All Things Considered, How Cruel is Palworld Actually?

 

Service with a smile (Sometimes)

NOTE: This post is going to completely ignore that other controversy surrounding Palworld, the one that deals with its originality or lack thereof.  I do have some thoughts on that, but that subject isn't too closely related to the in-game ethics, so for another day.  This also is not a review, which I may also write later, but as of writing this, have not seen enough of the game yet.  So with those out of the way, let's begin.

Bad Reputation

Pocketpair's Palworld has sold millions and become one of the most widely-played games of Janurary, 2024, but hand-in-hand with the hype has been an ongoing controversy about the game's disturbing undertones, mostly related to animal cruelty.  To give an insight into how Palworld gained such ill-repute, allow me to share my personal story of how I discovered it.  

Back in 2021, a YouTube channel called Skyhoppers made a video criticizing the story of Pokemon Black and White, arguing that the games explored potentially interesting subject matter in their plots, but ultimately failed to do it justice, because to do so would call into question the entire premise of Pokemon.  I recommend the video, but to summarize, Pokemon Black and White are about a bunch of radical animal rights activists who crusade against the whole business of capturing Pokemon, training Pokemon, and making them battle other Pokemon, attempting to persuade people to set them free.  It seemed quite an audacious move for a video game series to feature a plot taking to task everything that its players were supposed to find fun about it, and opened the door to a lot of philosophical discussions...or at least it could have.  

However, as I have stated in a past blog post, when the show must go on, a franchise based on fictional stories can rarely bear to permanently undermine its status quo, so any characters who wish to do so must be treated as wrong in-universe.  And so it was in Pokemon Black and White.  Towards the end of the story arc, it is revealed that the leader of these radical animal rights activists has a hidden agenda; he wants to conquer the world, or at least the region, and convincing people to set their Pokemon free was only a means to his end of leaving them defenseless as he kept his own Pokemon to use as weapons of war.  

In itself, this wouldn't be a bad twist, but in the context of those games, it was used as a quick way to declare all of the preceding arguments about animal rights to be irrelevant instead of actually engaging with them, because again, to give them any permanent legitimacy would give the Pokemon series substantially less cheery vibes from then on, and a haunting sense of hypocrisy.  As an aside, I personally dislike any stories that take a real-world debate and try to invalidate one of the positions just by writing one side's proponent as having insincere motives, and I should write more on that in the future, but that is beyond the scope of of this post.

Moving on, while Skyhoppers was musing about what could have been had they followed through and explored their themes a bit more, he couldn't help but briefly mention and show a trailer for a suspiciously Pokemon-like game that took a deeper and less flattering look at the ethics of creature collecting games, a then-obscure indie game called Palworld.  

As someone who has long-since soured on the lore of the Pokemon series, seeing it as schmaltzy, repetitive and obnoxiously naive about its many questionable implications, my interest was instantly piqued, and I went to watch the trailer to Palworld in its entirety.  I was impressed by many aspects of the gameplay that were apparent even at that early point, so I kept following the game's development, but it soon became apparent that most of the discourse around the game was comprised of other YouTubers watching and reacting to its trailers.  Myriad viewers were shocked and amused at the sight of "Pokemon With Guns"; from the very start, the buzz about Palworld focused mostly on its potentially disturbing moral content.  

Now that the game has become a breakout hit, that buzz has become a roar.

Putting it in Perspective

For what it's worth, Pokemon itself is not devoid of the occasional disturbing bits of lore; a substantial amount of it relating to outright death.  Quite a few PokeDex entries mention Pokemon killing each other or even killing people.  That doesn't all just flow one-way, either, as some of the PokeDex entries for Lapras mention people hunting them to near-extinction.  During a memorable moment in the original Pokemon games, you learn of Team Rocket killing a Cubone's mother for resisting them.  On that note, numerous terrorist organizations keep popping up throughout the Pokemon world, and even conventional warfare occasionally utilizes Pokemon as weapons, as mentioned by Lt Surge.  The subtext of all of this is that a world full of monsters with all sorts of awesome elemental powers is, go-figure, dangerous.  Also potentially hardcore to truly awesome levels. 

Mommy!

However, the series has maintained an overall positive tone and a cuddly, infantile reputation by being very selective in when, how, and in what doses it lets players experience these darker themes.  Most of the time, it's strictly tell and not show, and even when it is shown, generally the protagonists themselves are not allowed to partake in much. 

