Palworld and the People Talking About It

[Yumetaro]

Palworld is a new game developed by the Japanese game development company PocketPair. In the English speaking world, the game has received a lot of attention for being "Pokemon with Guns." This meme came as a surprise to the CEO of PocketPair, Takuro Mizobe, because Palworld is a self-described open world survival crafting game that is in his eyes more similar to many other games before you get to Pokemon. He has compared it to or explicitly said inspiration was drawn from Pokemon, ARK: Survival Evolved, Dragon Quest, Rust, Grand Theft Auto, Rimworld, Minecraft, and probably more. The game has become an explosive success, achieving 8 million sales in less than 6 days, and is currently occupying the top spot for most concurrent players on Steam. If having the most concurrent players of a Steam game were a contest, it would hold second place for the all time record, with PUBG maintaining a comfortable lead.

With this success has come much controversy on X.com, with many posts calling the people at PocketPair and Takuro Mizobe plagiarists, parasites, cheaters, bootleggers, etc. and calling for the legal intervention of Nintendo. Many posts have been written in response to these people calling them all sorts of mean names as well. Scanning through arguments and profiles you can quickly piece together that this basically another fight between SJWs and knights, being anti and pro-Palworld respectively. The purpose of this thread is to talk about both Palworld and this ongoing discourse. To start the discussion off I'll write some ideas about the history and philosophy behind PocketPair and Mizobe, and then some ideas on what is motivating the anti-Palworld side of discourse. In the interest of completeness, I will summarize the pro-Palworld side as knights who either have chips on their shoulder about Pokemon and Gamefreak, or are reacting to libtards saying obviously silly things, or "just want to let people enjoy things, man." Just like with everything else they accept their opposition's self-flattering framing at face value and then react to that very stupidly. I will leave it there, but if you have your own thoughts on these knights feel free to talk about them.


Takuro Mizobe graduated from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2012 and quickly began working for JP Morgan Securities. In 2014, he founded an online crypto exchange, and after making some money in crypto he founded PocketPair. He's a technical guy with a personal interest in games.

Palworld is PocketPair's 3rd major release and it's 4th game overall. It's 2nd major release, Craftopia, sold 600,000 copies. This success left the 10 person company with a decently sized war chest and enough media attention that we can start to understand what ideas are driving Mizobe.

https://wired.jp/article/why-stay-indepe...ro-mizobe/

The kind of games that Mizobe makes are chimeras that don't hide that they are chimeras. A combination of things that he liked from other games. Combining two different things that are appealing on their own but would create something unique when put together. He finds this to be challenging work, and the more games you try to put together the more difficult it becomes. He compares it to mash-ups in music, but also compares it to the philosophy that was common in web services. These quotes were translated using Google Translate.

"Copying is commonplace in the world of web services, and for example, Facebook easily copied Google's Circles feature from Google+. Other examples of how the world's largest companies are copying each other's web content include Instagram copying its Stories feature from Snapchat, Twitter copying Clubhouse's voice feature and developing its Spaces feature, and It's a world of services. In the first place, ``STORYS.JP'', which I started, ended up being a different company, but the original motivation was to ``create a Japanese version of LinkedIn.'' I think the same is true in the world of games. Many fighting games follow the UI of Street Fighter II, and many card games are influenced by Hearthstone. Famous indie games in particular are often strongly influenced by past masterpieces. I believe that culture develops through imitation."

He also contrasts his philosophy with the philosophy of Nintendo.

"I've always loved Nintendo games, and that hasn't changed. I also deeply respect him. However, when it comes to making games, Nintendo has a strong philosophy of creating new and unique games with high quality, and this was questioned at the Nintendo Game Seminar. On the other hand, 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, or rather, 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)."

I don't think that Mizobe has any delusions that he is going to be the next Kojima. Again, this is a technical guy with an interest in video games, not an artist. Whether that's out of laziness or a belief that he couldn't even make it there if he tried is not for me to say. But I think that his enjoyment of games and making them comes through clearly. To contradict Mizobe, he says he doesn't have any artistic vision but I don't think that's as true as he would believe. He describes himself as a trend chaser that wants to appeal to the interest of others, but I've noticed that as he has jumped from project to project there are specific things he has kept an interest in and wishes to emphasize. Palworld is arguably a mashup that uses his previous game Craftopia, a game in which you could own pets. Palworld emphasizes and explores this idea after he found the limited ability to interact with pets in Craftopia to be much more interesting than he had anticipated. PocketPair's next project is a 2D action game, but still shares common threads of town building and having monsters under your command.



Palworld as a discourse and controversy quickly began after the release of the game. It started with the perception that Palworld has creatures come close to infringing Nintendo's copyright, and comparisons and arguments about the two rosters multiplied from there. Here is a link to the most comprehensive and popular list of comparisons. If any individual comparison in this thread grabs your attention you will probably find the comments interesting as well. Then the discussion moved to the claim that these designs were being made with generative AI. The evidence in favor of this is that Mizobe is very open to using generative AI in games, and Pocket Pair had made a game called AI Art Impostor to explore this interest. It's impossible for generative AI to have been used in Palworld in this way, but because AI is a hot-button issue for a certain type of person it is at this point that I believe that the conversation moved from a small controversy to the standard culture war we're so used to seeing. Palworld is no longer a game or even an act of theft, it is a mortal threat to artists and creatives everywhere.





Lastly, people with access to Blender have gone into the games files and accused the PocketPair of stealing models from Gamefreak and then changing them. It would be negligent for me to not include these claims in this mini-history, but I can't comment on how true they are. I'll simply point out that the desire to compare the models directly came after the controversy, not the other way around. But, if it can be undeniably proven that the models are stolen in the way these people claim, PocketPair owes The Pokemon Company a very large check.

Rather than comparing individual creatures, or comparing inspiration to plagiarism (it annoys me that this specific word is only being used because of a video made by HBomberGuy), I think the closest this discourse has gotten to productive is directly comparing PocketPair and Palworld to specific indie games. What is the difference between Palworld and Bug Fables or Project Wingman? These are games that are meant to appeal to an audience that played very specific games and invoke experiences they've already had. Why are Shovel Knight and Pizza Tower not mash-ups in the same vein as Palworld and Craftopia? I've stumbled upon a freelancer who sells legally distinct "Zelda-inspired plush dolls" on Etsy to provide me with an answer.



So the badness of Palworld can be attributed to its cynicism, and the fact that a very large profit was made. No one at PocketPair is particularly interested in anything they are taking from. Maybe I've been too generous to Mizobe and his game where you hold left click on trees, but I wanted to make sure his sincerity comes through. This claim that Palworld was made by malicious actors who saw guaranteed cash is essentially a mass hallucination. We also have the blog post about the game's strange development cycle to attest to this. What kind of money making plan involves porting your code from Unity to Unreal Engine mid-development and then selling it for a one time payment that's still less than half the price of a normal major release?

https://www.eurogamer.net/is-palworld-actually-any-good-of-course-not

"I'm still trying to reverse-engineer this one, so let's pull back a tiny bit further. The real problem with Palworld is less the derivative approach itself, than it is it's total shamelessness. It might be oddly refreshing to be so open about your cynicism, but it also has an impact on the player. Play Palworld and you won't feel like you're playing something made with thought, or craft, or an earnest team's best intentions. You won't feel admiration or wonder. You won't feel any real sense of achievement. You won't feel like any artist has been involved, or that anything meaningful might come to mind. You will instead feel like you're playing a product designed to be sold, rather than to be played. You will feel like a mark. And you'll be right."

So this is the belief that is at the root of why Palworld must be driven from polite society, and it's also not true. At most they're basing it post hoc off of the same quote about Nintendo that I linked to earlier. So why do they believe in it strongly enough to talk about it for days on end? Is it that Mizobe and these people are essentially the same, and seeing their reflection honestly for the first time destroys them? Is it resentment for being beaten at their own game by a "tech bro?" Do they believe that making an ARK clone is only something you would do if you wanted to take advantage of stupid people? Is it the anti-Japanese racism that's around all the time? Has their opposition to AI has forced them into increasingly absurd positions? Does social media just make them stupid? What do you all think?

One last note: After reading through these posts for long enough I can confidently say that "slop" is no longer a word for knights on 4chan, it's for everyone. Even in the current era, the rest of the world remains downstream of them.

[Zed]

Excellent high effort OP.

