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Let's be real here. You don't have a small team working on this. You're the idea guy (barely) and maybe you've got a friend who'll make sprites for you then dip once he realizes how daunting of a task game development is. You're hoping to recruit people by making this thread.
Anyways, here's my suggestions: Make a standard semi-open JRPG. Maybe a dungeon crawler or a tactical RPG. Hundreds of monsters that you can catch multiples of is a bitch to code. Instead go with a roster of 20 or fewer base stage monsters. These monsters should be treated as actual characters, have unique and branching evolution trees as well as going beyond Pokemon's 3-stages of evolution. This will make it feel like you're actually trying something new instead of just trying to make "Pokemon, but better!"
Wanting to make your game play like PMD instead of mainline series is a step in the right direction, but throw in some hand-crafted dungeons along with the procedurally-generated ones. The randomly generating dungeons are the worst part of PMD and the only thing that makes them stand out from one another is the mob variety.
I've just handed you a pretty fleshed out idea on a platter. Now it's up to you to either use it, or ignore my suggestion and just remake pokemon gen 1 and give up because it's too ambitious for your pirated copy of RPG Maker.