Sometimes, it feels like they wrote themselves into a bit of a corner when attempting to conceive a franchise that was both interesting and child-friendly, which could explain this much beating around the bush.  In theory, a world where children are allowed to wield creatures that are essentially living weapons, and wander the country unsupervised while doing so, sounds like it's heading for disaster, having the potential to be as brutally anarchic as the Grand Theft Auto series, and calloused adults who grew up with Pokemon may be tempted to wonder if there's a link between this and just how many Pokemon-powered evil organizations keep springing up in this world.  The rules governing Pokemon games, though, are such that your protagonist has no choice but to be well-behaved.  Instead of ever letting you be the soldiers who fight alongside their Pokemon, against other soldiers presumably fighting alongside theirs, the series almost always casts you as a vague child, starring in a plot that gives you a motive only to become the region's champion by competing in matches governed by a lot of rules, and even when you run into wild Pokemon and villains, in the context of gameplay they act exactly the same way as friendly opponents.  Even the when not being used in violent ways, the vast powers of the titular monsters can only be deployed in very specific circumstances, governed by still more seemingly arbitrary rules; for example, even if a Pokemon is strong enough, lore-wise, to push a boulder around, it's only allowed to do so when you've obtained a certain gym badge and used a hidden machine to teach it a move, and you'll never be able to use its strength for any other function in the world unless the game says it can use another such move, which you must obtain another hidden machine and another gym badge to do.

Such cautious and censorious game design has been a double-edged sword for the Pokemon franchise.  It certainly has helped Pokemon to become the largest child-friendly media franchise in the world, in a way a more offensive series would not have, but it has also kept it from living up to the full potential posed by its theoretical premise, leaving that up to peripheral media like anime, manga, and spin-off games when it is shown at all, and in turn, also kept it from embracing the free-roaming, emergent and experimental sort of gameplay characteristic of many AAA game franchises these days.

In that context, Palworld may be best understood as creating lore that is actually reasonably similar to that in Pokemon, but choosing to take up a different double-edged sword.  It tears off the kid gloves, tears out the arbitrary restrictions and restructures itself so that it really is more like Grand Theft Auto, except with Pokemon-like creatures.  The result is a game that allows the players to be absolutely vile in how they utilize this world, if they choose to be, and this has certainly been played up in trailers for maximum shock value, as it turns out, to great effect.  But what is gained from this anarchistic approach to design is that now players can actually experience many aspects of the Pokemon world (or pretty close) that heretofore they were only able to read and dream about, or in rare cases, witness secondhand.  And this is a big part of Palworld's runaway success; it fills a niche that has been gaping for a long time.

The Sinister Urge

I have above explained why you can be a terrible person in Palworld, if you want.  That is something that generally comes with the territory of open-world games, though a few, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, don't really allow for it.  But an important question for many people curious but worried about this game is, does it reward evil play?  Is what players can gain from treating Pals badly more than they can gain from treating them well?  As it happens, and perhaps disappointing to many people, the answer isn't cut-and-dry.  A lot of factors seem to lean one way while many others lean the other, and I'll do my best to detail them all.

"You're not really gonna shoot a lamb, right?" "Yeah, in the face."

Violence against Pals, of some sort, is one of the first things you'll experience in Palworld.  Sounds damning, but that in itself doesn't make it any more mean-spirited or disturbing than Pokemon.  Maybe it's a bit more edgy since you can actually see the fights play out, but most people have seen Pokemon fights play out too, thanks to peripheral media like the anime.  The fact that a lot of the combat (though not all) you'll see in this game is human vs Pal might make it seem a bit harsher, but it's not like that sort of scene is totally absent from official Pokemon media either, though it is fairly rare.  

Those two examples, of course, don't feature guns, which from the start have been the most noted of this game's disturbing elements, and from many cultural perspectives it could be argued that the inclusion of realistic guns makes a game more "adult".  But what ESRB rating Palworld should get isn't what is being debated here, how "cruel" their inclusion makes the game is.  Since Pokemon games already heavily involve Pokemon attacking each other, logically, any argument that using a gun to shoot a Pokemon would be exceptionally cruel rests entirely on being able to demonstrate that a gun could harm it significantly more than any attack from another Pokemon would.  Not only can this not be demonstrated, but there is also no clearly defined threshold of how much a Pokemon can be damaged before such can be considered cruel.  Theoretically, that threshold does exist and would most likely be whatever would kill a Pokemon, as evidenced by the aforementioned time Team Rocket killed a Cubone's mother, but within Pokemon gameplay, no amount of damage dealt can do any more than make a Pokemon faint, and it was never clarified what else Team Rocket had to do in order to outright kill one.

