Palworld is a Broken, Unhinged Masterpiece

remember that first po World trailer cuz when we all saw that chipmunk pull out the gun I feel like we just instinctively knew this would either be the best thing ever or one gloriously horrible dumpster fire of a game Well turns out it's both this thing is plagued by glitches the story doesn't exist it's full of bootleg Pokémon and every human character looks like they crawled out one of those weird mobile game ads but folks I got it and I just can't stop playing it see I feel like most parts of world are comically uninspired and often just plain terrible but somehow when you put it all together you kind of get a masterpiece in what I can only describe as a brand new way to make a game not suck so as I break down pal world and what makes it work there are going to be some people in the comments telling me why it's awful and creatively bankrupt and for the record you're all literally right every point you make I will probably agree with but and I am so confused as I say this eight out of of 10 let's talk about why oh my what the first off the obvious pal world is a creature collection game where you can collect various monsters and put them in your pocket hold on wait a second yes of course these are all Pokémon which have been moderately screwed up Mr Potato Head style to avoid Nintendo's unspeakable wrath Pokémon in the Pokémon World never heard of them these are Pals welcome to Pal World approach a wild palet at a battle will commence I will say though much like how great art forgers must learn to paint like the Masters before scamming rich people palor really has captured the visual language of Pokémon here especially with the faces got to say they do have good taste like they recognized that quag sire's face is Peak design so they slapped it on this guy and it just works but yeah look around and you'll see some very familiar faces among all the pals to be fair they do have some fun ideas and there's actually one thing I seriously do love here which is that the actual Pals have been animated with a disturbing level of care and personality like this is Pang goet the penguin pal let's take a look at how it moves first it has a slow walk then it has this bouncy run and when it's holding something it puts it on its head and walks like this and sorry you can say what you want but I am now a pain gullet fan well as we get into the more questionable sides of this game I really want to show you that it's the animation of the Pals themselves that carries pal World more than anything else yes the pals look like knockoff Pokémon and everything besides the pals has no personality but check out this king penguin who mines with one hand in a dignified kingly fashion oh and once I overworked my penguin by cranking up the forced labor intensity at my monitoring stand and because of it that penguin got depressed but anti-depressants were too expensive so it would just roam around my base with this dejected expression without a single word the pals communicate five times more character than anything else in this game but luckily they are the most important part so the game opens by plopping you on a beach in the mysterious palpo Islands how fun it's like the Galapagos Islands but with Pals well I hope you love that pun cuz it's more or less the most interesting piece of text in this entire game well maybe aside from the Pokedex that's pretty fun but clearly P world is more in the gameplay Camp of games and the plot is more of an excuse now of course that's not necessarily a bad thing right when I play Mario I'm not exactly looking for deep commentary on The Human Condition but especially for an open world game if you don't care about plot you better have some insane gam playay or it's going to get real boring real fast well palor seems to be trying to take the Elden ring route here where there's an open-ended story that frames your Loosely goal oriented exploration but I mean wow you will be so incredibly bored by every human character in pal world it is like they are actively trying at one point you descend deep into a hidden cave to discover a mysterious black market Merchant surrounded by Guillotines and torture devices and he ends up being the most boring wet cardboard soggy serial copypaste non character of all time and like how do you do that how do you make this boring after all that work and for however frustrated I might be with the Pokemon franchise nowadays I got to say at least they can make fun human characters with actual character traits and pal World kind of doesn't even compare here knock off all the Pokemon you want pal world you could never make Larry I mean at one point I found a human settlement and I celebrated when a guard there told me he'd do anything for money because I was like whoo this character has a trait one character trait that's crazy almost nobody else in this game has a trait or a theme or like any anything they're just sort of there like the rocks or the trees this person is like there's a boss you should beat so I beat the boss and came back and they were like there's a boss you should be in fact I think chess has deeper human characters