I have some stuff to add, but I'd like to let my thoughts on Palworld sit for a few days. In the meantime, there is an interesting point to be noted - Pokemon is not an artistic masterpiece that was born ex nihilo from some auteur vision, it has been commonly remarked that the original designs stole a good deal of inspiration from other games/companies. Nor was it specifically a masterpiece in other ways: It was a game that fundamentally (and consistently) released multiple iterations of the same game with very minor changes (for a very long time, merely different starting Pokemon) to play on the fact that hyper-fans would be willing to shell out extra money, well aggressively pushing the tagline "You gotta catch them all!"

Much of the original Pokemon games involved fundamental innovations in marketing-based design, including the remarkably quick multi-domain commoditization of it - card games, anime, movies, conventions, high-end toys, burger-king toys.

With that in mind - Let's flip the tables a bit --- would anyone truly be upset if someone ripped off Genshin Impact? Genshin innovated marketing-based design in similar ways, yet it is routinely copied and no one gives much of a fuck.

So why Pokemon?

Is it that the objects of our collective iconic nostalgia always tend to the sacred?

[Edge]

So why do they believe in it strongly enough to talk about it for days on end? Is it that Mizobe and these people are essentially the same, and seeing their reflection honestly for the first time destroys them? Is it resentment for being beaten at their own game by a "tech bro?" Do they believe that making an ARK clone is only something you would do if you wanted to take advantage of stupid people? Is it the anti-Japanese racism that's around all the time? Has their opposition to AI has forced them into increasingly absurd positions? Does social media just make them stupid? What do you all think?

I would say that most of this is correct, but the second one is probably the major one. I think most people, perhaps even those in "our thing", underestimate the extent to which these people consider any artistic endeavor their exclusive birthright after growing up hearing that people who have the correct opinions are just magically better at art. "How dare this crypto trading outsider outsell my queer friendly deck building roguelite about depression featuring silly little guys! It doesn't even have a trans flag emote!"
If you look further, you'll see that this game checks off a lot of boxes for them: it's Japanese, the developer was involved in crypto and AI, it's not morally didactic nor does it try to take any shots at the average gamer's sensibilities, it's also not in the usual "quirky" indie style. It sets off enough of their "chud" alarms that they view it as adversarial regardless of any developer statements or political content. There's probably even more of these elements that I'm forgetting.

[anthony]

Hello. Very interested in the phenomena surrounding Palworld. Totally uninterested in the game to the point I haven't even looked at footage yet. My understanding is that it's basically Valheim and Satisfactory with primitive NPCs who look like Pokemon, sort of like the Conan game's slave/thrall system. If I'm really wrong or missing something important someone let me know.

So how am I interested in the game without caring about the game? I'm interested in people talking about it. Specifically because I think I'm recognising a pattern now that's playing out again just like I've seen it before. Let me get some of my reference materials I've saved up so far.



First off there's a perception of the game itself. Which is not just good for what it is. I have been reading 4mex threads about this game. Nobody is talking about playing it. Everyone is talking about how good it is? But what does it mean for a game to be good with reference to nothing else? That doesn't make sense. What's being said incessantly is that it's good compared to pokemon. People are terribly excited about the idea of a game being better than a bigger established one.

This gets silly on several points. From my detached point of view (I have not played a pokemon game in about 18 years) it seems obvious that there is virtually no point of comparability between how these games play. Palworld is obviously ripping off other games which exist, but nobody is interested in talking about that. Did Palworld put Valheim to shame? Did it put Satisfactory to shame? Did it put modded Minecraft to shame? These are the relevant questions if you're interested in games. But this is very obviously not about that. Palworld has put pokemon to shame. And what does it mean to do that? It means to generate threads on 4mex about how you've put pokemon to shame. It means youtube thumbnails and shitjourno headlines. It means that the palworld community is eatin' while the Pokemon community is coping and seething.

Now why would they be? I asked in several threads and couldn't get a good answer. There are people upset at this game. But it's obviously not about pokemon. As has been pointed out in this thread, I believe that the game's success (not the game itself) is a chud-coded phenomena. Both sides are perceiving this and so squaring up and providing the other with what they see. If chuds support the game then suddenly it is a chud game. And if chuds hallucinate that people are mad hard enough people who are mad will appear (never mind that it's just libtard shitjournos who are literally paid to oppose whatever these guys are into, it's close enough so now we can pretend the pokemon community is having a yaseethemeltydown whatever the hell it is that's meant to be so satisfying to these spics).

Other side of the above meme is so absurd that maybe it's satire, maybe it's bait, more to the point that everything about this is pure attention seeking. How is Baldur's Gate 3 not an AAA game when it has a 9 figure budget and Tencent backing? The answers to this question in thread were spic gibberish which was maybe someone's idea of a joke (sit with that if you want to stay sane) but also maybe someone genuinely not aware of how little sense this makes attempting to answer in English. Again, either way this is retarded.

And more important point, even before Palworld I saw this point raised, people think that Baldur's Gate 3 puts Starfield to shame. I didn't screenshot this but I swear to God I've seen someone post that Baldur's Gate 3 was everything they wanted Starfield to be. Think about that. There is someone who has convinced themselves that when they bought Starfield they were expecting Baldur's Gate 3. This is the level of wilful self-delusion we are dealing with. So much retardation online about art and media comes back to people trying to narrativise their history of engagement with media for some nefarious new end. And we have a new compelling lie about our history with things we enjoy to pollute the discourse with gibberish, lies, and foul intentions indefinitely into the future. The new fantasy is that of the plucky indie resistance that got so good at smoking the AAA slops.

If these people were just keeping to themselves that would be one thing. But this is a community vs community fantasy/delusion. It requires an other side. And while the libtard communist shitjourno war-machine is kind of fitting, the trouble is they won't shut up about plagiarism and their shitty "art" and aren't talking about the game (the ascendant palworlders aren't but they're at least talking closer to it). They can't just talk to the other people who care about this. There's not enough material or reaction to the specific charges being made. But, that doesn't matter. We got here by hallucinating, so we're going to keep hallucinating. There's your "they", and they sure are owned.



For a start, I'm sure nobody here will have trouble believing me when I say I have seen passionate threadspanning arguments over what does or does not constitute a soulsbornevanialite.

Now as for what he actually means. Yes, I am Silly rageface punchline. Obvious. But this "punchline" has to be a cutoff, because otherwise, what were these people going to say? Is Palworld similar to Pokemon? And if so what were they going to call them? Another way of raising the question of "how are these similar?" What is this person's self-insert (ironic or not it still is) about to say? What is he thinking? The only realistic point of comparison is the way the characters look. Which would mean the friendly suggestion is that the two games call themselves pokemonlikes because they have the visual design of pokemon in common. Something which I've basically only seen raised by this game's warbase (they aren't really a "fanbase" even though I also use that word with contempt) as a sign someone is seething and a hater and pokeslopper or whatever.

(cool nigger doesn't need to tell this guy to chill)



While this guy is clearly unhappy. But a serious question. Why? If I look into Palworld threads I can find nobody who is actually analogous to this character, and again, there is no potential for a case to be made in the above cut off at the end of the meme. I am convinced that nobody is mad in a way that would quite strike this game's supporters as satisfactory, but with innuendo and insinuation and provocation they're trying to build a contrary community, or at least suggest the appearance of one with the odd led reaction. I don't believe that this is any kind of plan. I believe it's just a strange new mass psychology. Again, there is a very desirable fantasy of being a plucky new community under siege from the haters without who have been smoked by your side's guerrilla brilliance and now are just pissing and crying and screaming incessantly over, what exactly you never have to fill that part in, too much fun to imagine everything up to this point, anybody who asks is just proving they're seething.

Palworld, as far as I know completely by accident, has built a mass following on spite. Pre-orders, Day One Purchase Americans, and Snowballing are of course contributing factors (remember that the other big indie pre-order stampede before this was the chink scam-game 'The Day Before', people are that fucking stupid), but what sets this apart and gets it talked about is the fantasy of owning. Something which is in such hot demand that people will imagine conflict where there is none so that liking the game is elevated from buying junk-software to an act of mass social solidarity and rebellion. The idea of playing this game is insanely appealing to people. Is the game itself? Maybe that is too, but it's not what everyone's talking about.

A quick thought on the pre-order question. The game of course has a meme that will stick in the minds of less internet psychotic American normalfags. The real true believers who are SMOKING game freak are 'discord server meme channel full of pictures of homer simpson eating ass' Americans, but the rank and file normalfag sales are because of 'Pokemon with Guns'. I believe that these sales are where the comparison to The Day Before comes in. The Day Before is on its face retarded. The title is wrong. It's set after its defining event, but its title suggests the opposite. I know it's a scammer trick to put something stupid up front to filter people who will give you problems. Maybe it was in that case. Palworld definitely isn't that. But it's what happened, in the sense that lots of complacent people bought in under completely retarded and preposterous premises which suggest a bar for entry so low on the common purchase these people could be satisfied with virtually anything. Pokemon is a turn based JRPG in form. You select a word from a menu and numbers go down. How do "guns" come into that meaningfully? They don't. Every image and clip of the game looks like Valheim with chink knock-off Pokemon. Anybody who buys into "Pokemon with Guns" and this steam front page is more an animal than a man. They hear the word pokemon, see something that looks like a pokemon, the bell is ringing, credit card is out.

