Fighting? Not at all similar, unless Psyduck suddenly got Gatling guns.
It's absurd. Pokemon has made bajillions of dollars, surely it's time to acknowledge it belongs to our common culture and we all now have a right to make up our own stories, games, music, whatever around it.
This isn't radical. It's just a question of time. We would call it madness if Disney claimed to own Greek mythology and sued the makers of the game Hades about it.
But Palword feels such a rip off of Zelda BOTW (the intro and the items are 1:1 the same of Zelda, even the tablet!) and Pokemon.
For most if not all "pals" I could instantly name their Pokemon counterpart, that is textbook copyright infringement done in the weakest form.
That’s not copyright infringement: you copyright the form, not the plot.
That's not surprising, because for ever Pokemon it's also fairly easy to name their real-world counterpart. There's a finite amount of recognizable real world animals, so you quickly get there even if you've never seen a Pokemon before.
Edit: and even today. Generate textures for blocky assets? Sure. But full pokémon models that wouldn't need a ton of rework? Nope.
Well, that is the core benefit of using AI - you can save a lot of the groundwork, especially in concept art. Making 20, 30 versions of "fat rat in yellow with lightning bolt symbols in their fur" is cheap with AI, but prohibitively expensive if you're using humans. You're starting running already.
How is that bad? Why is there this strong wish for a single corporation to own our culture and what we are without allowance to experiment, build upon it and allow market competition for the best evolution?
Palworld is really a "survival crafting" game and is closer to a game like "Conan Exiles" which has a similar gameplay mechanic of capturing slaves to put to work in your base.
What made Palworld stand out was the shock factor elements of "Pokemon with guns", "make pokemon work as slaves in a factory" and "grind up pokemon for meat", which streamers were able to convert into clickbait thumbnails and views.
Notably, the Megami Tensei series, which predates Pokemon.
It really highlights that first mover advantage doesn’t count for everything.
While the primary goal of the game is to get all of the pals, most of your time is spent putting your pals to work building up your base, breeding better pals, and manufacturing the weapons needed in order to get even better pals. This is a stark contrast to Pokemon games, where you just walk around challenging gym leaders. It's an entirely different game.
So if Pocketpair reskinned a few assets sure, pay Nintendo 5% at most. But those skins had nothing to do with the success of the game and Nintendo doesn't deserve anything more than that.