I don't know anything about Palworld. I literally had to look it up on Google as I haven't heard of it prior to this post, so forgive me if this isn't relevant, but I remember in the Hoenn games (Emerald/Sapphire/Ruby) being able to customize a little area in a cave(?) with plushies. I know that's a one on a customization scale since you should have been able to do so much more. I feel like Pokémon could have built on this. Instead, we haven't seen this feature since to my knowledge.
yup, the secret base system! it actually also existed in diamond/pearl/platinum in the underground. it made a return in omega ruby/alpha sapphire, pretty close to the original if i remember? but the remakes of diamond/pearl were super dumbed down, you could only decorate with ugly statues to increase spawn rates.
Why in the world would anyone need a side-by-side comparison to tell you that it looks similar to Pokémon when that is the obvious joke? Under this same guidance, we might be alarmed at some strikingly similar character designs in The Simpsons.
This is a sentiment that I agree with, but I don't know why people are under the impression that Palworld is going to be the game that will do it. I'm speculating that once the initial craze for the game comes and goes, the player rate will die off hard, because it's game that seems to live and die on its premise alone. Games like Tem Tem also promised to provide a Pokémon alternative for jaded fans of the series (or non-Nintendo players in general), but it hasn't really done anything to threaten Gamefreak's bottom line, either.
The part where people still buy the game regardless of the drop in quality gets me.
Brand loyalty is a particularly strong force in the Pokémon fandom from what I've seen. I'm not claiming that everyone who bought Scarlet/Violet were just corporate shills who just can't think for themselves; I'm fine with someone enjoying the games in spite of its myriad of flaws. We all have our comfort games, and we all have our subjective lines as to what we consider "good" and "bad." But discourse surrounding the games is extremely tiresome when any point of critique is either dismissed as a nitpick, forcibly lumped in with the pitchforks-and-knives mob mentality as a means of discrediting it, or just denied as a thing that exists in general despite the myriad of screenshots and videos to demonstrate otherwise. All that to say, I think it's just become extremely popular of late to have these brands tied intrinsically to your identity, so the quality of the games becomes irrelevant to the purchasing decisions of some groups.
In my mind, even if Pokémon games weren't in a downward spiral in terms of quality, I feel like these two games deliver two very different niches. People like to use "linear" as a blanket statement for poor quality, but there is a place for linear RPG's. I don't think bigger world with more options necessarily translates to better game design. So even if Pokémon were to suddenly improve drastically or if I just didn't care about the declining quality, the two would be substantially different enough that I wouldn't feel like they fulfill the same niche.