Now pardon that, a moment ago I was getting to this. I said this is a pattern. I've seen this before and I know where it's going, provided this insane American spite-cult doesn't do something extreme.







Massive initial wave of enthusiasm, people more interested in talking about thing in relation to something that already exists, than about the thing itself. While in the case of Battlefield and Battlebit comparisons would make sense, people caught up in the initial wave were not interested in that discussion. Because as you see evidence of above, that discussion would lead to a place that would deflate the fun. Battlebit was comparable to Battlefield. But not better than it in any inherent way. It sold on a wave of enthusiasm based on sticking it to the man and his stupid disciples by buying into this new thing that's not out of touch. It's "Focused On What Matters". Now what matters? I'm not watching that tool's videos, because I already know he's just lying like all the others. If he's not why did everyone stop playing once the youtube thumbnails wore off?

The most convincing explanation I've seen for why the game felt fun at first came from a particularly lucid (white) 4mex poster who said that everyone was VOIPing at first in Battlebit. He didn't say why, but it's obvious why. Because all of the wholesome guerilla smokedpunk youtubers were VOIPing like retarded clowns in their "What Matters" videos and people received the programming and copied them for a while. But of course, VOIP exists in Battlefield too. This didn't lead to a VOIP revolution in all games, led by ongoing Battlebit success. Instead it suffered the fate of Battlefield. VOIP is hard and awkward and there are other games which are more explicitly social. The VOIP mania wore off and people realised that they were not in fact owning the Battlefield community, they were the Battlefield community all along. So they went back to playing Battlefield.

A similar phenomena was observed during Cyberpunk's development run. Where there was at first an inorganic hatebase based on memes (who still bought and played it), followed by a redemptionbase also built on memes and youtube thumbnails who now took pride in standing with the game against its haters (themselves, now forgotten and renarrativised) and enjoying their fixed game (it no longer has BUGS, since that was apparently the problem with the 50 hour game). You can hallucinate yourself enemies on all sides and switch places with them. Tracking a game's popular reception (real or imagined) seems to be more fun than video games to most people talking about video games online now. Youtube thumbnails and titles serve as a second layer of shitjourno titles and headers, you can create a whole narrative for a thing's history if you control those. No matter how little sense it makes a certain kind of person who is serious about this stuff will follow and be completely programmed by it.

We have a pattern, but the particulars of Palworld make things weird. The fact that Pokemon is an IP rather than a game, and a very different game in its most common form, and it sells on meme-power. Will this drop off? I still believe so. Remember, this game's rank and file are Day One Purchase Americans. Idiot slaves who won't pay long term attention to anything. Beyond that there's this precarious and extraordinarily fickle group of people who are more or less addicted to playing the role of a besieged but just community, with video games themselves being an auxiliary part of the experience, and the fact the game basically stole the mimetic power of another IP by looking close and having the word associated with them, "Pokemon with guns". There is no long term further winning plan for this game. It's a one-off purchase that has made its sales, and now it's a question of how much more game they make for dwindling returns before trying another project. How they proceed will influence their reputation going forward, but considering how fickle and uninformed their primary buyers seem to be perhaps what follows won't really matter at all.

Right now I think it's most likely that the playerbase tanks massively within a couple of months as all massively successful games do, and Nintendo may let this slide but make it clear they'll rape the next person who tries this, or maybe they'll take some or all of the money, we'll see. And of course everyone acting like this is a serious social phenomena will declare victory 
(victory over who? Damn bro you sure are seething while I'm just here stating fax).

[anthony]

And I just check /v/ a minute after posting this and find another example of the phenomena

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/665235293



This thread is full of condescending posts directed at nobody about how "they" were not mature enough to handle someone ruining their fun so quickly after release. When this was actually controversial because he was obviously manipulating how the games' sounded in post to make an inane point about atmosphere of the kind which would only even look like an own to a moron (LOOK SARS 5 trillion decibel ambient sound in original much more souls yes sar). Anybody pointing this out is a paid shill and or a kid who will one day go bald and understood that sometimes the AAA's just slop (have less than 5 trillion decibels to their ambience).

Here, for those of you who lack the plugins to read threads automatically post-death:

[Yumetaro]

Thanks for the reply anthony. I appreciate that your post focuses on 4chan-centered pro-Palworld discourse. It makes the thread more well-rounded, and people hallucinating in order to place themselves in narratives and to own people that don’t really exist is definitely a real and repeating phenomena. As I alluded to before I think on the anti-Palworld side there is also some hallucination-based narrativisation, as defenders of small and struggling artists against predatory “tech bros” and the forces of capitalism. In your post there was also some focus on the memetic power of very weak comparisons, Starfield vs. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Palworld as “Pokemon with guns,” which both fall apart quickly if you look at the form of the things that you are comparing. However, I think that if you instead focus on the underlying experience that these games are offering, and their forms as secondary choices for delivering those experiences those comparisons make more sense to me. If that sentence makes sense to you and don’t want to read me elaborate on that, skip the next two paragraphs and jump to the part about Palworld and Pokemon, but this is all novel to me personally. Basically I want use this post to argue against PocketPair and say that if you squint Palworld is “Pokemon with guns” or “Pokemon but better.” I also haven’t played almost any of the games I’m about to talk about.

First I want to quote something you wrote in the FromSoftware Appreciation Thread.

The experience FROM want you to have in every game is that of a weak and unwanted interloper in a strange world you can only appreciate from your ant-like point of view. That experience is there now, but it's lost on most of the people playing the game, who just see Ghosts 'n' Goblins with a way bigger budget. Crossed with World of Warcraft.”

I could be misunderstanding, but what interests me about this idea is that the experience that these games are going to have is defined before we decide what kind of media it’s going to be. The phrase “a weak and unwanted interloper in a strange world you can only appreciate from your ant-like point of view” makes very little but not zero demands about what form it will be. FromSoftware decided that a 3D action game would be the best form for this experience, but a 2D point-and-click that tried to give people that experience could be seen as having more in common with Elden Ring than a 3D action game that didn’t.

Next I’d like to consider this person who said that “Baldur's Gate 3 was everything they wanted Starfield to be.” It is entirely possible and even probable that this person was shifting his own memories to recontextualize them into a narrative in which he supported plucky Tencent-backed underdogs who usurped the white American Todd Howard and his AAA company and supported them as they socked Mr. Chess Club in the eye, as you described him. But I’d like to imagine a version of him that genuinely thought that. Obviously no one bought Starfield expecting a butt-fantasy CRPG where they can watch elves do top-down D&D combat. However, maybe an exceptionally lucid person would say “When I bought Starfield, I wanted to be in a weird place and have NPCs tell me to do tasks in other places and have those tasks play out in ways I didn’t expect while still being an agent in this process, and be excited and interested the entire time.” If that’s what you want from a game then it doesn’t really matter whether the game has the form of a CRPG or a Todd Howard game. According to this theory Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 could have been visual novels. I ask that you forgive that I conspicuously ignored that Baldur’s Gate 3’s popularity is obviously relying on the fact that normalfags like D&D now.

So let’s get back to Pokemon. I hope it’s clear where I’m going with this. It’s interesting that a multimedia franchise based on a JRPG series would have such a stranglehold on Americans when the popular conception of JRPGs in America hasn’t advanced much past the original Final Fantasy from 1987. I think that its popularity is in spite of being a JRPG. Treating Pokemon as an elaborate version of chess is popular, but the load-bearing desired experience that captures people’s attention is “I want there to be a cast of cartoon monsters that are cute, cool, or some other quality and I want to be able to make them my friends and I want them to interact with my character and the virtual space they are in in a way that feels real.”

What evidence do I have for this? In 2009 Gamefreak released Pokemon Heartgold and Soulsilver, one of the features in these games is that the leading Pokemon in your party will follow you around when you walk around. A sprite bobbing up and down with a 2 frame walk cycle and can read a text box by pressing the A button in front of it is now one of the most popular features in the series. A Pokemon game having this feature is considered an unambiguous positive, and when a dataminer found that there was a walking and running animation for each Pokemon in 2016 it was a noteworthy event for the people who breathe this garbage every day. But this feature has nothing to do with Pokemon as a JRPG and a great deal to do with Pokemon as a game that has creatures existing and interacting with you within space.

