Not quite the very best: 13 Pokémon imitators and rip-offs that didn’t make the cut

By William Hughes, Sam Barsanti | May 24, 2021 | 5:00am

Games Features Pokémon

Not quite the very best: 13 Pokémon imitators and rip-offs that didn’t make the cut

Counterclockwise, top left: Digimon, Yo-kai, Pocket Mortys, and Medabots (Screenshots/YouTube); center: Pokemon (Image: Getty Images) Graphic: Karl Gustafson

When Pokémon first landed, 25 years ago this fall, it broke a lot of fundamental assumptions about video game design. There was its instant inescapability, obviously, with the accompanying animated series and its compulsively catchy theme song, immediately burying themselves in the minds of the planet’s children while the games themselves colonized Game Boys everywhere. There was the crafty marketing scheme that split the original title between its Green and Red (or Blue and Red, Stateside) releases, encouraging kids to peer-pressure their friends into joining their new blood sport pyramid scheme. But most importantly, there was the injection of collectability into the body gaming. Before Pokémon, you collected power-ups or allies in games because they helped you win; afterwards, you collected to collect. It was brilliant, genre-defining, possibly a little sketchy, and tremendously lucrative.

Which explains why it took roughly zero time for the imitators to come rolling in, dragging whole zoos full of robots, monsters, and scannable UPC barcodes in their wake. From established gaming franchises, to direct rivals, to the true oddballs lurking on the edges, everyone wanted a shot at Pikachu’s throne, luring kids in with another set of brightly colored characters and the chance—more often than not—to command a literal god to kick the ass of your third-grade rival. And since we’ve always argued that you can tell a lot about a franchise by examining the aspects that others choose to rip off from it, we present you with this: 13 games and franchises that tried—and failed—to be the best, like no one ever was, and beat Pokémon at its own game.

Monster Rancher

First installment: Monster Rancher (1997)What are you catching? CDs… or maybe the monsters that live inside CDs? (Or “Mystery Discs,” as they’re termed in the game’s mythology.) Either way, you get new collectible creatures in Tecmo’s Monster Rancher by popping out the PlayStation disc and replacing it with something from your CD collection. The game then scans the disc’s metadata and somehow generates a monster from that information, with certain kinds of CDs generating special kinds of monsters.What are they doing? From there, you do what it says on the box: Ranch some monsters, which is to say, train them to fight other monsters. Unlike Pokémon, these fights are exclusively one on one, and handled indirectly, which might seems a little less active—but in your heart you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that all of your new friends were birthed from your copies of Third Eye Blind’s self-titled debut or that one Hanson CD. You know, 1997 stuff.Does a small child end up owning a god? Some big dragons and other assorted monsters show up, but no gods, unless you consider a monster spawned from your parent’s copy of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell to be divine. Which we do.

Medabots

First installment: Medarot (Japan only, 1997)What are you catching? Robots with sort of a self-referential, winky nature. Wait, no, that’s “meta-bots.” These are just robots with interchangeable limbs and attachments—some of which you could buy by picking up extra “parts” collections, a bold new innovation in bilking kids for their cash.What are they doing? Fighting, naturally. The fights in Medabots are mostly like Pokémon, but with moving and aiming, because a key strategic component of the game involves destroying specific parts of your enemies’ robots to make them weaker. So imagine Pikachu breaking another Pokémon’s legs so it can’t run away, and then Pikachu gets to keep those legs and attach them to his own legs. But… it’s for kids.Does a small child end up owning a god? Nope, no deus ex machina here.

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Dragon Quest Monsters

First installment: Dragon Warrior Monsters (1998)What are you catching? A wide variety of classic Dragon Quest monsters, ranging from the series’ endlessly smiling Slimes, all the way up to the actual dragons that one is usually questing against. And, fair play: Capturing Akira Toriyama’s iconic monster designs definitely carries an excitement that can’t be matched by stuffing your 40th Rattata into a dingy Pokéball.What are they doing? Battling, per series tradition. In fact, we need to give Dragon Quest some credit here: Its “catch a monster, have it fight for you” bona fides actually stretch back to the pre-Pokémon days, with 1992’s Dragon Quest V. Still, 1998’s Dragon Warrior Monsters feels like a specific response to Pikachu and his buddies, setting you as a child who fights in tournaments with your various Drackys and Hammerhoods as your murderous proxies.Does a small child end up owning a god? No, but you do get the reins to the franchise’s infamous, quasi-invincible Metal Slimes, which might actually be even scarier.

