On August 2022 I posted an illustrated opinion piece on how bad the trailers of the then upcoming Pokémon Scarlet and Violet looked and how they were anticipating a very bland and undercooked experience, from a studio that had stopped caring for an audience that didn't know better about the real standard of videogame industry.
I was wrong.
More than undercooked, that piece of software was a sticky dough with too much water to keep itself together. An open-world without any of the know-hows and the manpower necessary to build an open-world.
Textures not loading, wild clipping, frame rate slowing to a crawl, desolate cities with nothing to do, shops with no interior that sell always the same stuff, and absence of level scaling that annihilated the difficulty.
The only saving graces were a plot unusually well-written (but don't worry, the DLCs fixed it) and a generation-specific mechanic that, yes, it looks the cheapest of them all but at least it's more of a strategy move than an auto-win button.
In the case of the Gym Leaders it was an auto-lose button, since their AI isn't programmed to avoid turning their Pokémon in a type that makes them weaker to the player's attacks.
Ten years have passed since the release of X&Y and the main devs at Game Freak still haven't realized that it wasn't the challenge that makes their games tedious and obsolete for the modern audience.
It's the grinding. Grinding for IVs, captures, friggin' shards. Grinding on the worst map of the entire series, barren and glitchy, with Pokémon spawn points thrown around without rhyme or reason.
But still, this game sold, more than 20 millions. An alpha release with a $60+ price tag is one of the best-selling games of all time. People are so involved in this franchise that would buy this game and a Switch to play it.
I was so disheartened. What's the point of quality and passion if a company big enough can just coast on the good will built up 20 years earlier and sell garbage software just because people want to still be involved in the franchise and get the new spanking Charizard form?
I felt humbled. Stop aiming for the stars, a big company is already here taking up all the air, and what you can do is be content with what you make and what you like, praise the creators that still want to make quality products in a world where hot trash with wide appeal is the rule.
You can't topple the Reign of Squalor of the modern mainstream, but find your tiny village of hand crafted-goods to exchange and enjoy.
But then Pokémon with Guns released. It wasn't a joke, it wasn't a meme. A survival RPG where you can capture a bunch of creatures that look an awful lot like pokémon by beating them up yourself.
And it sold, 19 million copies in the first ten days. An indie team that allegedly built this game with a $10.000 is now swimming in money.
You don't sell 19 million copies with the Pokémon with Guns meme. Not even with the rabid publicity made by Nintendo cultists accusing the game of plagiarism. You sell them because your game is a fun and creative experience.
Although the controversy must have helped a lot.
Do I think that the pals are a ripoff meant to leech the notoriety of Pokémon though the similarity of the designs? Yeah, absolutely.
They were made with this intention.
While Pokémon-likes so far tried to populate their world with concept designs that don't exist in the Pokédex, like a Minotaur, a platypus, or a Griffin, half of the creatures of Palworld are meant to resemble already existing pokémon.
They look like reskins or fusions of pokémon, and they make you suspicious for the designs that otherwise would have got a pass.
(Because, let's admit, there aren't that many ways you can design your hot Deviantart wolf OC.)
Do I think it's plagiarism? That TPC should sue Pocket Pair? Damn, no.
We live in a world that doesn't appreciate creativity, but fetishizes it, where artists are viewed as good-for-nothing hacks that don't want to get a job or oracles of the Gods that produce masterwork after masterwork and should never be criticized.
There's no comprehension of the more intermediate and mixed phases of the creative process, the training, study experimentation, the emulation, the copying. The stagnation and the regression and then sudden bursts of creativity and technique because you started to sleep regularly.
In the minds of the mainstream, the Muse doesn't give you the inspiration but drops on your lap the already finished work.
And these blatant copies of Pokémon fully make part of the spectrum of the creative process. It's bad art but it's still art.
At least for being 3D assets made from scratch: Even if the concept art was made via Pokémon Fusion, there's enough human choice and deliberateness in making a 3D model that it can still be considered an original product.
It's not good art, but it's still art.
By the way, no, it's not AI-Generated. The founder of Pocket Pair might look like the scummy guy and the resume of the Studio filled with clones of other popular games, but AI is nowhere close making 3D models, due to the energy consumption that it would require, and it was even less when the first trailers were published three years ago.
What I find very interesting is that nobody talked about the other clone games made by Pocket Pair. Like nobody would give two fucks about a game which is the copy of something else, until the copy manages to be better than the original because the original sucks.
And I easily accept that calling the pals "bad art" is arguable. They can be unoriginal, sloppy in some parts of the modeling, and don't give the idea of a fauna but just a series of game creatures, but each one of them is meant to be the definitive version of itself. Both from a design and gameplay standpoint.
You can roll for better IVs in Palworld, but each pal can be useful as a fighter or as a worker, and you don't have to wait impatiently for the moment of its evolution, or dread it if it turns into a worse design.
While in Pokémon half of the bestiary is garbage you can't bring to the end game even if you liked that. Sorry Parasect, I love you but you die of everything.