than pal World cuz at least in chess I'm kind of interested why the queen can run so fast now at this point you might be like damn it sounds like this game is terrible and you hate it and I know it does right I should hate it but I can't and that's because of the game play for this I went in thinking oh they just ripped off Pokemon but I was simply failing to see the vision see they didn't just rip off Pokemon they ripped off breath of the wild they ripped off Ark survival evolved they ripped off fortnite and now I'm going to say something crazy I'm going to make some wild accusations but I think these developers might have played Elden ring I'm not joking when I say pelor has possibly stolen more from these games than Pokémon which I recognize is a a wild thing for me to say considering this is literally a Pokémon knockoff but I mean pal world really is an iceberg where the tip is we're copying Pokémon and from there all the way down is we're copying every popular open world game that has ever existed personally I found the Elden ring stuff especially funny just because of how baked into the world it is like at the start of the game you leave that one crumbling structure with that one NPC on the right side of the hilltop and in the distance there's an her tree they bought off wish and down the hill that's a big enemy you can't fight yet in combat of course you react and spam rolls and you even got the fromsoft stamina bar that's my bar now of course Elden ring didn't invent any of this stuff but it is very funny to see them all together again in a completely different game I walked into a church and I got Deja Vu cuz it was just that one Church from Elden ring right down to the crumbling bricks and the flowers on the ground and that glowing upgrade item in front of the statue just some truly baffling stuff going on in pal [Music] World want to upgrade and build with a clear UI we got bootleg Arc here want to climb and glide anywhere you can see we got bootleg Zelda here and listen I'm sure I'm not even mentioning so many games they ripped off like I heard this was inspired by RIM World a lot that game is still on my list right now but I can't wait to play it and find out how much of its homework pal World blatantly copied so I'm actually curious if you play pal world tell me which games you know they stole from cuz they did so much stealing that it sort of wraps around and becomes a strength of the game pal world is like a combination of every single popular thing which means it will feel fresh to you unless you've played every single popular thing folks this is no mere level one plagiarism this is a carefully constructed Collider scope of almost plagiarism that the developers are transparent about in the funniest way possible see pal world's developer pocket pair was founded by takuro mizobe who is quite the personality he gave an interview with wire Japan that I am Google translating here but to quote that Google translated interview I have a dee rooted desire for my work to be enjoyed by as many people as possible and to that end if there are good ideas in the world I pick them up and I don't necessarily have to be particular about originality that I'm glad he cleared that up cuz I sure couldn't tell but you know he's not lying about it and honestly there's a lot of nuance here that I don't think we should Miss in that interview he mentioned that he's always loved Nintendo games and deeply respects them and call me crazy but I do feel like genuine passion was the spoon that stirred this plagiarism stew now for the record the flame that was cooking that Stew was definitely a massive desire for money but I mean who doesn't like money right speaking of which today's video is is sponsored by the fraction of a scent of AD Revenue that I get if you watch my stuff I like money so please subscribe but actually I think it's a very toxic idea that doing something for money means you don't really care about it we see people say this all the time to artists to developers and it just never goes away and oh man we are seeing this everywhere with pal World Euro gamer playing pal World gives off the impression of playing a product designed to be sold like it is that's what games are but but listen when I play this game and I see these stupid little walk Cycles or the sheer range of mechanics and ridiculous things that happen at Camp it's clear to me that this isn't just some low effort cash grab you see pal world is a high effort cash grab a master class of chasing Trends and I got to respect it plus I can't stress enough how easy it is to combine popular things but end up with absolute garbage I tried bacon flavored ice cream once I love bacon and I love ice cream but it turns out bacon ice cream is a horrible crime against both so you know combining all these already successful ideas to make your own successful game well I can't help but think that's a process that's easy to make fun of but maybe not so easy to actually pull off Igor Stravinsky famously said a good composer does not imitate he steals clearly Igor Stravinsky had just played pal World though you know pal World kind of both imitates and steals so the jury's