They might be legal under fair use, but that doesn’t save them from poor design choices.Pals get compared to Pokémon for obvious reasons: they’re, at best, extremely heavily inspired by existing Pokémon designs, and with how much the franchise has seeped into our collective unconscious through cultural osmosis, it’d be an immediate point of comparison regardless of how similar their appearances actually were. It’s also certainly not helped by easy name comparisons like “Pokédex” and “Paldeck”, or even the company “Pocket Pair” to “Pocket Monsters”.That explains where the plagiarism allegations came from, but it doesn’t do quite as good a job at telling us why they’ve stuck around, even after the Pokémon Company themselves released a mostly passive official statement and public opinion has shifted more towards Palworld falling under fair use.Despite these factors, the real nail in the coffin that’s kept people from moving on is that most Pals fail to introduce any interesting concepts of their own. Even as the general gaming community tries to move away from the “plagiarist Pokémon” sentiment, Palworld’s denizens don’t offer enough new ideas or themes to replace it, so it sticks around regardless.Granted, that doesn’t mean they can’t still be fun to discover and learn about. Originality be damned; I’m a sucker for the mere exposure effect. I still get a huge rush of oxytocin from beckoning my Fuddler over to pet it and make it feel better about its sad little life of slaving away hitting rocks all day. The Pals yearn for the mines, truly.It’s alright, buddy. It’ll all be over soon — I just can’t tell you when yet. (Screenshot courtesy of Pocket Pair.)But that adoration is still massively undercut by how easy it is to summarize most Pals in just two words, with almost no nuance.And I can prove it using the modern Internet’s calling card for definitely objective info presentation: a tier list.Created with Tiermaker, using a preset made by Marc Copeland.Under my interpretation (which, if you were wondering, is law), a whopping 42 Pals are little more than Pokéclones. These vary wildly in what they borrow and how, but they all do significantly.Ribbuny, even if it’s a different species, stole its entire schtick from Sylveon, right down to the shape of the ribbons. Dinossom is a bizarre amalgamation of Lilligant’s crown and Goodra’s body, with arguably some Meganium DNA mixed in as well. Flambelle is orange Litwick. Nitewing is just Staraptor. Woolipop is a crime against God and humanity and Alcremie.34 more Pals are essentially real-world animals with nothing but an elemental coat of paint slathered onto them. And 14 others don’t even take that last step. Granted, it’s entirely fine to have a few of these — in small quantities, they can be quite enjoyable in their simplicity. But when there’s this many at once, they quickly go from charming to bland.On the elemental side, there’s an almost dartboard-like strategy of pairing a random animal, or humanoid, or mythological creature, with a random element. It’s as though they’re smashed together by force in a factory, with no real interest in exploring how those two things might actually come to combine naturally. How else could we so succinctly describe Mossanda as a “grass panda”, or Beakon as an “electric bird”, or Blazehowl as a “fire chimera”?This is a good time to address the other constituents to these Pals’ designs. It’s not just their visuals; it’s also appearances, Paldeck entries, animations, abilities, and two aspects I think deserve significant scrutiny of their own: names and typings. Both of these theoretically allow for so many unique, creative, standout concepts, but instead they place most Pals on crutches and make it that much easier to revile them as derivative and unoriginal.Names are the easier to explain; in fact, you’ve probably already noticed Palworld’s pattern yourself. Nearly every creature on God’s green Palpagos Islands is a portmanteau of the beast it’s based on (or part thereof) and another related word, usually a reference to its typing or behavior. You don’t need me to tell you where the names Lamball or Cinnamoth or Killamari come from, and if I named every example we’d be at it forever.There are entire sections of the Paldeck where just about every Pal has a nearly identical naming strategy. (Screenshot courtesy of Pocket Pair.)But the far more interesting part to talk about is typing. Making a creature-capture game without assigning types to the beasts players collect is basically sacrilegious. Different games tackle it in different ways, but come hell or high water, it’ll always be compared to Pokémon’s system at the end of the day.If you want an example of how to iterate on this