Pocketpair’s ‘Pokemonwith Guns’ game has taken off much how you might expect a Pokemon with Guns game to. It’s a roaring success, at this moment the most-played game on Steam, according toSteamCharts, and it seems that people are digging its curious combination of base-building, combat, and exploration.
But with great publicity comes great scrutiny, and off the back of a mysterious Twitter (X) account that’s popped up showing striking similarities betweenPalworldand Pokemon’s character models, and a subsequentVGC reportwhere 3D artists chimed in to say that the models do indeed look suspiciously alike, questions are now popping up about whether Palworld is just ‘influenced’ by Pokemon, or outright using assets as a baseline for its own.
Bold Words
Another interesting hook here is that Pocketpair, when talking about their upcoming game Never Grave, which looks remarkably similar to Hollow Knight, said this in a2022 interview with Wired Japan:
“I have a deep-rooted desire for my work to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, and to that end, if there are good ideas in the world, I pick them up, and I don’t necessarily have to be particular about originality. I’m thinking about it. I want to make it more casually. I think it would be a good idea to create things in a way that just jumps on what is trendy (lol).”
– Takuro Mozibe, Pocketpair CEO
Now, for a studio to come out and say this is, to me, actually quite refreshing. There are so many games out there that, particularly in the way of art style rip off of the recent ‘hot thing.’ Take Enchanted Portals, for example, which is pretty much a direct Cuphead rip-off, or Foregone, which uses much the same distinctive art style asDead Cells. These games are so derivative as to be rip-offs, yet you don’t hear their creators publicly shunning the idea of originality in gaming. Seeing Pocketpair defend the art style of their game, which nails the Hollow Knight aesthetic to a T, by claiming that ‘originality isn’t the goal’ is a unusually honest response from a developer, directly addressing what many of us feel in instances like these, which feel more and more common these days.
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In another defence of Pocketpair, both Palworld and (by the sounds of things) Never Grave are actually pretty distinct from Pokemon and Hollow Knight in terms of actual gameplay. Our Wyatt observes thatPalworld is in fact more Slime Rancher than Pokemon, and beyond that it has comprehensive base-building mechanics and a big focus on multiplayer that really make it its own beast entirely. Likewise, Never Grave is expected to have multiplayer and base-building, which increasingly starts painting a picture thattheseare the kinds of things that really define Pocketpair games, with the art styles simply being details that, as Mizobe said, are ‘jumping on what is trendy.’
Pal-agiarism Is Not Cool, Kids
Of course, all of the above defences of Pocketpair’s approach to its art direction will be completely and utterly negated if it does indeed turn out that they’ve been using assets from other games. And you can be sure that if that is what’s been happening, then the notoriously litigious Pokemon Company will soon pick up the scent and crack down on it, with absolute lawsuit hell to pay.
It would be a massive shame if that were the case, because, by most accounts, Pocketpair created a game that is very good on its own merits, rather than being an all-round ripoff. For it to fall apart just because the artists couldn’t be bothered to come up with their own creature designs would be foolishness of the highest order on their part, but of course things have happened in gaming.