If both Pokemon and Palworld are trying to make people have this experience then I think it's perfectly fair to compare them on their ability to provide it. The rest of this post argues that Palworld was intentionally made to focus on this kind of experience and that when Palworld focuses on delivering this people notice it and talk about it. Again, Palworld is an iteration on PocketPair's previous game Craftopia that emphasizes and explores the aspects of that game in which you can own and interact with pets. The ideas on how to expand this were intensive enough that it was decided it would hamper their ability to develop on Craftopia, so it was made into a new game.

Here’s a quote from an article I wasn’t able to include in the OP in which Takuro Mizobe talks about this intention behind the game.

Palworld was built on the hypothesis that having the monsters, Pals, act both autonomously and emotionally will result in a completely different playing experience than that of Craftopia.

One of the main themes of Craftopia was “automation,” and I think that it received recognition for the outrageous things users were able to do with it, many of which we, the developers, had not even anticipated.

With Palworld, our idea was to take this a step further, by aiming for “automation with emotion.”

Pals will rejoice from the bottom of their hearts if you give them food and pet them. On the other hand, they will cry and refuse to work if you’re rough with them. We are a small-scale indie studio, but we really wanted to go far and beyond in terms of expressions of emotion, and this was actually a big percentage of our costs. I mean, try to imagine making different petting interactions for over 100 Pals (laughs).

This announcement trailer is almost entirely focused on all the ways different Pals can do different things and interact with the world and yourself in different ways. When it’s no longer tied to a certain form and thought about as an experience I think how guns can be introduced into Pokemon meaningfully becomes more clear. It’s another group of objects that these creatures can interact with as they were both real things occupying a real space.



People do appreciate this side of Palworld and compare it to recent Pokemon games. Admittedly I don't have much for this point. I’ve stumbled onto this GIF multiple times, and if you consider the appeal of Palworld to be the one I put forward then I think it’s clear why. Here’s the exact 4mex discussion I pulled it from and a post listing some ways different Pals approach the same tasks, and then contrasting it to their experience with Pokemon. People seem particularly enamored with the blue cat thing and its habit of doing everything in a very lazy and bored way.

[anthony]

Palworld was built on the hypothesis that having the monsters, Pals, act both autonomously and emotionally will result in a completely different playing experience than that of Craftopia.

One of the main themes of Craftopia was “automation,” and I think that it received recognition for the outrageous things users were able to do with it, many of which we, the developers, had not even anticipated.

With Palworld, our idea was to take this a step further, by aiming for “automation with emotion.”

Pals will rejoice from the bottom of their hearts if you give them food and pet them. On the other hand, they will cry and refuse to work if you’re rough with them. We are a small-scale indie studio, but we really wanted to go far and beyond in terms of expressions of emotion, and this was actually a big percentage of our costs. I mean, try to imagine making different petting interactions for over 100 Pals (laughs).

This announcement trailer is almost entirely focused on all the ways different Pals can do different things and interact with the world and yourself in different ways. When it’s no longer tied to a certain form and thought about as an experience I think how guns can be introduced into Pokemon meaningfully becomes more clear. It’s another group of objects that these creatures can interact with as they were both real things occupying a real space.



People do appreciate this side of Palworld and compare it to recent Pokemon games. Admittedly I don't have much for this point. I’ve stumbled onto this GIF multiple times, and if you consider the appeal of Palworld to be the one I put forward then I think it’s clear why. Here’s the exact 4mex discussion I pulled it from and a post listing some ways different Pals approach the same tasks, and then contrasting it to their experience with Pokemon. People seem particularly enamored with the blue cat thing and its habit of doing everything in a very lazy and bored way.

I think that you are right that this is a strong element of the game's appeal, and the most lucid comparison one can make to Pokemon and a place where it actually does come out ahead. Pokemon is largely admired for the idea of pokemon, which was frankly always kind of underserved by the JRPG form if you ask me. Nintendo do understand this, which is why in the past they've made spinoffs like mystery dungeon, snap!, the gamecube thing, etc. Those are really cool. But yes, I think people do want a game where pokemon just exist in a world and can be appreciated doing things and having personalities and presence. People want this I believe, but cannot articulate it at all because they are animals. So we get 500 years of complaints that the JRPG animations are "lazy" because the problem is that their menu based duels aren't represented elaborately enough on the pure visual end.

It's that problem we keep coming back to in so many games. Halo got sold as "ferszperszschootur" so when trying to surpass it we talk about "weapon sandbox" and "crunchy animations" because everyone is a fucking idiot and we've yet to receive a youtube thumbnail explaining an alternate appeal the thing might have in ten words or less. The appeal of the pokemon is the pokemon. And the appeal of pokemon is the idea of weird cartoon mascot creatures with semi-human personalities existing in a quaint japan-world. But crowbcat hasn't made a video about that so if something is wrong it's that we don't have enough unique "combat animations".

In that sense Palworld is a nice thing to happen. It's a very clear statement on what else you can do for pokemon. But I have virtually never seen Pokemon fans themselves praising, going back and playing, or asking for the pokemon games which do things other than JRPG fights. They exist. They have existed for decades. And nobody cared because this was before you could join an online community and make turning against something for something else into your personality for a month.

This /v/ thread you've linked is the most lucid palworld discussion I've seen (outside of here of course). They're starting to kind of get it. I do believe that if Nintendo made this, some people would call it lazy on the "gameplay" front, but pokemon holding a pickaxe in different ways would be seen as extremely "soul". But again, I don't blame them for not doing this, because these animals haven't cared about or asked for different stuff with pokemon. And again, the primary selling point was "pokemon with guns". Which is very far from what is actually happening which is novel and good in this game. As I said, pokemon with guns with no further revision would be functionally the same game, only "water cannon" is replaced with "gun" in your turn based duel text box. When everyone read "with guns" did they intuitively understand and communicate to each other that what this game actually is is "open world of autonomous actors who can be corralled and commanded in a more naturalistic manner towards more visceral and high stakes violence"? Or was it idiots who didn't think beyond "MEME + MEME" and instinctively pre-ordered because Day One Purchase Americans are a real thing and the most powerful commercial force in gaming?

Last thought, Cats told me earlier that he was watching friends stream it, and that they at least intuitively understood that "the game is about beating your slaves". My thought in response was that what we need now is the real slavery game. Enslaving humans for war with other humans. The pickaxe gif above reminded me strongly of Kenshi and that one Conan game. We've come close a couple of times, but nobody has explicitly and intentionally built the real slavery warband game yet. I like that this game is about autonomous entities, I love that in all games that do it. But we need to go further. In so many directions. But again, crowbcat and asmongold aren't saying this so it does not exist. It's Pokemon with Guns. That's what's happening. And this game's successor will be a duelling JRPG where the sprites are holding guns and people will say it's exactly like Palworld.

[Lohengrin]

I think that you are right that this is a strong element of the game's appeal, and the most lucid comparison one can make to Pokemon and a place where it actually does come out ahead. Pokemon is largely admired for the idea of pokemon, which was frankly always kind of underserved by the JRPG form if you ask me. Nintendo do understand this, which is why in the past they've made spinoffs like mystery dungeon, snap!, the gamecube thing, etc. Those are really cool. But yes, I think people do want a game where pokemon just exist in a world and can be appreciated doing things and having personalities and presence. People want this I believe, but cannot articulate it at all because they are animals. So we get 500 years of complaints that the JRPG animations are "lazy" because the problem is that their menu based duels aren't represented elaborately enough on the pure visual end.

It's that problem we keep coming back to in so many games. Halo got sold as "ferszperszschootur" so when trying to surpass it we talk about "weapon sandbox" and "crunchy animations" because everyone is a fucking idiot and we've yet to receive a youtube thumbnail explaining an alternate appeal the thing might have in ten words or less. The appeal of the pokemon is the pokemon. And the appeal of pokemon is the idea of weird cartoon mascot creatures with semi-human personalities existing in a quaint japan-world. But crowbcat hasn't made a video about that so if something is wrong it's that we don't have enough unique "combat animations".

In that sense Palworld is a nice thing to happen. It's a very clear statement on what else you can do for pokemon. But I have virtually never seen Pokemon fans themselves praising, going back and playing, or asking for the pokemon games which do things other than JRPG fights. They exist. They have existed for decades. And nobody cared because this was before you could join an online community and make turning against something for something else into your personality for a month.