still out on that one but let's take a closer look look how does all this stealing make for a compelling gameplay well I think it's cuz as you progress the tools and not Pokémon you use are constantly changing and the core combat mechanics sort of speedrun through every possible way to fight in a third person game early on you're just doing melee stuff then you get bows and crossbows a grappling hook you catch a dollar store Vulpix and you can pick it up and use it like a flamethrower then you're flying on a bird that shoots tornadoes and then you find sulfur and learn to make basic firearms and before you know it you're riding on a giant alpaca that pukes out Spirit bombs cuz you need it as a meat Shield while you periodically spend 10 seconds reloading an old-fashioned musket pal world is at its best when you are constantly finding new strategies and fun ways to combine its many very silly tools and the pals themselves are designed to make this possible if it looks like you can ride it you probably can if it looks like you can throw it as a grenade you probably can and if it looks like you can Harvest its organs and use them to make flaming arrows you probably can but I mean you wouldn't right it really feels like your character is coming up with ridiculous ideas to make the most of every single pal in a way that I personally loved sadly though this feature was actually plagiarized from real life you see once upon a time someone saw a horse and was like I bet we could grind up its bones and skin to make jello and it just sort of worked there's also that red food dye we make from Bugs I mean making weird from other animals is sort of a human tradition so I'm glad pal world has finally brought this fact into the Pokémon space By the way on the topic of making stuff the base management part of pal world is surprisingly enjoyable too you quickly learn how effective Pals can be at manual labor and before you know it you have a sprawling let's call it a production Network backing up the rest of your morally reprehensible adventures and I can't lie it feels kind of great to take a break from all the management get up on a cliff for a bird's ey View and just watch all your little guys going about their day but of course even this is plagiarized from tempo you just can't win folks but touching on those morally reprehensible Adventures I mentioned as you might know this is a very cynical and brutal take on the creature collecting genre in fact I went into it expecting to massively cringe at the whole theme of what if Pokemon was brutal cuz it just seems like a very obvious loow hanging fruit right but it's presented here with such a weird sincerity that it kind of won be over there isn't any blood all the Gory stuff is comically censored and it never feels like the game is trying too hard to be dark and depressing it just happens to be a brutal life here on the palpo island pals are friends and Pals are food and often they want you to be food and that's just how things are oh my God you want leather you go outside and you take your musket and your giant alpaca this is reinforced by the pal deex entries that describe each pal which actually do a pretty good job capturing that unhinged energy that the weirdest Pokedex entries have if it's a cute pal it'll probably have an entry about how they love murder or start forest fires or power the drug trade but rather than feeling edgy there's this nature documentary style Detachment to everything that makes it kind of endearing and for all that craziness the fact that the pals themselves are designed to be so genuinely adorable and expressive means that I actually did feel kind of bad that one time I gave my penguin depression from overwork in fact I was so horrified that I quickly eased up the hard labor built a hot tub for my pals and put more thought into the quality of their food not only that but when the game incentivized me to turn my weak Pals into Resources by butchering them or to melt my pals in a vat to empower the strongest ones we can also Harvest The Souls of Pals to then enhance certain stats most of the time I actually couldn't bring myself to cuz they just sort of seem like mean things to do to your friends weirdly this makes for some actual fun moral choices when it comes to your pals a lot of games make it too rewarding to be good which makes their moral choices very obvious and boring but in pal world doing the wrong thing is extremely rewarding and it's up to you to decide how far is too far now I will say playing this game without major animal cruelty is the equivalent of a no hit run in Dark Souls but the least you can do is to give your pals a reasonably comfortable life even if you do have three Penguins working at an assembly line making mountains of 9mm handgun ammo what I'm trying to say is I better not see you hit that super hard labor option you wouldn't do that to legally distinct go would you I mean just look at him look at him go wait no stop what are you doing creating a productive base like this is a secret to living a comfortable life in her world but be careful not to over rock your PS Now where this does sort of break down is all the horrible things you can do to people cuz as I said before humans in this game are just wet cardboard and their AI is some of the worst I have ever seen and it's not even funny bad like an oblivion or something it's just bad and because of that I simply could not care less about any char character in pal world that isn't a pal so yeah I might occasionally you know capture soldiers in Pokeballs and sell them for gold on the black market but I don't feel bad for them for the same reason I don't feel bad for Tetris blocks when I clear a line now of course I'm not asking for Shakespeare here with these NPCs but I really do wish a single person in this game would have even a crumb of characters so it would feel like your interactions have actual purpose one thing that does have a bit of actual personality though is the soundtrack it's pretty okay they got that epic Orchestra going on and then they threw like FL Studio drum samples over it it has its moments I'm not a hater some things do sound kind of familiar but that's just how music works I think I might just be stuck in that plagiarism detection State of Mind anyway now that we've talked about this stuff in the game we got to talk about how often it breaks that's right it's time for the bugs which as with any open world or Early Access game there are a whole lot of some were pretty annoying but miraculously none of them were for quite game ruining for me you do learn the workarounds Pal's refusing to do anything simply reload the game grappling hook got you stuck flying in midair like Superman again for the third time in 1 hour just switch weapons it's not too terrible for Early Access though fair warning my perception is a bit skewed here since I've been playing some real buggy games lately I mean as far as I'm concerned if I'm not falling through the floor I'm having a good time all right I think I cracked the code here we go so to this game's credit most things seem to function no crashes and I have not fallen through the floor in pal world yet I did get stuck inside of a rock once but technically I fell through the ceiling not the floor and there was also that one time I got stuck inside of a different Rock but I think that was the wall that I fell through still not the floor okay yeah if you really hate bugs maybe wait a few months before picking up pal world go check out my pal World [Music] movement all right and now I just got [Music] to the broken part of that video title is very much not for show even if I do think the gameplay itself is very fun in fact I could talk about that gameplay all day but I feel like it would simply be a waste of your time cuz I can just say Arc Elden ring Pokemon fortnite breath of the wild Rim world and it more or less covers everything I could talk about so instead I want to finish by pointing out how weirdly accessible this game's difficulty options are to the extent that they're actually some of the best I've seen ever like you have your casual normal and hard difficulties but you can also set it to custom to specifically tweak every single part of your gameplay experience from removing hunger and rids to adjusting the day night cycle and even changing the EXP and item rates pal world can get pretty grindy as it goes on but guess what they literally let you change that if you feel like it's too much just pop into the world screen Click Change difficult difficulty and raised the experience modifier at one point I found the solo Gathering grind was starting to get annoying what did I do I just cranked up gatherable drops so I could spend less time staring at rocks and more time riding on that cool alpaca and boom terrible attention span satisfied problem solved but wait while this is an amazing feature unfortunately it was plagiarized from the original System Shock in 1994 which invented custom difficulty where are the System Shock lawyers seriously though to me these options are usually a sign of a game that went the extra mile sometimes it's called assist mode like in celest or control but whatever it's called I'm a big fan of giving each player the option to customize their experience to whatever is the most fun for them it is an act of incredible respect for the players and their time and I cannot believe we are seeing it in the bootleg Pokemon game because and please don't kill me for saying this but most of the games it is stealing from kind of just don't care about this Ark is one of the most infamously timec consuming games out there Elden ring well that might be one of my favorite games but it's not exactly known for its accessibility and Pokemon well Pokemon had an easy mode once and it was something you unlocked after you beat the game on normal mode which is a game design decision that still haunts me to this very day now I do get that those games have competitive sides and this stuff is hard to balance but I mean come on at least let me mess with with the rules in single player it's not hurting anyone so as a gaming enjoyer who enjoys games from a lot of different genres I can't help but feel like sometimes there are things more games need to steal established franchises can get so cozy when they know they