Heading back to Palworld after two-and-a-half years , I can definitely see where Nintendo’s patent lawsuits have needled the game. You can’t glide with Pals anymore, a concept apparently Nintendo owns and wants to keep to itself. And there is some sort of stipulation that you can’t throw a ball and have a battling creature come out of it (now you just hold up your hand and they appear). It’s all rather absurd..

However, there is not just a legal conflict between Pokémon and Palworld , but rather fanbases clashing as well. There is a contingent of fervent Pokémon fans who make it their mission to try and take down Palworld , calling it a cheap knock-off of the series that inspired it, or claiming that it outright plagiarized the original. In some cases, saying it looks like “AI slop,” a more common phrase now from 2.5 years earlier.

Palworld is not the most polished game in the world, and it has certainly taken ideas from a host of games. Not just Pokémon (which of course does not own battling and catching monsters. Not yet, anyway), but you certainly see echoes of Breath of the Wild as well in its open world. None of this, however, takes away from the fact that Palworld is a fundamentally fun game, and it is hardly the first title to borrow from other big industry leaders. It has combined a number of systems under its own banner to create something unique, and if it was just a bad clone, well, we wouldn’t be here, would we? Through all of this, we have to keep in mind that Nintendo is a monster company with one of the biggest IPs of all time, and Palworld doesn’t have a fraction of its cash. Yet, it’s doing all this, creating a game that is almost, if not frequently more engaging.

There’s a line I’ve heard out there that if you truly think Palworld is better than Pokémon , you have nostalgia glasses on and haven’t played for generations now. You’re thinking only about the bare-bones games from ages ago.

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I did play those, but what I do remember is eagerly looking forward to seeing how the series would evolve from there. Even when I was like, ten, I was hoping we’d get a more action-based take on the series. A big (for its time) world to explore and no turn-based combat. It never came, not in the ways I wanted. Not until Palworld , 25 years later.

The combination of survival mechanics, base-building, live combat against Pals and humans alike, world exploration and secret-finding, breeding and min-maxing, and playing in the same world with friends all adds up to a tremendous experience, which is why so many people have logged on for Palworld 1.0.

Game Freak has not innovated at nearly the pace it should have over all these years. This isn’t to say Pokémon is crashing and selling terribly, but if fans are introspective, there is a lot of “bare minimum” progress going on here. Even brand experiments like Pokopia aren’t matching what Palworld is doing here. Pokémon is not a terrible series by any means, but Palworld is not a terrible game either. Both can coexist, but yes, Palworld certainly has some advantages, expanding the genre more than Pokémon has in a long, long time.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .