Games

My main issue with Palworld is that it feels like it caters to sophomoric edgelordism. "Hey this game has cute critters, but - get this - you blow them apart with assault rifles and work them to death in sweatshops! Isn't that shocking and hilarious?" No, because I'm not 13 anymore.

The game does seem like it sucks, but I do really like the concept of a game where Pokemon actually exist in the world and do things, which I think is the main "this is what pokemon fans always wanted". Pokopia tries to have that appeal but it's very much a dollhouse in the sense that the Pokemon each do very little or sometimes functionally nothing.

Edit: Also, not to bat for the palworld devs too much when I fundamentally just don't really respect them, but I sincerely appreciate their defense of their crass plagiarism undermining Nintendo's litigiousness. I'd rather live in a world where people can rip off Pokemon 100% and get away with it.

When this game was new, someone on here posted an article that said it was like that one guy who based his entire personality on an image of Bugs Bunny smoking weed, and that’s been the first thing on my mind whenever anyone brings up Palworld.

Pokémon with guns was a truthful clickbait few outlets could resist. I wasn't aware the hype continued after the realisation that gameplay wise it was more of a survival/campbuilder game.

Haven't looked into it since then, but does it have a dragon made out of guns? Digimon has a Gundramon

I disagree with you that it is a controversial opinion.... on Hexbear at least. The game is beloved by millions of people and super successful but there are loads of folks on Hexbear who dont like it.

I like it quite a bit and I would agree that its not a good replacement for Pokemon but I do consider it strictly speaking superior from a gameplay perspective. At least compared to the last Pokemon game I played which was shield...which yeah was really not that great. (Not saying Palworld is a 10/10 just that Pokemon feels kinda low effort in the modern era)

And finally I have to say I really dont loose sleep over someone "sticking it to gamefreak" (your words)

Pokémon with guns was automatically the least appealing game ever to me.

It also felt like a rug pull was the intention. Early access game with questionable legality around IP. Make quick money before the lawsuit from Nintendo.

also digimon and columbo are better

I really enjoy the survival crafting genre and really enjoyed ark and rust but palworld isn't really a great example of that either. You can accomplish everything with a big flat platform with all the crafting stations on it. The best part of survival games is the pvp and it's basically non existent in palworld.

I understand thinking it's mean to the pals but gameplay wise it's suboptimal to give the pals bad working conditions and they are just pixels to me idk

It's an Ark Survival evolved clone pretending to be a pokemon clone. It's an ok game that some people insist is the greatest game of all time, and those people are incredibly unpleasant and hostile. It doesn't help that the ultra-edgelord "You enslave these creatures and make them suffer with guns and violence" that a lot of the advertising focused on resulted in the fanbase being full of incredibly toxic edglords, who like you say, are more interested in "owning the normies" or whatever than actually playing a fun game.

It's not even really a pokemon game, if the "Pals" were just generic fantasy monster looking things literally no one would've cared about this game, it's only got any attention because of the fake pokemon designs, there's something kind of sickening about that. The game just strikes me as a lazy cash grab, with no real "heart" of its own. It's ok, but doesn't do anything to be unique, it is only noteworthy for how blatantly it rips off other stuff.

If you're looking for a fun creature catching game that does things differently to pokemon without just trying to imitate it, I'd recommend Monster Sanctuary, it's got a really fun 3v3 battle system and a metrovania style exploration system, where you can get to pretty late parts of the game early if you know what you're doing, so it rewards exploration really well.

Maybe it would be better to say it has aspects that people have always wanted: it definitely isn't a Pokémon-like game, in that its mechanics and focus aren't remotely the same, but it falls under the same basic monster taming fantasy while having realtime, open world battles that the player can actively participate in. A game with Pokémon rather than a Pokémon game if you will.

One thing that I found odd and I tried to investigate it but I'm dumb and found nothing but there is this pal that looks like delphox(just google "delphox palword") and they don't look exactly like delphox but it's exactly like a fan-made art of delphox that some online pokemon fan made game use it. If they contacted or hired Pokemon fan-artist to work on this game cool as fuck actually but if they stole not only Pokemon company designs but fans too that's sucks.

Eh it's ok. It's just survival crafting slop with some fun little minigames around collecting and optimising pals.

Palworld would have been better as a commune simulator with combat, Nintendo ended up taking the best parts of it (the creatures-house-village-economy interaction) and put it into Pokepia which illustrates how badly the Palworld developers missed the point