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Hot take: game is fun, not great but it’s early acess so it could get better
Honestly feels more like the Pokémon anime than the games in many ways but in a good way, little things like letting out my fire pal as a light source while mining at night feels better than anything gamefreak has done in the last 20 years
Honestly feels more like the Pokémon anime than the games in many ways
Honestly, this is why I think all the complaints about it being edgy and stuff are overblown.
As easy as it is to call Palworld “pokemon with guns”, it’s really just pokemon. JUST pokemon. It’s Pokemon as a 3d openworld adventure game, instead of abstracting through turn orders and menus. It’s pokemon where you can do all the things implied or outright stated in the official games. It’s not pokemon with guns, it’s pokemon that lets you use the guns.
If they do it well they could end up making the best pokemon game in terms of immersion, they’ve just stopped saying that being the main character makes what you do inherently good.
From the library in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum
A young man, callow and foolish in innocence, came to own a sword. With it, he smote Pokémon, which gave sustenance, with carefree abandon. Those not taken as food, he discarded, with no afterthought. The following year, no Pokémon appeared. Larders grew bare. The young man, seeking the missing Pokémon, journeyed afar. Long did he search. And far and wide, too, until one he did find. Asked he, “Why do you hide?” To which the Pokémon replied… “If you bear your sword to bring harm upon us, with claws and fangs, we will exact a toll.” “From your kind we will take our toll, for it must be done.” “Done it must be to guard ourselves and for it, I apologize.” To the skies, the young man shouted his dismay. “In having found the sword, I have lost so much.” “Gorged with power, I grew blind to Pokémon being alive.” “I will never fall savage again. This sword I denounce and forsake.” “I plead for forgiveness, for I was but a fool.” So saying, the young man hurled the sword to the ground, snapping it. Seeing this, the Pokémon disappeared to a place beyond seeing…
Long ago, when Sinnoh had just been made, Pokémon and humans led separate lives. That is not to say they did not help each other. No, indeed they did. They supplied each other with goods, and supported each other. A Pokémon proposed to the others to always be ready to help humans. It asked that Pokémon be ready to appear before humans always. Thus, to this day, Pokémon appear to us if we venture into tall grass.
I’ve always interpreted that Pokemon choose to show up and challenge humans when they want to join them, and will flee/not show up if they don’t want to be with people. Pokemon are clearly stronger than humans and will straight up not listen to you if you don’t have enough badges.
Also, battles don’t seem to be "real fighting’ in the way that they get injured or anything. Real sickness and injury, death, etc are presented as something completely different from status effects and fainting.
Okay, thats my incredibly nerdy take.
Anyway, I’m not so offended by Palwords “animal exploitation” joke as much as it makes me roll my eyes in a “Mario is high on mushrooms lololol Mario is possessing people with cappy lolol” way. It an old and easy joke. I feel like entertainment is nihilistic enough as it is.
I think a better idea would be a game where the Pals are being exploited by the bad guys and you free them and lead them in a bloody revolution for freedom lol.
i think they should make it more explicit actually, they would be able to claim satire with more creedance
also the whole debate over this shit is basically a veiled form of the vegan struggle session so lets just stop pretending we’re concerned for the rights of pixels in the shape of an orange dragon
chill out, people want to have fake monsters fight each other
I’m sure the godly and legendary creatures I keep in a capsule in a bank are feeling good about it. Oh you’re the god of space? Enjoy the luxury ball it’s the only thing you’ll ever see again
Why shell out for the luxury ball?
Last one before i ran out completely
That always bugged me with the Pokémon defense. “Oh, but they like that im the master and tell them to do things. We’re all friends, just a big family!” Is the exact argument you would use if you were subjugating others but didn’t want to feel bad about it.
As a massive Pokemon fan, Pokemon’s lore is just straight unhinged. They even say Pokemon used to live as equals to humans, and some would even have romantic involvement with humans. And GF expect me to believe that they want to be in the ball?
Are we gonna start a struggle session on keeping pets?
