Palworld works because Nintendo doesn’t want it to

Palworld hit its full 1.0 launch early July, and has sold millions of copies despite its relative unoriginality. Pocketpair’s inspiration from Nintendo’s Pocket Monsters is evident to the point of lawsuits drawn up against the former. Nintendo, a legal company that occasionally publishes games, naturally, has a financial obligation to protect the brand image of the world’s most profitable franchise. Since Palworld doesn’t have a brand image to coddle, it gets to play with the moral greys that Pokemon’s bottom line would never permit.

Players, being curious grubby creatures, are left to wonder if the denizens of the idyllic Pokemon world eat their combat partners, how poaching works, what ‘living in harmony’ looks like when its more humanoid creatures are already depicted participating in manual labour, or why anti-homeless benches can be found in its cities.

Meanwhile, Palworld shatters the moral tidiness of its franchise inspiration. Players are enabled, perhaps encouraged, to ranch, butcher, poach, murder, and set their captured and subservient Pals to hard labour on assembly lines and mining camps. A stray capture ‘sphere’ is just as capable of bagging humans as creatures- and besides calling it ‘inhumane,’ there’s nothing stopping the player from putting humans to work, too. It doesn’t moralize.

Also, there’s guns. Despite being a creature battler game, the player character is just as able to trade blows with bats, assault rifles, landmines, and rockets to blow creatures to kingdom come. It’s the imaginative candy of adolescents growing up with Pokemon.

This unscrupulous interpretation works for adults specifically because it violates the squeaky-clean franchise image that corporations like Nintendo so ardently defend. Palworld takes the safe mediocrity of a Marvel movie or yet another botched Pokemon launch and drops a minigun-toting grizzly bear on it. It’s refreshingly honest.

Palworld does retread the tired tropes of any open-world, survival-craft, base-building, tower-tagging monster-battler from the last decade, but between its liberty from Nintendo’s console-exclusive walled-garden and the ashes of the goodwill Nintendo torched suing its fans, it’s managed an ‘overwhelmingly positive’ rating on Steam.