This /v/ thread you've linked is the most lucid palworld discussion I've seen (outside of here of course). They're starting to kind of get it. I do believe that if Nintendo made this, some people would call it lazy on the "gameplay" front, but pokemon holding a pickaxe in different ways would be seen as extremely "soul". But again, I don't blame them for not doing this, because these animals haven't cared about or asked for different stuff with pokemon. And again, the primary selling point was "pokemon with guns". Which is very far from what is actually happening which is novel and good in this game. As I said, pokemon with guns with no further revision would be functionally the same game, only "water cannon" is replaced with "gun" in your turn based duel text box. When everyone read "with guns" did they intuitively understand and communicate to each other that what this game actually is is "open world of autonomous actors who can be corralled and commanded in a more naturalistic manner towards more visceral and high stakes violence"? Or was it idiots who didn't think beyond "MEME + MEME" and instinctively pre-ordered because Day One Purchase Americans are a real thing and the most powerful commercial force in gaming?

So let’s get back to Pokemon. I hope it’s clear where I’m going with this. It’s interesting that a multimedia franchise based on a JRPG series would have such a stranglehold on Americans when the popular conception of JRPGs in America hasn’t advanced much past the original Final Fantasy from 1987. I think that its popularity is in spite of being a JRPG. Treating Pokemon as an elaborate version of chess is popular, but the load-bearing desired experience that captures people’s attention is “I want there to be a cast of cartoon monsters that are cute, cool, or some other quality and I want to be able to make them my friends and I want them to interact with my character and the virtual space they are in in a way that feels real.”

I was once enamoured by Pokémon when I was younger, playing largely up to X and Y (more on that later), and you capture very well what I saw that I felt alone in seeing others clearly not seeing.  Cruising around town alone on my bike, stopping to observe animals in the distance, seeing cool bugs, this is what Satoshi Tajiri enjoyed in his childhood that he sought to recapture in the form of a video game.  The development process for the first Pokémon games are well-known, but going off memory I assume that Tajiri and his companions at Game Freak were quite big fans of Dragon Quest, so they decided to frame the game in the style of a "JRPG."  So with that also comes "combat" as befitting the frame of an "RPG", so the creatures you collect are capable of fighting and "multiplayer" components to interact with real world people includes fighting each other's creatures on top of trading them.  A multimedia franchise was born from this, Game Freak approving an anime, and an assortment of merchandise including toys, dolls, posters, trading cards, to sell people on these Pocket Monsters.  And of course... they succeeded!  Just about everyone agreed that Pokémon were cute, cool, and everything between.  It caught on like wildfire only to simmer down over the course of the next decade, but the games still sold at almost half the amount the original Red and Blue sold, 32 million is no slouch.  I can only surmise that a component of this fading of popularity were the games simply reiterating on the previous one, being largely the same only with new graphical quality and more Pokémon, until online capability is achieved starting in Diamond and Pearl adding new layers to the experience.  Even then, the audience was still satisfied with more toys and dolls of their favourite creatures, spin-off titles, more of the anime, so on and so forth.

X and Y in 2013 were a big turning point for not just the games, but also the direction the multimedia franchise would take.  New Pokémon weren't as much the focus, more appeals to the legacy of the first games, fan favourites such as Pikachu and Charizard restored to prominence, and the "starters" of those games were available early in the new game.  Most seem to agree that the game part of X and Y was mediocre, discussion on lazy design starts to formulate, declining "difficulty", whatever.  I can see where they're coming from, and I was losing interest by that point, but I enjoyed them for different reasons.  These were the first "mainline" titles since the GameCube titles and that one Wii spin-off thing that were animated in full 3D.  Buildings, trees, caves, mountains, objects in general were rendered in three dimensions rather than sprites, you could observe the Pokémon battle in three dimensions (but still in the frame of JRPG duelling).  If you caught a Pokémon, you could access its data in the Pokédex and observe its model, and I had plenty of enjoyment from simply spinning and turning them around, gazing at their majesty.  I would capture more Pokémon just to do this.  I probably came close to capturing most of the available Pokémon just to do this, even trading for more using the new "Wonder Trade" system, which was an interesting feature you could treat like gambling.

And then there was this:  



Look at what Game Freak delivered.  You can now pet and scratch your Pokémon!  The same Pokémon you use in the game!  What's the point of having a pet if you couldn't caress them?  Look at how happy Mew is in that video, and the way you can play with him.  And you can do this for all 600+ Pokémon at the time, all with their own animations and personality and such.

Call me a woman or a faggot or whatever, I enjoyed this.  This was not a detriment to the game for me, and if the same is already replicated in Palworld, then that shows me this was such a beloved aspect, on par with the Pikachu following you in Yellow, and its aforementioned return in HeartGold and SoulSilver versions.  As I said, I lost interest in Pokémon after this, so I know not if this feature remains in later titles.  Sword and Shield in 2019 seem to be closer to the logical conclusion of what Pokémon ought to be according to Satoshi Tajiri, an even less abstracted three-dimensional space to roam around in and observe Pokémon in nature, with Legends Arceus then Scarlet and Violet further "innovating" on the "formula" of the games aspect of Pokémon.  I've never actually played them, or even bother to see footage longer than half a minute, I just hear and see occasional screenshots from friends who still play this stuff.  I don't feel as though I'm missing anything by not playing them, maybe someone here who has can elaborate more.  Beyond "lazy" animations, I just hear they're "bad" because le gameplay or bugs or some other retarded complaint made by cretins who belong in slaughterhouses, instead of anything remotely worth complaining about such as ugly brown people and latinx transsexuals writing (which doesn't automatically ruin it).

Palworld seems in part to be a symptom of a conflict on how Game Freak delivers the aspect of three-dimensional space and how you interact with the Pokémon, and how to handle growing out of the "JRPG" frame that the games build themselves on.  For what it's worth, I too appreciate being able to observe these creatures behave autonomously as they are in nature, and that idea seems to have always been important in realising to Game Freak, playing into the Pokémon Snap spin-off from the very beginning.  It seems more intuitive than that Pixelmon mod for Minecraft that simply overlays it with Pokémon that have no meaningful impact on the world besides their three-dimensional presence and "JRPG" duelling with them.

[Promise-Ring]

If not for our very own media literacy Yōkai, Palworld may have been released and forgotten before any real discussion of the chaos took place. Regardless. It’s a good thing some discussion has already taken place here as it allows me to easily get into one of the fundamental problems with Media discussion.



All the way up to what should be the elite-level of making sense of culture, we have people who are illiterate-level fools at making sense of culture. Peasant-poor level street sweepers who think framing things Objectivity can defeat unrestrained Idiosyncrasy. Those who think they can win the war of taste without being INVESTED, by outsourcing their own Interest to a Community.

Mikka has many past tweets that give an idea of his taste, so I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say his vision of the situation is the Authentic yet synonymously decrepit Pokèmon franchise that subsists on its legacy alone being pushed aside by the fire of amoralist “zoomer” Palworlders, a supernova from the future. The next generation will become one with Progress, they will opt out of society to engage further in shonen anime style war with each other in the Slavery game. No more moralism. Only a microcosm of Meritocracy that will one day become so irresistible that it becomes the world.

As you can see by how I refracted Mikka’s vision through myself, I consider it a good vision. I find the idea of real life turning into Icycalm’s ideal video game (Especially if it all begins with Video Games overtaking reality, something Mikka should like as well) pleasing and wish people who want irl shonen dictated more of reality.

But don’t you see, this is all so PERSONAL. It’s all VISIONS.



Pokémon and Gamefreak were created by Satoshi Tajiri. An autistic type who got into game creation by starting the first Japanese gaming magazine on stapled together pieces of copy paper. Despite his complete lack of visual sense (something that would later be remedied by hiring Sugimori) and focus on dissecting every game as if it were a machine only, he had enough of a game-design ability in the Miyamoto sense of the phrase to impress Miyamoto himself. Who would later act as his mentor while creating Pokemon.



Pokémon wasn’t born out of something like innovating in the JRPG genre. Nor was it exclusively Satoshi Tajiri’s love of bug catching. It was the idea of Connection and Communication. Yes, what if my vision of my own childhood could be spread to all the world’s children? And what if the game made those children communicate in the language of my vision… and what if the technology brought that dream into reality?






The second and last Pokémon games Tajiri was heavily involved with were Gold/Silver/Crystal, which might just seem like an ultra version of the first game to the Gaijin. But in Japan the Crystal version had cell phone connectivity that brought children one step closer to total worship of Fantasy over reality (fake). Too bad Miyamoto feared bringing it to the west would threaten the re-emergence of the Japanese Empire and shut the whole thing down.



But of course, a large part of the appeal of Pokémon is the sentimental aspect. Crying Pikachu and all that.



