I have yet to have a solid informed grasp of whether Palworld manifested their sources of inspiration in good faith, but my tentative opinion at the moment is that hopefully this presses the Pokemon Company to innovate and elevate their overall game. The switch generation to me represented a generation of mismanagement and obvious management generated timelines and barriers, which is super unfortunate for Pokemon’s transition to a console.
Competition hopefully might change that.
The aesthetic is very similar, but the only thing I’ve seen that looked like it was straight up ripped off was a statue of a Lugia, the Lizard Punk dudes look very much like a creature from Final Fantasy, and the fact there is an area of the map that is the Altus Plateau from Elden Ring; like nearly 1:1 except the scale is smaller.
Everything else could just be chalked up to the fact the designs are pretty simplistic representations of real animals, but you can also see clear inspiration taken from a plethora of games even if they aren’t straight up duplicating anything.
