I think it looks enjoyable, but I'm holding out until the full version is available since, well, I've been on Steam long enough to know early access is a gamble.
I'm hoping with how much attention its getting that it'll be the game to compete with Pokemon and get them to 'pull their socks up'. On the other hand, I'm unsure how much of the hype is legit, or whether its just news sites posting about it enough to make it seem as though there's a lot of attention.
Pokemon isnt the first turn-based fighting game with collection of monsters and it won't be the last.
I always loved Digimon and lowkey wish it was the more popular of the two. I think the fact they never really stuck to a single type of game for Digimon is what hurt it the most since "back in the day" it was near as popular as Pokemon. Some of the games are brilliant, but going from monster raising/town building to typical JRPG, not to mention all those weird ones like the Diablo game, the Tamagotchi it originated from...Pokemon has its fair share of different spin offs, but I don't even know which games are supposed to be Digimon's mainline titles.
Medabots was cool too. Really wish that series got some more attention. Having a little robot friend that you change parts of and customise was in the same realm as Pokemon but different enough. Couple of games have done something similar, but not what a good Medabots game could have been.
Monster Rancher was again cool. The TV series was a little lame, but I had the PS1 game and that was great. I can see why it didn't last though. Outside its premise of unlocking monsters by using actual CDs, it wasn't particularly unique, and that premise was destined to become outdated with no real way of updating it save for changing the concept entirely.
Any others I can think of were usually good ideas horribly executed. I'm surprised there aren't more "me and my monster friend
(s)" games since its open to so much creativity than people would first think.