So i've been thinking. A lot of people back in the day

I've always called this kind of thing "battle partner" series.
Main characters/humans in general have no real combat power of their own (though in desperate times may join the battle themselves), and do battle by proxy of some sort of companion.
Themes usually revolve around teamwork, trust and friendship.

>>148410653
mon franchises are specifically aimed at monster collecting games and anime
Demikids for example counts as a "mon" franchise
There's also Dragon Drive, Monster Rancher and this one manga about a monster tournament in heaven I forgot the name though. But I think Gash Bell might fight the criteria.
This probably has another more concrete term though.

Shaman King and Jojo are definately their own thing outside the "mon" genre term

>>148410653
Persona's weird, since the protagonist uses tons of personas, but it's never really the main aspect of it. SMT fits the description a bit more since the party members are recruitable.

>>148411016
Gash should be in whatever category shaman king is, for sure. They are the most similar franchises to each other out of everything else in this thread

Whoever compared pokemon and Gash is an idiot, there's nothing related between them. Is any show where someone fights for the MC a pokemon game for them? Is Dragon Ball a Pokemon game when Picollo is doing the fighting?

>>148411159
It was just the immediate assumption dumb kids made back when the Internet was still kind of young and episodes were split into three parts on YouTube. Gash shooting lightning didn't help.

>>148411105
even though Gash and Shaman King are really heavily tournament based, Shaman King doesn't feel like it's about monster collecting since most of the spirits are human, well no, you're right. They even have animal spirits as well as nature spirits.
But there's just something about Shaman King that wont let my mind register it as a "mon" series. Probably because the spirits feel more like characters than tools like most other mon franchises. Like the spirits have a purpose in the plot and world of shaman king and have free will, same with Gash Bell.
But in things like Shin Megami Tensei/Persona and Pokemon, Digimon, ect, the monster collecting aspect is for the hell of it and the monsters are fully subservient

>>148411315
I wasn't even thinking in the tournament sense, I was thinking in the sense that both the spirits in SK and the demons in GB are actual characters themselves to an equal extent, and they are a team rather then a master/servamt

>>148410653
>>148411315
In the Digimon anime you get one partner. Normies out

megami tensei came before pokemon you idiot

>>148412063
I'm aware, didn't mean to imply otherwise