Initial Review: Creature Collecting Made Simple
I appreciate that each evolution of an Eldamon is one singular stat block. Evolution enables a couple powerful new features, but you don't have to relearn anything. The Eldamon themselves are fae-like, with strange priorities and ways of viewing the world, following their own whims, an interesting way of making them not too powerful as exploration tools. They're primarily designed to support the player and to be a roleplay opportunity, particularly since their evolution methods are through roleplay. The creature designs are generally very good... with a major asterisk.
There's a solid selection of Eldamon lines out of the gate, with four of each standard type not counting evolutions, making for 52 creatures with full, detailed art and stat blocks, alongside a wide selection of moves. While Eldamon don’t typically have coverage moves like Pokemon or Cassette Beasts do, there are Universal moves to round out an Eldamon’s movepool a bit more if need be.
As far as complaints go, a small one is that, while the type system is fairly well-done, none of the matchups are particularly unique like with Pokemon, such as Pokemon's Steel type having poor offensive abilities, Electric type only having one weakness, or Ghost being weak to itself, or Cassette Beasts' Glass type which only has weaknesses defensively but unique properties and high damage to compensate.
My other complaint, though... I have some issues with the aesthetic design philosophy. A LOT of the pet form Eldamon have this uncanny look to them, with unsettlingly large heads and eyes. The battle and evolved forms typically look much better, but the pet forms still stick out. Eldamon also tends to fall into the creature collector trap of "what if common animal but on fire?" To compare to something other than Pokemon for a change, Cassette Beasts has the Springheel line, which take influence from Jack the Ripper, while the Padpole line only vaguely resemble frogs and pull inspiration from various English folklore, while Spectrobes has the Ryza line that pull from the raiju.
I also wish the Body, Metal, Music, Poison, Space, Spirit, and Time types were covered in more detail, and hope they'll be expanded on in a future module.