system well, look no further than Temtem. It includes several unique types such as Crystal and Digital, reframes most of the types it takes from Pokémon (or at least gives them new names), completely overhauls the matchup chart between types, and goes out of its way to make tons of Temtems with new and exciting type combinations.It can be done… but Palworld doesn’t.All nine of Palworld’s elements are copied wholesale from Pokémon. Its matchup chart is extremely simplistic, with all but Fire and Neutral having exactly one strength and one weakness. But worst of all is that it has almost zero interest in experimenting with different type combos. Below is a chart I made detailing how often every element pairing appears in the Paldeck:Created with Canva. Dual-element Pals are counted twice, which leads to the percentages on the right side adding to above 100%.The vast majority of Pals are single-element: 112 out of 137, or 81.8%. There are 36 possible dual-element combinations, but only 14 are used, or 38.9%. Not a single Neutral Pal has a second element.This is all especially egregious when Pals’ color schemes and visual cues tend to be extremely homogeneous within their elements. Just look at all the cyan-and-white-and-nothing-else Ice Pals. Or all the Grass Pals that are almost entirely the same few shades of green with the occasional red or pink accent. Or especially the huge swathe of Dark Pals which use the exact same blue-violet flame effect.Most of the Pal “subspecies” are particularly noticeable in this pattern; they’re rarely more than cheap reskins, with the exact same cries and animations, barely-altered Paldeck entries and abilities, and formulaic addendums to their names — “Cryst” for Ice and “Noct” for Dark and… “Ice”? At least keep it consistent.The upshot to all of this is that I genuinely like the rest of the Pals I haven’t categorized yet.There are 22 where even if I can’t tell exactly what they are or where they came from, I still really appreciate them. Vanwyrm, for example, is probably inspired by wyverns alongside vultures and other carrion birds, but looks just generic enough to give me pause (though not enough to keep me from enjoying it).And the final 25 Pals I just flat-out adore. These stand out for how distinct and strong they are conceptually, and how well they execute on the unique ideas they represent. They still can’t get away from things like the naming convention and elemental color-matching, but they’re at least better with them on average.Just look at Eikthyrdeer: it’s a tasteful reference to Eikþyrnir (or Eikthyrnir if you’re not a “thorn” fan like I am), a Norse mythological stag, and it builds upon that concept in multiple ways.It introduces stark purples and pinks alongside the usual Neutral whites and beiges. It’s endowed with a large rack of branch-like antlers, a potential reference to how Eikþyrnir lives in and feeds on the world tree Yggdrasil. And those horns even have light blue tips, a nod to the stag releasing water from its horns to form myriad rivers in Viking lands.All of which is to say: it beats the “Xerneas ripoff” and “just a deer” allegations with flying colors. And for what it’s worth, I’d argue Pocket Pair iterates enough to discount any “stolen from Elden Ring” slights as well.Eikthyrdeer is a strong example of what Pocket Pair is capable of creating when they work with original ideas.(Screenshot courtesy of Pocket Pair.)All the Pals in this top echelon are fascinating in their own individual ways, which makes it difficult to capture their essence as a group. Highlighting a few standout members is arguably a more effective approach.When I tried to expand on my personal top five, though, my deep dives ended up being so long that they warranted their own separate article, which I’m linking here. Eikthyrdeer’s alone was already long enough, and I had to cut myself short because it’s not even one of those five.If nothing else, the best Pals create a bittersweet sense of longing for what could have been. To be clear, it never actually would have; the shameless Pokémon copycatting was always a relatively lucid marketing ploy to get as many people in the door as possible on the basis of sheer familiarity.But credit where it’s due — across the entire Paldeck, the 3D models are competently crafted, the animations and soundbites are genuinely excellent, and the replication of Pokémon’s art style is so flawless that it fooled a sizable chunk of the Internet into believing Pocket Pair had lifted assets from the series’ mainline titles.When Palworld’s creative team applies those talents to novel creatures guided by potent concepts, the results are excellent. It’s just unfortunate that they’re cut with so much sludge.