* unbalances your humors *

“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”

“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”

“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”

“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”

“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”

Do not support Palworld.

The CEO of Pocket Pair, the game’s studio, openly supports AI and even made a game where making AI-generated art is its main mechanic.

Palworld is not Pocket Pair’s first instance of plagiarism, either. Their previous game, Craftopia, plagiarizes Breath of the Wild, whereas as its upcoming game, Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse, plagiarizes from independent developer Team Cherry’s game, Hollow Knight.

On top of stolen character models and concepts from fakemon artists, it’s already known that you can put Pals through what is basically slave labor BUT what’s been recently discovered is that the game allows you to capture and sell humans. This has been raising some red flags for black gamers looking into these mechanics, me included, considering this factors into the established slave labor system of Palworld.

TL;DR: I completely understand being tired of Game Freak and the Pokémon Company’s lack of polish over the years, but supporting something that is just as devoid of polish and even more devoid of ingenuity is not the way to make those criticisms clearer. This will only encourage more soullessness in the industry.

But it doesn't.

This game is ugly as fuck.

The menus have zero stylisation, it's just a semi transparent black box with plain white text. While the overworld and the Pal's are in completely different art styles.

There's the obvious plagiarism, ripping meshes directly from pokemon models and designs from fan made fakemons. This isn't the studio's only plagiarised game. There's the well known among us rip off that uses Ai art. Their game Craftopia asks the bold question, is everything people thought Genshin Impact was going to be (a lazy botw rip off). While their up coming Metroidvania game rips directly from hollow knight.

Everyone is saying that this is what people want from pokemon but, is it? When it comes to the games that get praised it the ones with the better story and game play. But Palworld has no story and it doesn't really have gameplay comparable to pokemon.

This isn't a creature collector, it's not a turn based rpg, it's a survival crafting game with a shitty gimmick they only did for attention. It's completely soulless. At least modern Pokemon games have some soul. No matter what crunch they were under someone at game freak wanted to make a good game worth playing, even if it runs like genshin impact on my old potato phone.

You can put sleek graphics over a soulless husk of a game and gamers will act like it's the best thing since sliced bread.

To my knowledge, there is no punishment for it. At worst, the game crashes which is not exclusive to just capturing people.

There should be no justification for why you can “catch”, sell, exploit and even murder the NPCs you enslave in game. Why are you (the players in question) okay with boiling down chattel slavery to a “silly” gameplay mechanic?

If it exists in other games, then fuck those games too. People love to see concerning issues in the content they consume and go “Well, they do this too in x, y and z!” as if that changes the problem in question. If anything, that makes it a more relevant problem because of how normalized antiblackness is in the games you all play.

This does not happen with human NPCs who are designated enemies (i.e. the Syndicate Thug), however, and so long as the player is able to weaken the character enough, the player can capture them without much deterrence. This means that playing dungeons in the game over and over can net the player a steady supply of slaves they can use for labor or to sell. I haven't seen the sell mechanic myself to know if selling the "thugs" to the merchant NPC will trigger an attack, but it's unlikely as both capturing these characters and forcing them to do work does not trigger that response.

People should be more disturbed that in an interactive type of media, they are allowed to or even expected and required to enslave people. This is not a documentary about slavery. This is not a movie that shows you a story about enslaved people. This is not a point-and-click horror visual novel where the twist is you're trapped in a hellish liminal space as punishment for atrocities the player character had committed. This is not a game where you are escaping slavery. This is a game where you, the player, are in the position of the enslaver; you own humans as property; you are capturing, exploiting, abusing humans for your benefit. You are not an audience to a story, you're not a helpless bystander in the game, and your player character is not the victim. You, the player, are participating in slavery and for some reason it is not disturbing you to be in that position.

And in Palworld, it is not only a choice the player makes, but also a choice the developers have given you. It should be disturbing that the developers of the game have given players the ability to enslave people in the game, an unnecessary mechanic in any game but especially in a survival-crafting creature-collecting game. And the game being early access isn't an excuse...because the game even explains to the player that human NPCs do not have partner skills because they are not Pals. The developers know that players can capture humans in their game; and they're helping you, the player, figure out what you can and can't do with your slaves.

Be better.

