One thing that has always bothered me is how people kept calling Palworld "the game Pokémon fans have always wanted." I put around 30 hours into it, and I just don't agree:
well at first it sucked me in mostly due to the novelty of being a new Game but once the shock value wore off it just became old. There's no real story and progression sucks, and the game is just Ark with Pokemon and I already hated Ark, not to mention this game is also buggy and unoptimized as hell even with 1.0 and while it's more excusable than Pokemon for being in the same state, it's still inexcusable
Oh and also the creature designs are not the best . Like even when I first played the game I was like "some of these designs are basically asking for a lawsuit slap from Nintendo". Like I cannot name a single Pal aside from Chillet bc it's basically the mascot now, Grizzbolt cuz I kept losing to it, or Lovelander cuz it was the mascot of that weird dating sim they released "as a joke" . I don't even blame people for thinking they used Al to create these dudes because some of them genuinely look like Pokemon processed through ChatGPT. This game basically copied and regurgitated Pokemon's art style...I know that dragon quest comparison image is floating around but you need to have serious cognitive dissonance to think that they're similar in any way.... Nobody's mistaking Pokemon for dragon quest monsters and vice versa
Plus, its fanbase is based less around their love for it but rather a huge circlejerk that pat themselves on the back for "sticking it to gamefreak" and "how superior they are to the normies" (their words, not mine)
The sad reality is that Almost nobody outside of Pokemon and SMT/persona fans care about the Monster Tamer genre, One of The reasons Palworld gained traction so much is because IGN/media, haters, and gaming influencers saw it as something they could use against Pokemon.
Overall, Palworld is not a good replacement for Pokémon. What I want is better replicated in Persona/SMT, Cassette Beasts, Monster Hunter Stories and certain ROM hacks
What playing up? As I said you can select work hard and they get cartoon sad faces and need to eat better food and use sanity facilities more.
I really don't see how it's different to a tax slider in a sim lol.
Compare to rimworld where the game asks you to put slave uniforms on, terror furniture, make an ideology around it, and put down revolts it's just goofy.
If you're saying it glorifies slavery to cater to fascists then factorio glorifies pollution and colonialism to appeal to facists, StarCraft glorifies war to appeal to facists, serious sam glorifies shooting sprees etc.
Whatever this ain't a hill to die on. I personally think it's lawsuit bait edge lord cashgrab garbage. If you like it this is not an indictment of you personally.
To be clear I have a ton of criticism for Pokémon too. Cutesy animal cruelty cockfighting sim.
I think the focus on palworld is a moral panic. It's immature and mediocre with some cute graphics. That's pretty reflective of gaming broadly.
There are interesting discussions to have about why games gravitate towards violence and destruction as the modes of interaction but holding up something extraordinarily average seems like pearl clutching.
It's not even games exclusively. We're positively drowning in films and books about (or heavily featuring) murder, war, torture, and oppression.
Palworld spends about 1000x more effort on cute base decorations than any being mean to pals.