The truth is though, the Pokémon games really only become crying pikachu after the music guy (Junichi Masuda) took over.

The first of the games he directed has water everywhere and the music for traversing it is based on a Russian classical piece that translates to The Sentimental Waltz (linked above). Things only increased in intensity from here.

I decided that ‘ultimate’ was the theme in the beginning. I set myself a task to pursue what was the ‘ultimate’ for Pokémon games, and started to act on this theme when making the games. When I asked myself what is ‘ultimate,’ I immediately knew I wanted to improve the level of communication, which is a core element of Pokémon games. … I wanted Dialga and Palkia to become counterparts for a sense of balance. Infinite time and infinite space — that to me is the ‘ultimate.'”

I got really stressed out and had to go to the hospital and had some stomach issues and had to get a camera inserted and they didn’t know what it was – very stressful. The night before release I had a dream that it was a complete failure, a total nightmare.”

“We at Game Freak took that as a challenge and said, ‘It’s not dead. We’re going to show you guys you’re wrong!’ The morning after, the day of release, I went into the local shop and saw people lining up to buy it and was extremely relieved. It was close. Super scary at the time.”

This might just be the way Japanese people talk and not Masuda being a sentimental master, but I haven’t seen Satoshi Tajiri say anything like this.



Now in Gen 5, the Gamefreak logo emerges from dark energy and presents you a beautiful anime world with JRPG royalty, dreams, sorrow, and Maid outfits.





This kind of reaction to gen 4 and 5 seems common enough among people I’ve talked to. A dark sorrowful escape to a dream world with emotions more intense than those in reality. Sure, those are PERSONAL anecdotes. But the game says Hopes and Dreams and looks like that, not me. And on the subject of personal feelings, can you really imagine many kids playing Palworld feeling the same?



Or to use a nicer screenshot:



Nobody is going to grow up overtaken by sentimental Palworld feelings and create their own beautiful fanart or original work because of this. Nobody will find the power inside them through these images. Because it's Ark Survival but cute (Something only the Japanese can manage to accomplish sadly). If Palworld is indicative of an anti-moralist victory, it’s the anti-moralism of a half-German half-nonwhite kid using his blue eyes as a cudgel against a dark-eyed white classmate.

Consider what it means to look at this image and choose your reaction in response to the prevailing online sentiments. You’ve decided that you must NECESSARILY be downstream from millions of retards who don’t care about the game, don’t care about discussing it, don’t care about the people behind either Palworld or Pokémon, aren't clever enough to discuss the discussion as it is actually occurring, can’t appreciate things to begin with, and who are as demonstrated in Anthony’s post, EXCLUSIVELY using this game as they do with everything as a setpiece for their delusional war against an imagined COMMUNITY. Yes, it is the final (but we won’t let it be) victory of Gamergate, a visionless, tasteless community defined entirely by its opposition to an even more tasteless community.



And it’s not as if nothing heroically against our time has emerged. Rance is the best selling eroge ever and it puts his RAPESLAVE on the cover. And as you can see in the above comparison, it has already inspired the next generation. The New World is here for everyone to see, and all those not ranced in are the real cucks (mostly non Japanese) who can’t handle the “Inheritors of the Future” (What I’m calling it) community.



Yes. I am mad, I am seething, I am distressed, I am crying, and I will never surrender. Because we do not live in the world that worships artists, and so until that day arrives...



-------------------------------------------------------------------
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I can't tell what it is
But it's for sure
Something in the other side
Maybe the future

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNUJHuz-mEE

[Zed]

(Let me start with one point: I've played about 25 hours of Palworld at this point, and the game is solidly 'mid' in every appreciable way. I don't regret the purchase, but the survival aspects are not nearly as fun as vanilla minecraft - and the combat is effectively trivial once you beef up on a single Pal. Around level 34 or so, the game becomes a giga-grind fest. All in all, my overall feeling towards the game itself is "meh". Captivating premise, but a failure to deliver on it.)

I appreciate all of the posts above on the sociological reaction to Palworld. Still, it feels like it is somehow the least interesting direction this thread could go. Yes, we may analyze it in terms of pieces on a chessboard, each acting according to existing ideological priors... "New battlefield in the battle between knights and SJWs"...For all that, this line of analysis seems myopic, fixated on aspects appealing to the internal cultural background of those present and it fails to properly consider the nature of the outrage at the game --- and to a deeper extent, overlooks what that outrage tells us about the mass appreciation of media.

Anyways...my first thought on seeing Palworld was that it was going to be terrible. Gut instinct, effectively baseless. It was indeed rooted in the fact that the aesthetic was derivative. After all, the more derivative something appears, the greater the presumption that the overall product was phoned in. It speaks to sensing cynicism in the creation of the game. Something over-designed to cater towards an existing audience with 'more of the same'... Take for example:



Is Lies of P a good game? I can't honestly say --- I'm not interested enough to pay $59.99 for something that appears to rip and cheapen the aesthetic of Bloodbourne. Sure, I'm guessing it is 'mid', but I might be wrong --- I have a record of being wrong. As a teenager I refused to play Halo for many years under the impression that it was Unreal Tournament for xbox bros. Maybe some future Neo-Anthony will come along in 10-15 years and tell me that Lies of P was one of the best games ever made, and I missed it because of this gay bias. If so, I'll probably feel like an idiot. But then... I feel like an idiot daily, so nothing new in that.

Regardless, I assume the reader can take my point. Almost everything new has a delta separating it from the old. Something truly 'new' is extremely rare, so we usually judge novelty by the delta. If that delta amounts to applying an existing aesthetic to an existing mode of gameplay, we're going to sense a spirit of cynicism in the product. In particular, we are going to sense that it was made to cater.

Amarna does not like TV shows (or TV comparisons), but as a late millennial, I must note that a good analogy here is Breaking Bad --> House Of Cards. House Of Cards was quite literally sold as Breaking Bad, but for politics (the delta). It was not an awful show and it delivered the notes promised (...Breaking Bad for politics...), but it was bound from the outset in a matrix of predictability. For the viewer, Breaking Bad always held a promise of redemption - for Jessie and even for Walt. Resisting that, the Breaking Bad writers simply grabbed a shovel and dug the hole deeper. House Of Cards promised to do the exact same. Were the murders committed by Underwood or Stanton ever surprising? Or was it simply what we expected? For the most part, experimental TV died around 2011, and it died due to Netflix and others attempting to reproduce formulaic variations of the premium dramas produced between 1990-2010..."Slop"



If you're an artfag, you thrive on novelty - seeking new ground and new experiences. New does not have to be temporal of course, "new to you" is sufficient. The artfag can find fertile ground in 70s anime series, Victorian novels, and forgotten JDramas: 



That said, you don't have to be an artfag to desire non-cynical deltas. Everyone, normies and 4mex included, desire new experiences. Skyrim is one of the most popular normie games of all times, but no one is asking for The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim II. As for what they actually want...? 



...well, it is not Skyrim II. Maybe, not a radical artfag ultra-novel delta either, but something partially novel. With this in mind, you can start to accurately see the gauge source of the outrage, which @Yumetaro already distilled in the quote of Chris Tapsell (I repeat for the sake of the reader). 

"I'm still trying to reverse-engineer this one, so let's pull back a tiny bit further. The real problem with Palworld is less the derivative approach itself, than it is it's total shamelessness. It might be oddly refreshing to be so open about your cynicism, but it also has an impact on the player. Play Palworld and you won't feel like you're playing something made with thought, or craft, or an earnest team's best intentions. You won't feel admiration or wonder. You won't feel any real sense of achievement. You won't feel like any artist has been involved, or that anything meaningful might come to mind. You will instead feel like you're playing a product designed to be sold, rather than to be played. You will feel like a mark. And you'll be right."

Contra Yumetaro, Chris is only partially wrong here. I think it is actually quite the opposite: he doesn't go far enough --- You don't have to buy Palworld to feel like mark, the mere existence of Palworld alone is sufficient. That is, the nature of Palworld as a targeted consumer product and the reflection it casts on gamers as consumers by catering to them. Catering does not entail low production value either - the MCU films are quite expensive to produce, but they fundamentally cater. Is Chris Taspell as upset by them as he is by Palworld?