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We co-evolved with dogs over the course of 40,000 years. in so far as the temr “natural” means anything, it is natural for dogs and humans to live together in close cooperation. there’s a theory going that humans and dogs (and domesticated agricultural plants) co-domesticated each other and that our close relationship with dogs (and wheat) is why humans seem to share many traits found in domesticated animals but not wild animals.
Malazan plays with this idea by claiming giant fantasy dogs that work for the god of death protected early humans and we kinda evolved as a result. or something like that, its been years.
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annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd blocked you’ve gotten weirder
that would be a completely ridiculous struggle session to have, no one is against banning pets, unless you’re a bastard landlord or have justifiable reasons due to allergies (but even then its usually ‘keep them out of this area’ not ‘ban people from having animal friends’)
so hexbear will stay free of such things
I love how you said this but now someone is in fact unironically arguing it.
Never underestimate Hexbear again.
hexbear is both the best and dumbest place on the whole internet
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The comment I replied to was talking about the subjugation part.
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But pets are still absolutely subjugated. They are literally owned by humans, are not free and have no agency over their own lives.
The point is that everyone here going “huh this is just what they said about slaves” are completely ignoring that we have pets, which we love a lot (at least i know i love my dog very much) but they are nevertheless subjugated and treated as lesser. Our dog is not allowed on the couch. Sure, I don’t make my dog fight other dogs, but I am still denying her her freedom and she is my legal property. She would not survive in the wild and she loves me a lot as well, but is that not what they said about slaves? Either way, she is not given the choice. What are the ethics of this relationship?
Pokemon is a nonsensical setting that can’t decide whether its creatures are more like animals or whether they are sapient, but I think comparing Pokemon to pets is much more appropriate than comparing them to human servants like the house elves from Harry Potter.
Either way, you do not have to hand it to Palworld, it’s obnoxious, Happy Tree Friends-esque edgelord shit.
Edit: To clarify: I’m not saying “Keeping pets is ethically good and therefore Pokemon is ethically good”. I think you could argue both, the point is that we shouldn’t pretend like we treat all living things as equal and that, if you assume subjugation to be mistreatment, it is still very evidently possible to sincerely love something you’re subjugating and treating as lesser. Morality and emotions are complicated and don’t make sense a lot of the time.
Either way, you do not have to hand it to Palworld, it’s obnoxious, Happy Tree Friends-esque edgelord shit.
W, fuck this game.
I saw them blasting some pokemonesque creature with assault rifles and I felt like I could smell the axe body spray of the dev team from my room
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Exactly. Humans are the same as other humans. Animals aren’t.
Do you get what I mean?
but again most people don’t do that
Billions of people across the world use animals for labor, before the Industrial Revolution most people did. In much of the underdeveloped world you often have to use animal labor to survive. And often people who exploit animal labor feel genuine affection for the animals, plenty of people who use dogs for more utilitarian means still love them, plenty of farmers care for the donkey that hauls their produce to market.
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“Hey, you better shut up! You’re giving away our entire anti-unionization playbook!”
SMT negotiations are by far my favorite monster-collecting methods. Just equal parts philosophy, flirtation, and gibberish as they vibe check you.
Jack Frost has joined your party without your consent!
I IMPLORE you all to read this https://hexbear.net/post/763625, diegetic essentialism is a waste of time and infantilizes you. Please, stop it.
Fuck you… making me read a thing and learning shit…
my pleasure
Ok that was great. I love when someone puts an inexplicable feeling into concrete terms. Once with this DE stuff and twice with the the banger within a banger when op calls to stop calling everything fascism. Thanks 🙏
the wild thing is that this excellent term, which so accurately describes the utter decripitness and shallowness of pop culture and media today, came out of a shitposting subreddit for fucking WH40K lmao
40k has a lot in its favor to cause that thought to come into being and result in an essay like that. Namely the chuds who take the propaganda from their guys at face value. They are frustrating to say the least.