Jade Cocoon

First installment: Jade Cocoon (1998)What are you catching? A pretty standard set of largely bug-based monsters, but with character designs from Kiki’s Delivery Service designer Katsuya Kondō. That immediately gives Jade Cocoon a huge advantage over many of the other, similar games that were working in this space in the late ’90s.What are they doing? Unfortunately, Jade Coccon immediately squanders that advantage by being a lot like every other Pokémon-like game in every way, except clunkier and uglier. You walk around the world, you fight monsters, you capture the monsters and make them nice, and then you use those nice monsters to fight other mean monsters—but it’s all done in some blocky PS1 graphics that haven’t aged well at all.Does a small child end up owning a god? Kind of, in the sense that some of the boss monsters represent elemental spirits, which might as well be gods. Clunky, ugly gods.

Digimon

First installment: Digimon World (1999)What are you catching? Digimon, digital monsters. . Actually, there’s no real catching here, at least in the original Digimon toys, which were like Tamagotchi systems but for cool boys, so you just had whatever monster the thing gave you. Which were basically indistinguishable from Pokémon.What are they doing? In the first versions, you had to take care of your baby monster, which means raising it, feeding it, and cleaning up its monster poop. Then you could go fight other hungry, poop-making baby monsters. Over the years, though, more Pokémon-like Digimon games have come out, where you collect monsters and go on adventures with them to fight other digital monsters. Also, like Pokémon, Digimon will evolve into bigger and cooler monsters, but unlike Pokémon, higher-evolved Digimon will often magically sprout clothes and guns and body armor. Yeah, Charizard is cool, but Charizard would be cooler with a leather jacket and a sword, right?Does a small child end up owning a god? Uh, hell yes. When your little dinosaur friend eventually turns into a bigger dinosaur, and then a full-on anime mecha nightmare, and then some kind of anime mecha nightmare with a leather jacket and a gun, you will believe in a higher power—and that higher power’s name will be something stupid, like SuperGalactiColossalmon.

Neopets

First installment: Neopets (1999)What are you catching? Get it straight: One does not catch a Neopet. One adopts their precious new baby, bringing them into one’s home, feeding them, playing games with them, typing in one’s parents’ credit card information to buy them designer accessories, etc. And what is a Neopet, you ask? Well, imagine a cereal box mascot designed by someone who’s read a “How to draw Manga” book at least two times, and you’ll wind up somewhere in the ballpark.What are they doing? What aren’t they doing? Neopets—originally developed by Adam Powell and Donna Williams, then lashed to a series of corporate masters over the decades—is sort of an attempt to be all virtual pets to all people, hung together with some very old-school HTML design. There’s battling, yes, which is what gets this into Pokémon territory, rather than a straight Tamagotchi rip. But there’s also games, competitions, home design, elaborate narratives, outright gambling, and more. Neopets is vast, and it contains multitudes (including, across its history, multitudes of ads). It probably deserves a fuller treatment than it’s getting here, honestly. Neopets is wild.Does a small child end up owning a god? No, but that’s only because Powell and Williams put their foot down when majority investor Doug Dohring—a prominent Scientologist and the dad of Veronica Mars’ Jason Dohring—allegedly tried to insert “Scientology education” into the site, which was fielding millions of young visitors at the time. See? Wild. Xenu, we choose you!

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Children

First installment: Devil Children Black Book and Red Book (Japan only, 2000)What are you catching? The Shin Megami Tensei series is well known for giving players a wide variety of mythological figures to fight on their behalf, ranging from ancient deities to potentially world-ending demons. Devil Children asks, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we put that power in the hands of 10-year-old kids? Oh, and let’s give ’em a gun, too.” You will be shocked to learn that only one of these games (2003’s DemiKids, which dropped the whole “devil” thing from the title) ever made it to the United States.What are they doing? Going questing, fighting monsters. The Devil Children games aren’t all that different from the other SMT titles, actually, albeit with cuter graphics and an increased emphasis on monster-catching. (Which is already a pretty huge component of the maxi-series’ DNA; you could argue that plenty of other SMT games might fit in this slot, too.) Notably, the games include two different variants of the series’ traditional fusion system, dependent on which of the color-coded versions you conned your parents into buying for you.Does a small child end up owning a god? A god? This is Shin Megami Tensei—if you’re not fielding a full roster that includes Ishtar, Ares, Odin, Kali, and a dozen other classic deities to help you beat up bullies, what are you even doing?