have a loyal audience and sometimes this makes them ignore innovations that could make these games better for everyone well as we've established pal world is just a whirlwind of Shameless theft and also I got to say that CEO guy has quite a few h takes about crypto and AI that do put his company on the precipice of like five separate PR disasters but when he says he wants his work to be enjoyed by as many people as possible seeing the way pal World somehow manages to carefully combine so many genres and then puts in the extra effort to let us tweak every part of it I can't lie it kind of makes me want to believe him especially when this is like a game that you pay for once and there's no premium battle pass or awful money stuff which shouldn't be something I have to phrase in a game but you know how things are now and listen if we step back for a bit I got to ask should pal world really be an illegal level of plagiarism well it's definitely at least close but I do like it when art styles and mechanics are copied and experimented with because that is how art has always worked right and while a lot of stuff here is clearly derivative I'm not sure I would love the precedent of it's illegal to draw this funny face or design an electric zebra or make a shitty Walmart Lucario or even have knockoff pokeballs I think that could seriously backfire both legally and in terms of allowing creativity it's just like that one quote earlier from Igor Stravinsky something something steel I forgot the quote but yeah I personally do think you should just barely be allowed to go this far as for whether Nintendo and the Pokémon company think the same way well on January 25th Pokemon released an official statement called regarding other company games it does have some very sanitized corporate speak so to be clear I'm not a lawyer but let me try and interpret this legal language for you it's basically saying uh fear us for we bear the wrath of an Angry God your sins have earned our Fury the Seas will run red with pal blood so yeah a bit of a strong stance now I will say there's a lot of different accusations going around some people are convinced the pals are AI generated from Pokémon or the models are literally ripped from the Pokémon game uh that would suck but I tried to find a source for those claims and for now they're sort of just made up but even though the actual characters were made at pocket Pair by humans I did see some more convincing comparisons that show how let's say deeply inspired by Pokemon a couple of these models are in terms of proportions basically implying they could be the 3D equivalent of tracing which is not good personally I'm still not super convinced cuz you know Pokémon itself did steal a lot of designs from like animals but of course not an expert so I suspect pocket pair might want to use all that money they made to hire some good ass lawyers also for the record I'm recording this in January 2024 so if you're here a few months from now after some horrifying truth was revealed about pal world and the court of law welcome this was always a possibility but let me tell you future viewer before this game got Dlisted from Steam for plagiarism it was pretty good maybe you could still find it somewhere you know somewhere and of course if you're here from the future where pocket pair survived getting sued to Oblivion by the 500 trillion watt orbital death laser that is the Pokémon legal team uh yeah no I had faith in them the entire time uh complete faith no plagiarism at all probably Long Live Pocket pair at least until the pal World 2 AI controversy in 2027 which will happen have that popcorn ready folks in conclusion great game somehow with a lot of moments that genuinely made me smile now it might change one day because I do not think this company has a lot of respect for the law but right now now pal world has no microtransactions no day one DLC and everything can be customized down to the EXP rate it is a strangely Pro consumer experience that defied all my expectations except for some of my expectations which it didn't defy but in my opinion it's absolutely worth the 30 bucks not only that but they released a very promising looking road map for Early Access and I sure do hope they can finish it so again if you're looking for a story that will inspire you and make you think maybe don't play world but if you hate what game freak has become and you want a passionately made Pokémon game by fans with real Creative Vision play cassette beasts but if you're looking for a truly unhinged open World sandbox that plays like an ADHD fever dream frankensteining five different genres together with not a single bit of care for intellectual property law then pal world just might be for you I give this game an 8 out of 10 and a nine out of 10 if it were sealed in a vault for 100 years and released after Pokemon became public domain [Music] [Music]

Channel: WhyDo

Views: 143,432

Keywords: whydo smash, wdbthtgp, whydo, WhyDo, smash guy fieri, palworld, pokemon, pokemon with guns, does this game suck, pocketpair, palworld review, whydo palworld

Id: 7fXXCIAcLXU

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024