As a product that caters, Palworld is reasonably perceived cynically and, worse, perceived so in relation to some of their formative childhood experiences. But I think it may still be worse than that: The perceived cynicism of Palworld is so intense as to make one notice, however obliquely, the cynicism of Pokemon itself --- and, as @Yumetaro alludes, the existence and prevalence of slop more broadly. Maybe this is a charitable interpretation of the outrage, but I feel like it is the most honest one. I believe it serves to scapegoat a broader phenomena of increasingly derivative games. Naturally, the sin does not belong to Palworld alone, but Palworld was merely the most offensive whore available, fit to be The Whore suitably universalized. Contrast: Did anyone truly give a fuck about Zoë Quinn sucking the dick of a Kotaku 'writer'? Or was that just a stand-in for a greater failure, a greater decay? In retrospect, they were scapegoats... and so is Palworld.

Fog of War then: Who are the knights now...? Who are the SJWs...? 

So far, I don't feel like I've added much to this thread beyond simply giving my own reading of the OP - albeit one a little more generous to the critics of Palworld. As an artfag - the more interesting question here concerns the nature of the novelty delta. 

Consider: If the designs of Palworld were a little different, a little bit more idiosyncratic, how would people have reacted? 

For one, it almost surely would not have sold nearly as many copies. But secondly, the comparisons to Pokémon would have almost universally been ones of praise. Calling Nioh, Code Vein, or Hollow Knight a 'Soulslike' is an attempt to solicit the game to an existing fandom/audience. It isn't an insult and it isn't supposed to be one. Being a soulslike does not preclude one from having a novelty delta in other ways. Likewise --- you can imagine normies selling Palworld favorably to their friends as 'It's like Ark and Fortnite, but with Pokemon!'. From a gameplay frame: Palworld is *novel* in its integration of multiple gameplay mechanics from distinct sources, and Openworld Pokemon With Guns And Slavery is a compelling enough to sell 7 million copies. 

This brings us to the essence of the Palworld question -- we have two sides with
different valuations on the nature of the novelty delta - one side sees an aesthetically repetitive game, the other an overcoming of the turgid Pokemon formula embracing the best elements of modern survival games. Yet both desire a game at once familiar and different. The former would gleefully embrace a new Assassin's Creed game, so long as it was set in ancient India, China, or Africa (or somewhere the franchise hasn't touched yet). The latter would love Skyrim II if it introduced multiplayer, factions, and a dozen new gameplay mechanics. GTA Online... but Skyrim.

The tragedy -

Only a minority would be satisfied with a game that was novel in both aesthetics and gameplay.

[anthony]

I appreciate all of the posts above on the sociological reaction to Palworld. Still, it feels like it is somehow the least interesting direction this thread could go. Yes, we may analyze it in terms of pieces on a chessboard, each acting according to existing ideological priors... "New battlefield in the battle between knights and SJWs"...For all that, this line of analysis seems myopic, fixated on aspects appealing to the internal cultural background of those present and it fails to properly consider the nature of the outrage at the game --- and to a deeper extent, overlooks what that outrage tells us about the mass appreciation of media.

I'm open to this but think we might actually disagree.

Anyways...my first thought on seeing Palworld was that it was going to be terrible. Gut instinct, effectively baseless. It was indeed rooted in the fact that the aesthetic was derivative. After all, the more derivative something appears, the greater the presumption that the overall product was phoned in. It speaks to sensing cynicism in the creation of the game. Something over-designed to cater towards an existing audience with 'more of the same'... Take for example:



Is Lies of P a good game? I can't honestly say --- I'm not interested enough to pay $59.99 for something that appears to rip and cheapen the aesthetic of Bloodbourne. Sure, I'm guessing it is 'mid', but I might be wrong --- I have a record of being wrong. As a teenager I refused to play Halo for many years under the impression that it was Unreal Tournament for xbox bros. Maybe some future Neo-Anthony will come along in 10-15 years and tell me that Lies of P was one of the best games ever made, and I missed it because of this gay bias. If so, I'll probably feel like an idiot. But then... I feel like an idiot daily, so nothing new in that.

Regardless, I assume the reader can take my point. Almost everything new has a delta separating it from the old. Something truly 'new' is extremely rare, so we usually judge novelty by the delta. If that delta amounts to applying an existing aesthetic to an existing mode of gameplay, we're going to sense a spirit of cynicism in the product. In particular, we are going to sense that it was made to cater.

I'm actually of the opinion that derivative is generally fine provided that the experience has limits. At least nothing inherently wrong with working closely to what has already succeeded. I think that "derivative" is one of those critique meme-words that people like because it's easy to pin on something and makes you feel like you're doing real critique, but derivative is not an inherent problem. At least I don't understand it as one. There are good derivative works out there. As well as a lot of bad derivative works. The problem with bad derivative works is not that they're derivative. It's that they're bad.

Lucio Fulci's Zombi2 was so derivative of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead that it was actually marketed as a sequel (Dawn of the Dead was released as 'zombi' in Europe, Fulci's movie stole the title and put a 2 on the end to make them look associated). If you ask me people who fell for that only have so much right to feel ripped off, since of course, the movies are associated. This movie was made by people who saw Dawn and wanted to make another movie like it. George Romero went on to make a lot of movies which aren't superficially like Dawn of the Dead at all. If you liked Dawn of the Dead for zombies, you will be disappointed by Knightriders. But you will not be disappointed by Zombi2. You might say that someone who just likes Dawn of the Dead for zombies and violence and guns and has no regard for Romero's consistent views on life and humanity which carry over between Dawn and Knightriders, you might say such a person is a cretin, or a certain kind of demented aesthete. You could say that. But still, they're an audience. Fulci is playing to that, while also of course inevitably to some extent working to himself.

People just trying to rip off Romero on the most vular and superficial level stand an okay to weak chance of creating something interesting. Dawn of the Dead might look like a simple movie, but if it's so simple, why aren't there 100 of them? Fulci's made several successful and fondly remembered zombie films which owe something to Romero, clearly. They also owe something to Dario Argento and who knows what else he was watching at the time. The man wasn't afraid to derive. But, again, if it's that easy, why isn't everyone doing it? It seems obvious to me that Fulci's "zombie" movies last because of Fulci's own personal genius, which was the real engine of his films. Not ripping off George Romero.

I think people who have never thought seriously about creation like the charge of "ripping off" to discredit a work because it implies that what's lacking is some kind of WORK. And if you've read and listened to me for a while, you know I think that a neurosis about artists owing us WORK, regardless of importance to finished work, is a massive factor in bad reads on art and media. People like the idea of George Romero sweating over a desk before coming up with the idea of zombies in a movie. He's allowed to be an artist because he suffered for it. Fulci skipped the queue. He has to suffer too.

Retards will say that the problem with Lies of P is that these Koreans (cursed people) didn't put in the WORK and pulled a LAZY BABY queue jump by lifting "fast skinny guy with a sword who rolls" from From, in addition to the setting being "like bloodborne" (never mind that it looks way more like Bioshock than Bloodborne because Koreans are tasteless ASSHOLES). If there's a problem with Lies of P it's that it looks fucking retarded. Look at that stupid robot bobby. It looks like something out of Ratchet & Clank and I'm supposed to take it seriously? It looks like it should be making bad british puns. And as for the "gameplay", yes they clearly lifted that. If you only ever liked From games for the rolling and putting "points" into your "build", then this should be good for you. And there's no serious problem. This is not to From what Fulci was to Romero. This is to From what the hundred forgotten zombie movies (forgotten because unwatchable shit) are to Romero. But with more money apparently.

A video game equivalent of Fulci to Romero might be Halo to Unreal. Influence is clear and undeniable, but if you look at them and so the same thing, or something devoid of its own character, that's on you not paying it due attention, or a faillure of judgement. Unreal is kind of ugly and stupid looking, Halo is clearly assembled with better sense towards the realisation of richer ideas. Not saying Fulci is definitely better than Romero, but the comparison is artist to artist. Not artist to hack ripoff.

And what makes a hack ripoff? It is absolutely not whether or not the work is derivative. A hack ripoff only has derivation to draw and hold interest. Which is another way of saying they've made shit that got you in the door by superficially resembling something that was good.

"I'm still trying to reverse-engineer this one, so let's pull back a tiny bit further. The real problem with Palworld is less the derivative approach itself, than it is it's total shamelessness. It might be oddly refreshing to be so open about your cynicism, but it also has an impact on the player. Play Palworld and you won't feel like you're playing something made with thought, or craft, or an earnest team's best intentions. You won't feel admiration or wonder. You won't feel any real sense of achievement. You won't feel like any artist has been involved, or that anything meaningful might come to mind. You will instead feel like you're playing a product designed to be sold, rather than to be played. You will feel like a mark. And you'll be right."

