Palworld's Plagiarism Problem

“Drew like a dark, fucked up version of Pokémon haha. Just a glimpse into my dark reality. A full stare into my twisted perspective would make most simply go insane Imao”

It honestly just feels like someone took those “if Pokémon was realistic” videos where Pikachu said fuck every minute and trainers were abusive and made it a video game

One thing that bothers me is that they seem to have taken so many decisions saying "let's do X so that the internet will do Y". "Let's add a furry bait Pal so they'll make fanarts", "let's add creepy descriptions so they'll make top 10 scary lists", "let's add a weed Pal so they'll make memes like they already made with that one pokemon a couple years ago". At least Pokémon feels organic, like all this funny stuff just comes from the sincere enthusiasm of fans and not just because it was a marketing strategy (or if it was, at least it was well hidden).

my favorite way to describe this game is that it's what you'd get if you gave a budget to an eleven year old who thinks pokemon is for babies because it doesn't have guns

Palword plagiarism? Call that palgiarism. Thank you thank you I’ll be here all night!!!

The biggest offence this game made in my humble opinion is the complete mish mesh of art styles. Like there are some pokemon-lookalikes who look genuinly a lot like the cartoony style of pokemon. Standing on top of a fairly realistic looking nature and then the humans look like they came from a completely different anime. None of it looks good together and I can't figure out the thought behind it.

I feel like the color palettes are so similar because they want you to draw associations in your head with specific pokemon. They aren’t trying to hide the plagiarism. They just need them to be different enough for some legal debate and other than that, they want to get as much money as possible from people who are nostalgic about pokemon and will feel the same about ripoff designs.

Digimon's "cute" rookie monsters, like Agumon, Gatomon, Patomon, etc, don't look like they were copy-and-pasted from a collection of Pokemon parts. (That Palworld rooster is definitely using Starly's CGI model.) And Digimon's more powerful monsters look even more distinctive. Palworld didn't try to make their monsters original because without the Pokemon angle, what would they actually have? A grindy farming game. BTW a lot of Digimon have guns (and some are made of guns) so if monster pals with guns is what you actually want, just play Digimon Cybersleuth. It's on the Switch. :)

there is one thing not mentioned in this video that i find absolutely despicable about this game. The Delphox knockoff isn't just a knockoff of the Pokemon design. It DIRECTLY STEALS EVERY SINGLE DETAIL of a Fanmade mega-delphox design by Pyroaura98. It sickens me to my core how Pocketpair don't just settle for plagiarizing a larger property, but that they would stoop so low as to steal designs made by small creators who dont have a platform to push back

My beef with Palworld is the simple fact that everything about this game feels so derivative. You can draw a straight line between any random aspect of this thing and the point of "inspiration" that they lifted from almost immediately. When you look at something you don't think "Oh, this is something cool and unique to Palworld!" Instead you think "Oh, this is that thing from Zelda, or Elden Ring... or this is just Suicune with extra steps."

One side of the argument that people don’t understand is that something can technically not be a direct copy, but still feel like it’s being plagiarized simply because it doesn’t add it’s own creative spin. Palworld is a classic case of that I thought more people would be better aware of plagiarism especially after that Hbomberguy video

The early trailers actually have more appealing graphics to me. I’m so sick of the default “realistic” Unreal engine map textures combined with low poly cell shaded character models. It’s just lazy and looks so bad. The characters do not match the world. But making a cell shaded map in unreal is more work than using default materials, and likewise making detailed characters/pals to match the detailed map textures is more work. That’s why it feels so uninspired. Both the map textures and the character textures are just whatever option is the easiest and require the least amount of effort. And this isn’t even really debatable due to how NO assets from craftopia were made by them, they would rather just do the bare minimum

Another important thing to note is Pocketpair, as we speak, is making a game that clearly rips off Hollow Knight and its art style. To blatantly plagiarize from a AAA company is one thing, but an indie team of three people is a different matter entirely, and it's frustrating that so many people either don't even realize or just deny it the same way they do with Palworld.

As a designer, what strikes me about Palword's designs is it appears they have had only one type of reference. If you reference only 1 thing as a designer, (in this case Pokemon) then all you're doing is remixing another designer's work with their work and all your designs just end up looking like the referenced designer's work. Hence why every Pal looks plagiarized in varying degrees from blatant 3D model reskins to lesser just "mixed parts of varying Pokemon." It appears to me like a nooby mistake at best, or maliciousness at worst. Given the story you've told about the studios nativity and inexperience, I hope it's the former.

I love how one of the main creatures is literally just Totoro but painted yellow.

No.072 "Bushi" and No.058 "Pyrin" are directly copied from Yokai Watch Bushi is a copy of Kusanagi and Pyrin of Genjuu Kyryn "Bushi" is at least changed enough to be passed off as a just extremely heavily inspired design of Kusanagi but "Pyrin" is beyond blatant, with the entire model 1:1 based on Yokai Watch 4's Genjuu Kyryn model down to the smallest details and even color palette, with the only thing changed that genjuu kyryn's tail was replaced by his konten counterpart from Yokai Watch 2 they really shouldn't have gotten a pass.

what cracks me up was people saying "this looks so much better than Pokémon" meanwhile it literally looks like Mario in Unreal

My issue with Palworld is one that no one else seems to bring up because they're too focused on the plagiarism-not-plagiarism stuff. Palworld marks THREE games that the dev, Pocketpair, has in Early Access simultaneously. Craftopia has been in EA for three years and instead of finishing it they decide to make a second, almost identical game, even re-using assets from Craftopia. It's just so obviously a cash grab, they cobbled it together from old code and assets they already had and it'll sit in EA for half a decade with their other games they abandoned now that they've wrung the money out of people who were willing to buy it.

I mean, we can all see that basically every Pal is composed of Frankensteined together Pokémon design elements, right? Some are complete mishmashes and others are barely changed, but either way the pieces are all still there—to suggest the Pal team didn’t literally have a complete list of Pokémon designs in front of them for reference while making these creatures is, I think, totally absurd.

“If you have never played ARK count yourself lucky” I feel this so hard rn