>>43934753SMT is the original monster collector. It's much more obvious in the mainsline SMT games, although the first 2 Persona games and persona 5 brought back the "catching" elements of mainline Megami Tensei, which would be the demon negotiation system. And even in P5, all your other teammates, like with 3 and 4, just have their one persona and that's it. But in SMT it's a proper team, catching, levelling, and fusing.
Also, levelling demons tends to take so much time and effort that eventually it just becomes a much better use of your time to fuse something of a higher level and carry over useful skills. So it actually encourages changing up the team and getting new stuff way more than Pokemon does.