This quote is revolting to me to the point I'd like to see this "man" dead. "admiration or wonder". Fake feelings. Sentimental narrativised revision of feelings towards past media consumption. Spiritually trans culture warrior. Will be destroyed. Where is the lack of "thought, craft, or earnest best intentions"? "Earnest" I guess is his trick here where nobody is earnest unless they're making a hopepunk boomershootertraversalvaniabornelite about fishing to pay for rent and your disabled lesbian (trans) partner's insulin by fishing on a pier next to a funky noodle vendor stall in a cyberpunk city.

"anything meaningful might come to mind". "meaningful" is another word idiot tranny revisionists love. But also the userbase of 4mex. It's like the critique extreme of Russel's Conjugations. My game meaningfuls. Your game slops.

You know where I'm at on this. Kill everyone who has ever talked about video games and start over with me.

Contra Yumetaro, Chris is only partially wrong here. I think it is actually quite the opposite: he doesn't go far enough --- You don't have to buy Palworld to feel like mark, the mere existence of Palworld alone is sufficient. That is, the nature of Palworld as a targeted consumer product and the reflection it casts on gamers as consumers by catering to them. Catering does not entail low production value either - the MCU films are quite expensive to produce, but they fundamentally cater. Is Chris Taspell as upset by them as he is by Palworld?

As a product that caters, Palworld is reasonably perceived cynically and, worse, perceived so in relation to some of their formative childhood experiences. But I think it may still be worse than that: The perceived cynicism of Palworld is so intense as to make one notice, however obliquely, the cynicism of Pokemon itself --- and, as @Yumetaro alludes, the existence and prevalence of slop more broadly. Maybe this is a charitable interpretation of the outrage, but I feel like it is the most honest one. I believe it serves to scapegoat a broader phenomena of increasingly derivative games. Naturally, the sin does not belong to Palworld alone, but Palworld was merely the most offensive whore available, fit to be The Whore suitably universalized. Contrast: Did anyone truly give a fuck about Zoë Quinn sucking the dick of a Kotaku 'writer'? Or was that just a stand-in for a greater failure, a greater decay? In retrospect, they were scapegoats... and so is Palworld.

"Cynicism" is read as a code, not a tendency or class of motivation. Call of Duty sequels with massive amounts of work in them, original realised scenarios every time, that's "cynical". Sarkeesiancore non-games that probably took 12 hours to make and were promoted by exploiting connections in journocliques. That's not cynical, that's a new, inspiring stunning and brave vision of what video games can be. They're art now.

Outdated example I know, but it's still the same. "Indie" games have always been cynical pieces of garbage in what I believe is the truest sense of the word, while historically most big productions were very idealistic and risky. Pokemon is not cynical. It is successful. I feel like you're trying to make a polemical point but are stretching concepts to the point of meaninglessness here. Anything appealing is not cynical. Or if it is virtually everything humans do is cynical to the point we can jettison the word and take it for granted.

You suggest people are aware of cynicism in games. 1, what does that mean? People are aware they're being appealed to? Gaming culture is so troon and spicified I can see people getting angry at that, but being troon and spicified, it's also too dumb to even reach a conclusion that succinct. 2, are people being appealed to cynically (in the only sense that can matter, in the sense of products optimised for maximal reach and returns?), I think no. Very obviously not. How many massive media projects have to scream "NIGGERS HU ACKBAR" before stabbing themselves in the heart and dying before this meme dies? We are very obviously not in a cynical age in the sense of refined appeal. We are in the opposite. There has never been more potential popular appeal sacrificed in the name of personal beliefs of... I won't say the developers, but someone's personal beliefs and values.

Now I got kind of flipped around in my stream of thought here, back to where I was, the true cynicism is almost entirely contained in the western indie sphere. Games which are being built as optimised gameplay joy dispensers paired with psychologically manipulative viral marketing pushes are all "indie" to the point where even cretins who have never heard of me are almost on the verge of noticing.



Potential awareness spun off into a transsexual's narcissistic fantasies of being someone who experiences love and wonder while gaming on the COWCH on a SATURDAY MORNING with PHIL FISH. PHIL AND BAMIE JUST A COUPLE OF STRANGER THINGS CHARACTERS THIS IS WHAT BEING A KID GAMER WAS LIKE.

These animals continue to hold us back. Nothing new. Moving on.

Fog of War then: Who are the knights now...? Who are the SJWs...?

Again, we should kill everyone to be safe. Let God sort them out.

So far, I don't feel like I've added much to this thread beyond simply giving my own reading of the OP - albeit one a little more generous to the critics of Palworld. As an artfag - the more interesting question here concerns the nature of the novelty delta.

I appreciate the attempt at pushing art discourse in a novel direction and getting us off pure sociology in this thread, but as I've gone into above, I think the novelty delta is a meme. Good artists tend to make good art and there is more or less derivation in the process. Idiots like to fuss over derivativeness because it gives idiots a chance to rules-lawyer things which are superior to them. The only questions we can ask about the novelty delta concern how stupid people perceive and react, bringing us right back to sociology.

Consider: If the designs of Palworld were a little different, a little bit more idiosyncratic, how would people have reacted?

However the youtube thumbnails and screencapped shitjourno headers told them to (directly or by programming for their contrary "reactions").

For one, it almost surely would not have sold nearly as many copies. But secondly, the comparisons to Pokémon would have almost universally been ones of praise. Calling Nioh, Code Vein, or Hollow Knight a 'Soulslike' is an attempt to solicit the game to an existing fandom/audience. It isn't an insult and it isn't supposed to be one. Being a soulslike does not preclude one from having a novelty delta in other ways. Likewise --- you can imagine normies selling Palworld favorably to their friends as 'It's like Ark and Fortnite, but with Pokemon!'. From a gameplay frame: Palworld is *novel* in its integration of multiple gameplay mechanics from distinct sources, and Openworld Pokemon With Guns And Slavery is a compelling enough to sell 7 million copies.

As I said in my earlier post, the other bestselling steam pre-order phenomena in recent memory was 'The Day Before'. People are fucking retarded and virtually anything is at least an outside chance at setting off a Day One Purchase American stampede. And you raise the "soulslike" comparison, I've seen negative comparisons to all of those on spic-chan. If we're reading mass reactions to anything, we have to keep in mind that every human mass averages out to completely fucking retarded.

This brings us to the essence of the Palworld question -- we have two sides with
different valuations on the nature of the novelty delta - one side sees an aesthetically repetitive game, the other an overcoming of the turgid Pokemon formula embracing the best elements of modern survival games. Yet both desire a game at once familiar and different. The former would gleefully embrace a new Assassin's Creed game, so long as it was set in ancient India, China, or Africa (or somewhere the franchise hasn't touched yet). The latter would love Skyrim II if it introduced multiplayer, factions, and a dozen new gameplay mechanics. GTA Online... but Skyrim.

Both are worthless appraisers of the value of anything.

The tragedy -

Only a minority would be satisfied with a game that was novel in both aesthetics and gameplay.

I love death stranding and consider this framing obscene. The implication that one creates a Death Stranding by putting enough novelty work into both the "aesthetics" stat and the "gameplay" stat during development. We get here by having faith in and investing in Hideo Kojima and letting him do as he pleases. And this game does resemble things we had before it, if you have the sense to see. This game is to Metal Gear what George Romero's Knightriders was to George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. The continuity is clear provided you can see past "zombies" or "guns".

Death Stranding is not a product of a carefully considered Novelty Delta. The essential element is Kojima. Kojima himself did think "metal gear without violence, how would that work?" But this was obviously not a cynical move. Metal Gear sells on violence. He was not playing mad libs with the premises of successful games until he found a promising combination. The whole work is expressive and personal.

Now someone could have come up with something at least superficially resembling Death Stranding by playing Mad Libs with Metal Gear until they landed on "metal gear with no guns, you walk". But again, where is it? Who's doing this? Where is anything that feels like Metal Gear? I am aware they turned Ghost Recon into worse MGSV, and it looks to be to MGSV what Lies of P is to Bloodborne. Nothing uniquely compelling. Won't last. Will pass time if you like crouchwalking through ferns.

Now I'm taking too long to get to my point. Death Stranding is novel in aesthetics and gameplay. But I believe that that's incidental to the idiosyncracies of what Kojima wanted to do. And as I said before, artists tend to make good art. The essential thing that makes Death Stranding good is the vision of Kojima. I greatly enjoy the movie parts of the game, in which there is NO innovative "gameplay". Prior Metal Gears were very deliberately playing off of being derivative of each other. Kojima could make incredible derivative experiences if he wanted to.

A point I've been meaning to get to all post now, there are plenty of brilliant games out there are derivative in both gameplay and even aesthetics.



I'm actually assembling a video on this one right now. So consider this post a preview. I'll let you all speculate rather than spin out the ideas again here. I have work to do now.