Instead of making call-out posts targeting specific people like an SJW tumblrina in need of attention, I will provide general counter-arguments everybody can use within the Palworld discourse. I am sick and tired of AI-art getting normalized, this issue is getting out of hand and we must spread awareness for the sake of artists everywhere.

YOU ARE ENCOURAGED TO EDUCATE PALWORLD DEFENDERS, BUT DON'T ATTACK THEM PLEASE!

Without further ado, here common arguments by Palworld fans and how you can deconstruct them.

1. "So you're defending a multibill. corp?!"

This is a common argument used by Palworld defenders. Within their narrative, Pokemon designs are a direct product of their Nintendo (the multibillion dollar company in question) and you're totally bootlicking them if you're pointing out the obvious plagiarism - as if the very heads of Nintendo were the ones creating the Pokemon designs... The truth, of course, is that individual artists provide these designs FOR Nintendo. Instead of "taking from the rich" like Palworld fans claim, their game actually steals from these artists. Hence, those who call out Palworld aren't die-hard Nintendo fans as much as they are people who simply call out plagiarism in defense of artists. I would even go as far as to add that people who defend PocketPair (the developers of Palworld) and those who buy the game just for the sake of controversy (yes, it's been done) are themselves adamant defenders of a corporation. Since they imagine others to be blindly defending Nintendo, it's bordering hypocrisy.

2. "It's not plagiarism"

If you show a Palworld defender one of Palworld's character designs and the Pokemon it's based on, they will in some cases start pointing out the differences between the two in order to claim there's no plagiarism involved. This is easy for them to do because the Palworld design you showed them isn't quite a rip-off of a Pokemon, no. It's actually the rip-off of TWO Pokemon. In fact, most Palworld designs tend to use the model of one Pokemon and some features of a other, along with some final alterations that are unique. Once you point this out, it's easy to notice on most if not nearly all Palworld designs. Here is an example that comes with a visual analysis, provided by @RaphDesLandes (a gamedev!) on X:

3. "There's no proof of PocketPair using AI!"

Not only is there proof of it, but that same proof shows that the devs run servers for AI programs, the same which they use for their game "AI Impostor", a game in which the core mechanic is the use of an AI-image generator. Here is the most flagrant example (I hid the developer's name because I'm not that kinda guy).

Of course, I don't blame people who didn't know this. It's far from being common knowledge amongst Palworld fans, after all. That's why it's important to spread the word though.

4. "Gamefreak should'a made better games!"

It's not a secret: Nintendo and GameFreak have been letting us down with the recent Pokemon games on the Nintendo Switch. From poor writing to bad graphics, many fans (myself included) are unsatisfied. Palworld players praise the games' quality, claiming that it's existance is justified by the fact it's programmed better than recent Pokemon games. While it's understandable that one would want to play games with superior programming, it doesn't justify plagiarism (they could've just made a Pokemon fangame or a mod), and, well... it's simply false and doesn't apply.

Here is a link to a tweet showing one of Palworld's game-breaking glitches.

Not only that, but Palworld is mostly made up of Unity Engine assets, and it's controls are wonky. They're reminiscent of Garry's mod, which came out in 2006, except Gmod is faster.

5. Bonuses

-evidence of PocketPair using Pokemon fans' art to model their characters after (post by @onion_mu on X)

-every Palworld-Pokemon lookalike (source unknown but reposted by @hejibits on X)

-and also: deconstructing the (partial) myth around Palworld's success on Steam

Lastly, it's important that I point this out, even if it's unrelated: Pocket Pair devs have received death threats. This is unacceptable. I encourage everyone reading this to create an online-environment where people discuss and debate with rationality, rather than such shameful behaviour. To me, people who send others death threats are no better than thieves, so please stay respectful!

Like. Wildcard has problems for sure (as passionate as they are) and Snail Games (the publisher) successfully put all Ark fan (that I saw) asking how to open a court case.

And the Pokemon Company (not Nintendo) pushing for ever more content and Game Freak refusing to become a big studio caused problems too.

But I still won't buy Palworld, because for what I saw it does not feel like it's own thing. Digimon feels like its own thing. Yokai Watch feels like its own thing. Ark's immersive taming mod feels like its own thing. Pixark, which never hide being a mashup, feels like its own thing.

Palworld ? That feels like a mashup without anything feeling unique about it. They're others monster tamers out there that feels unique people ignored that would have been GREAT concurrence to pokemon.