Literally: I picked a spreadsheet of the Dex with all the stats listed, and on 1200 Pokémon (included the variants and the megas) almost 600 are under 450 points of base stats. Which make the pokémon viable only if it has a very favorable stat distribution, move, ability or double type (mostly the pikaclones) while the rest can just hope to evolve in something better or it's box time for them.
I've never realized before how the mechanic of evolution, which has always been the most exciting part of Pokémon because it gave a sense of progress and growth to the player, had the effect of bloating the Deck of each generation with lesser variants of a core design.
It's because of the obsession with evolution that in the first generation we have only one Dragon and Ghost Species, while they could have easily been two and three species respectivel.
Because they were that in the earlier builds leaked a few years ago.
A Paldeck with 100 non-evolving and all-viable species is like the first Pokémon Games came out with a Pokédex of 250 elements or more.
There's something else to be added to the species of Palword. They might look less like animals and more like toys that came to life, but the gameplay gives a much better worldbuilding compared to Pokémon.
I don't respect Pokémon's worldbuilding. They went for a vibe in the first two generations and then started tossing salad to the wall with each subsequent one. Aliens, golems, time travel, sentient AIs. Every new game introduces some new reality-shattering concept and the next one promptly ignores that.
For fuck's sake, there's a kid jumping through wormholes just to complete the pokédex at Alola!
But the thing that never made sense from the start of the series was how humans managed to survive and even become the dominant species in a world of magical creatures.
Legends Arceus tried an IMHO failed to explain it, while Palworld had the most simple and elegant explanation: Humans have the physical prowess to resist and fight back, which makes them plausible part of this world more than the humans of Pokémon ever were.
(They also mesh well with the pals and still manage to look like adults instead of the same kid model that GF has been recycling for the past ten years.)
Yeah, they need a stick at least, and the gameplay is about progressing through firearms, which is a very contentious point.
I won't lie: Pokémon with Guns was an excellent marketing stunt and the explosive early sales of the game are all thanks to that. People wanted to see if the game was real and have a laugh at filling with lead Electric Totoro.
But these aesthetics don't blend. They're a novelty that will die out and will leave a game with a very awkward and miserable-looking transition to firearms mass-production.
Pocket Pair should ASAP patch the game, so the assembly lines of rifles become unnecessary, even as an option to flag or unflag at the beginning of a new game.
The IP can now stand on its legs, you don't sell 19 million copies with the marketing stunt alone, and it would benefit a lot in the long run from a consistent aesthetic where technology doesn't go beyond whimsical magitech.
When it comes to the accuses regarding the act itself of attacking the creatures with your game character, like some sort of endorsement of animal cruelty, that's very rich coming from the fanbase that (rightfully) mocked PETA because it said the same things about their game.
Because, let's admit it, Pokémon is a game about dog fights to the death. They might be less relatable than personally beating an animal, but they aren't better.
The only effort that the series ever made to hint to the player that they weren't actually killing the creatures has been the "X fainted!" line, and a few scripted events where a (usually legendary) pokémon flees the battle after its HPs have reached zero.
Do you know what happens when the pokémon HPs reach zero? The poor bastard dies, that's why you can't catch it, because it's a corpse. For fuck's sake, the item you use to revive a "fainted" pokémon is called "revive"!
None of these games endorse animal cruelty, and that's because they know that the player has the intelligence to separate reality and fiction. You don't play pokémon because you want to become a trainer for dog fights, in the same way I didn't play Final Fantasy VII because I wanted to get in a love triangle with two women.
And I respect much more Pocket Pair for admitting that yeah, you kill the creatures you beat to 0HPs, than Game Freak that still hides behind the "fainted" fig leaf and still 30 years later hasn't given a "fleeing the battle" animation to the defeated wild pokémon.
But this time I'm hopeful. I believed that was impossible to develop a functional open-world RPG every two years even with a full team of hundreds of people, but Pocket Pair having achieved that in less than 4 years with an indie team tells the opposite.
Sure, in two years you can't make God of War Ragnarock or Tears of the Kingdom, but a decent RPG, a finished RPG? Seemingly yes.
People now know it and TPC now knows that they know it. Game Freak can't be excused anymore. They're small because they want to stay small. Because everyone in charge wants to still work with the pipeline of the DS days.
But coasting on the appeal of a mainstream IP had an unexpected boomerang effect: mainstream audience isn't that dedicated, and it will easily jump ship for something that looks similar but with an edge added, and when they realize that they have bought a Switch to play an alpha build while they could have played for half the price a proper game on the PC they already owned, those are people aren't coming back.
If TPC and GF won't put their shit together and start developing quality games like they once did.
So, yeah, either way I'm optimistic.
The Reign of Squalor of TPC might not have been defeated by a gallant and rebellious paladin, but backstabbed by a goblin rogue that wanted to steal the pocket change, but we live in an imperfect world where the ripoffs look and play better than the original.
So I'll take it.

Posted using PostyBirb