Skannerz

First installment: Skannerz (2001)What are you catching? Aliens! Monsters! Mutants! Mercenaries! All of whom have decided to hide, for reasons never properly explained, in the UPC barcodes at your local supermarket. What are they doing? Fighting each other—once you’ve taken one of Radica Games’ handheld Skannerz devices (genuinely cool-looking lumps of plastic, as it happens) and scanned your boxes of Apple Jacks, etc., in order to either recruit or battle against a wide variety of bizarre monsters. Later version of the technology would change things up a bit, shifting to pre-printed cards—and then, weirdly, a racing game—but the core challenge remained: indoctrinating a nation’s children into becoming the most badass (and efficient) grocery barcode scanners around.Does a small child end up owning a god? Not unless creatures like “Webhog,” “Waspito,” or “Rotosquid” count as gods. (We really hope Webhog doesn’t count as a god.)

Dinosaur King

First installment: Dinosaur King (2005)What are you catching? Diiinosaurs! (Read that in the voice of .) And not cartoon bullshit dinosaurs either: These are the real ones, from history. (Sure, they have magical elemental powers, but that was probably inevitable in this genre.)What are they doing? Sega’s Dinosaur King was originally an arcade game, and the dinosaurs were printed onto little cards with barcodes when you collected them. And by “collected” we mean “collected,” because you were literally collecting them on little cards! Brilliant stuff, aside from the fact that it was unwieldy and required a big and presumably very expensive piece of hardware to function, rendering that version of the game (a DS version does exist) pretty much unplayable now. But just imagine how cool it must’ve been to roll up to your local Aladdin’s Castle and whip out a huge binder of Dinosaur King cards. “Who’s that kid?” the other players would whisper, awed. “How quickly do you think we can beat him up?”Does a small child end up owning a god? Was Tyrannosaurus rex a god? If so, yes! If not, then no. They’re just dinosaurs.

Invizimals

First installment: Invizimals (2009)What are you catching? Invizimals! Imagine a magical, animal-like creature imbued with various elemental powers that children use to fight each other. Then scrub anything, uh, legally incriminating off of these pocket-sized monsters, make them invisible, and there you go. In fact, their invisibility means that Invizimals could be in the room with you right now. They might be crawling on your body, doing Invizmal things, and you wouldn’t know it!What are they doing? So, the central gimmick of the original Invizimals is that the only way to find the damn things is to look through a camera attached to your PlayStation Portable. That’s right: We’re in Augmented Reality territory, seven years before Pokémon Go made the idea of secret Snorlaxes lurking everywhere seem commonplace. Invizimals also extended this idea to the actual battles, allowing them to play out on your desk or table—although its biggest contribution to the pop culture ecosystem might be in adding another fantastic entry in the list of things at in pursuit of a paycheck over the years. When he asserts in the above that “The Invizimals are about hope; that is our great strength,” you genuinely want to believe it.Does a small child end up owning a god? A quick perusal of the Invizimals wiki reveals a recurring monster called Shapeshifter, described as a “god of the forest” who appears to be a living totem pole, and also not terribly culturally sensitive. You can also catch Daxter of Jak And Daxter fame, who might be considered a minor household god.

Monster Racers

First installment: Monster Racers (2010)What are they catching? Unlike some entries on this list, which managed to blossom out to giant franchises with bestiaries rivaling Pokémon itself, Monster Racer only ever got a single Nintendo DS game and 80 monsters to its name. Nothing in its selection would look out of place hanging out in the endless purgatory of a Pokéball either—at least, until you see their talents unleashed.What are they doing? Racing. (See: Title.) What makes Monster Racers genuinely interesting is that it is not, amazingly, about these noble beasts beating the shit out of each other for a child’s pocket change. Instead, they’re racing the shit out of each other, running through 2D courses with obstacles that are easier or harder to deal with depending on your particular mount’s type. This is a fantastic idea, and someone should probably steal it.Does a small child end up owning a god? Here’s the description for Kristar, one of the game’s Legendary monsters: “Kings of the frozen land, any ice they create can never be melted.” That’s not just a god—it’s the plot of a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

Yo-kai Watch

First installment: Yo-kai Watch (2013)What are you catching? Oh, there’s no catching here. You’re befriending spirits, or Yo-kai.What are they doing? There’s no fighting against other Yo-kai trainers either, just trying to calm mean spirits and dismiss troublesome prankster spirits. Other than that, it’s a lot like Pokémon—at least conceptually, since it doesn’t really look or play that much like Pokémon beyond the fact that it all looks very anime, and there are hundreds of creatures hanging around. The games are more plot-based than “I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was”-based, too. Also, the third game in the series takes place in a country modeled after American’s Southern states called BBQ, which is pretty funny, and the spirits found in the region are specifically referred to as “’Merican Yo-kai.” That is also very funny.Does a small child end up owning a god? Kinda, yeah. What are all these rambunctious spirits but little gods? Who are we to say any one belief system is wrong? Especially when one of those spirits is a boxing ghost with the nearly legally actionable name of ?