Revealed at Summer Game Fest, Palworld is essentially Pokémon with guns, and the similarities with GameFreak’s creations are startling.
We get that the idea of collecting little monsters is fair game, and we’ve seen our fair share of titles that have copied liberally from the Pokémon playbook over the years, like Cassette Beasts, TemTem and Ooblets. But those games have all put an original spin on the idea, and come up with their own unique monster designs.
The monsters in Palworld, on the other hand, are barely distinguishable from the ones created by The Pokémon Company. The trailer was revealed last night at Summer Game Fest, and we found ourselves constantly doing double takes. Was that a Lapras with a missile launcher?
It was a bizarre 60 seconds indeed. How utterly bewildering to see Aldi knock-offs of familiar pocket monsters wielding machine guns. It feels like some sort of fan mod, yet somehow it’s a real game made by a real studio, and it’s entering Early Access in January 2024.
Let’s take a closer look at the monsters from the Palworld trailer and align them with their equivalents from the Pokémon bestiary.
First up – that’s definitely Eevee with blue fur, right? It’s not just our imaginations, is it?
And that’s got to be a Gyrados, right?
Is that Electabuzz with a machine gun?
Shaymin, is that you?
This Wooloo seems more violent than usual.
Lapras? Why are you holding that missile launcher?
SURELY that’s got to be a Latios. Surely.
There are loads more monsters in the trailer with striking similarities to familiar Pokémon, but you get the idea. It will be interesting to see what The Pokémon Company’s lawyers have to say about all this – or whether, like all those overly familiar Aldi products, they’re just different enough to get away with it.
Palworld is being developed by Japanese studio Pocket Pair, and will launch into Early Access on Steam in January 2024.
7 Comments
Pokemon are based on animals yokai and other various things we have in real life caterpie is an actual caterpillar so in all actuality its not copying pokemon. After over 1001 pokemons you can own monster designs and even from generation to generation they redo concepts like how many monkeys are there how many dogs or turtles are there every generation has a aldis pikachu
Eh these are all massive stretches other than maybe Gyrados
Because they aren’t breaking any laws. You can’t sue someone just for being competition
Most pokemon are based on real animals myth or legend storys having similar looking creatures is bound to happen cause alot of games base monsters on sleight reality of real elements
There was a brown fox at the beginning that looked almost exactly like Eevee
There was a brown fox at the beginning that looked almost exactly like Eevee
One that looks like Natu, one looks like they tried to make salazzle way sexier and failed, one looks like piplup, the llama/alpaca is just flaafy and arceus combined, the giant floating whale is literally just a whale that took a trip to genshin impact, the red dragon is just latias and the blue dragon with more drip is latios, the fuckin’ blue serpent thing is suicune and milotic combined, ones literally just coballion with a diet, then theres the zoroark and zekrom concoction, the black griffin looks like murkrow and arceus, one is just lilligant, then theres a fuckin all yellow and black bo blue to be seen luxray, then they pulled up with bowser 😭, then theres the anubis lucario, then the yamper ripoff, the fire dog is obviously flareon if it got a fucked up petsmart groom, the grass elephant is donphan if he wasn’t so damn dry, i think the huskys are supposed to look like lycanroc, Faleris is just talonflame with a hint of corviknight, one looks like tangela and abomasnow combined, the little mythical looking thing is the one that slides by the most since the only thing I noticed was the flower looking like glimmora a bit, one is just meganium, tanzer is a shitty grookey, and this one slides by too but the little pink floating animal looks like sylveon just a little.
Those are ones that look like pokemon, there are two that look like an anime or a video game. Mara looks like kindred from league of legends mixed with a chandelure, and the main electric fatso looks like totoro from “My Nieghbor Totoro.”