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Ok, I mostly agree with you, but people have been pointing out Pokemon makes animals fight since day one. (Parents also called it satanic lol)
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Without reading (I am a staunch antiintellectual, yuck), is diegetic essentialism the boiling down of a text into strictly what happens within the text and ignoring the fact that it’s humans who consume the text and that that process can create meaning beyond that of the literal text?
yep
Ah, so the fun police
It’s ok if you’re just having fun, but we are so far past that point.
From the linked thread
Pokemon is cockfighting, Mario massacres Goombas and turns by the hundreds in any given game and we know from Paper Mario they’re fully sentient and about equal to human intelligence, the star fox team are a PMC, Samus has blown up 3 planets, maybe more ans wiped out 2 species, sorta 3 if you count Evil Beak or whatever from Dread, he was likely the last Chozo. None of this shit really makes any sense and it’s pretty senseless to go thst deep into it. Especially if you’re being serious.
deeply unserious vibeo game lore
Diegetic essentialism 101, it leads people to ask deeply unserious and frankly stupid questions like: “is superman actually a socialist?”. Like, no , unless superman is written as such, he’s not. These fantasy worlds you escape into? Theyre written a certain way by its authors, and no amount of nerd slapfighting online will change that, please stop wasting your time.
Mario has a heart attack whenever he just bumps into one on the street because he’s racist and can’t stand the idea of touching minorities.
ironic for an it*lian.
Meanwhile the chad
saves animals and the environment from the capitalist, imperialist Eggman by destroying polluting robotsdeleted by creator
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sorry kiddo thems the breaks
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i think the difference is that palworld is a bad game
I’m pretty sure the Pokémon died in the comics but that also may have been a meme idk
Nah, the comics can actually get pretty dark. People die, Pokes die, etc…
Imagining them doing a canonization of the Jesus story but with Pokémon a la Moses in beyblades lol
Honestly one of the first things that came to my mind. Good on B&W for showing that the neurodivergent have what it takes to psionically connect with animals and lead terrorist organizations.
Can’t forget Lavender Town, a town pretty much dedicated to mourning dead Pokemon.
back in my day we just made a 3 panel sprite webcomic about johto’s labor laws, not a whole shit game with I’m assuming nfts two years after anyone cares about those
No NFTs afaik and first impressions are surprisingly positive from what I see online. Apparently there’s a lot of factorio-lite automation gameplay???
Didn’t Nick Mullen make this joke in his stand-up?
why did i read that as dick mullen
me and my friends made this joke about pokemon when we were kids. i think it has independently occurred to a lot of people that it’s just a romanticized fantasy dogfighting cartoon.
Yeah the “Pokémon is cockfighting” joke has been floating around since the early internet. There’s old ass YT videos making the exact same joke.
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Unfortunately, it seems that pokemon society is not vegan so it’s also canon that people just eat pokemon.
It’s way funnier than that. The Pokémon company has anthropomorphized Pokémon so much that they feel icky about killing them. But they also have chronic carnism brain. The result? They’ve recently designed a Pokémon with a limb that falls off so humans can harvest their meat without feeling bad. There’s a scene in one of the shows where a character straight up drinks Shuckle juice from its orifices. Actually, that carnist design goes back a couple decades. People will literally come up with the most ridiculous explanations in their FANTASY world instead of just making it vegan.
Shuckles ferment berries in their shell it’s not carnism but it is assault and robbery
I’m just lumping in using other creatures’ bodies for food under carnism.
Fair
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One game’s villain has a pokemon that uses a maximum-damage Frustration. Friendship’s default value isn’t zero, meaning gamefreak has gone out of their way to say “this guy canonically abuses his pokemon”
In that game the frustration move is bc the badguys did some evil techno-magic to the mons that makes them angry and aggressive, and if you treat the shadow pokemon well it will “open their hearts” and they’ll lose the frustration move. It exists bc the bad guys hurt the pokemon’s feelings to weaponize their alienation.
And making them spirits isn’t any better. Kami aren’t any less individuals with feelings than animals or pocket monsters.
