on multiple occasions i have seen people on socials excited for palworld 1.0 and it has taken me a moment to realize they aren't doing a bit and are genuinely excited
Do you know nothing about capitalism. This is coming from an avid anti-estabishment. More competition is good for us. This is a marathon, not a fucking sprint. Read a book.
hi! thank you for commenting. i know more than you. the point of this post is that Palworld is not competition.
see, here's the thing: it is absolutely possible to create a monster capturing game that could compete with Pokemon. It wouldn't win, it wouldn't even come close, the sheer market dominance of Nintendo and The Pokemon Company is too overpowering for any competitor to have a reasonable chance of doing that.
The problem is that nobody is going to do that because every attempt to do so is an attempt to compete with the superficial elements of what Pokemon is now, rather than following the how and why that led to Pokemon to become what it is. The objective they are chasing is how to compete with Pokemon, which is no objective at all. The only way to create a true competitor is to build the equivalent to Pokemon again from first principles.
There are plenty of other good monster catching games (as people have mentioned in the notes) and if anything we could do with more of them - it's an underexplored genre IMO. But Palworld isn't that. Palworld is Pokemon as imagined by a modern gamer who believes Pokemon should have completely altered its gameplay style to match modern trends. It's the sandbox gameplay loop soup idea of what Pokemon should be. It's slop. It's the gaming equivalent of a protest vote.
The thing is, I would not have beef with Palworld if it weren't for blatantly ripping off Pokemon for its monster designs. I wouldn't like it, but that's for the same reasons that I don't like most contemporary AAA action RPG games. But incorporating a more modern combat style into a monster collecting game is an idea that genuinely has legs.
The problem is that it's not trying to be a monster collecting game with guns, it's trying to be Pokemon with guns. If it had actually built up a unique set of monsters specifically to fit the tone, setting, and style of the gameplay ideas they were building off of, they could have made something really interesting. What they actually did by stealing Pokemon designs was communicate that the monsters in this game don't actually matter and could have been replaced by anything.
This is the difference between Palworld and previous monster catching games like Youkai Watch and Cassette Beasts. Those games actually care about their designs. The monsters were made as part of the games they were for, whereas in Palworld they're a box to tick.