The above describes Pokemon, but what about Palworld; how is it different?  The first place to look would be out in the wilderness, where most fights will take place, and you'll get some strangely mixed messages on the subject.  The game does not directly state that Pals have been killed; in combat scenarios it uses the word "defeated", and while their bodies go limp when they are in this state, otherwise, the sight is quite tame.  That said, when "defeated", Pals will drop loot like leather, meat, and bones, so that would seem to make it clear that they have been killed, right?  In most games, yes, but oddly enough, if instead of delivering the killing(?) blow, you capture a Pal in a Pal Sphere (which you could probably have guessed was Palworld's version of a Poke Ball without seeing it), you will also be awarded those items.  Now granted, if you capture a Pal, that original Pal's existence, bits of numerical data though it may be, will be preserved, while if you "defeat" a Pal, that individual is gone forever, until the game randomly generates the same collection of numerical data.  However, the same is technically true when a wild Pokemon "faints".  Meanwhile, if a Pal in your party faints (or is defeated), it can make a full recovery, though this requires a trip to your base.  

In my experience, there's only one way in the game that a Pal can officially die, and that's if you butcher a Pal you own with a meat cleaver. (Yes, it has to be a meat cleaver; any other sharp object in the game won't work.) In real life, butchering with a meat cleaver means cutting up a creature that's already dead rather than killing it, but let's not sweat the technicalities.  "Butchering" a Pal will give you another instance of the loot you would get from defeating or catching it, but that's not so much as to give you a strong incentive to do it.  

So just as with Pokemon, there's quite a bit of ambiguity how cruel the game's combat is or is not, albeit for different reasons.

Always in Demand

However, it is worth mentioning that the loot obtained from defeating or capturing Pals is essential to crafting many important items in the game, and in that sense, even if you don't actually need to kill(?) Pals, you are incentivized to go out and harm them for personal gain.  That's before we even talk about the notion that once Pals are captured, they essentially become slaves (but we'll get there soon).  

Some would rationalize that all this is fair enough from a realism standpoint, making Palworld into essentially a reenactment of the history of civilization, retreading key points when people exploited and twisted nature to their own ends, as well as maybe a satire of Pokemon that zooms the perspective out to reveal the darker implications of its world.  But the problem with such rationalization is that many of these crafting requirements are not realistic.  

Some of them reflect reality closely enough, for example some items made with leather and keratin in real life are made with analogous items in Palworld, but there are also instances of things that could be made with animal parts but also could have ample substitutes fairly early on; for example, many saddles you need to make for riding Pals can only be made with bones, even when wood is common.  Then, there are cases when the game largely ignores reality in order to force objects into accordance with its elemental system.  Several different elements of Pal, such as poison, fire, and ice, grant loot types specific to their elements upon being defeated or captured, and generally any devices the game can relate to those elements, it makes dependent on harvesting those Pal bodyparts.  Want to smelt metal in a furnace?  Then you'll need to three Flame Organs and might have to go shoot some adorable foxes to get them.  Want to get out of that barbarism via modern technology?  Well, good luck, because you'll need a whopping twenty Electric Organs just to build a power generator!  There are many, many other examples of this sort of unrealistic dependency, too numerous to list here.

You won't get an uplifting Katy Perry song inspired by this use of electric critters!

 

One of the most offensive crafting requirements to me, however, is the use of Pal horns to make medicine.   There is folklore around the world, going back centuries if not millennia, which associated horns with magical powers, able to ward off everything from demons to diseases, and while such has dissipated in much of the First World, it still holds sway in some places like China, and the demand for horns in traditional Asian medicine has created a huge market for poachers, and driven some species, like elephants and white rhinos, towards extinction.  It's incredibly depressing to see a video game validating such harmful beliefs, even more-so that most players probably won't even notice this issue. 

Many of the more advanced devices and structures you can craft also require "Ancient Civilization Parts", which in typical SciFi/Fantasy fashion, are more technologically advanced than people today are.  To get these, you need to defeat bosses, which are located in various places.  You can find some of them in the overworld, you must venture into dungeons to fight others, some have their own arenas you warp to and battle them in, and then there are tower bosses, who (go figure) are fought in towers.  The bosses are often rare species and always larger than the species norm.  I bring all this up because it's another place you could argue Palworld encourages cruelty, since boss pals often (though not always) have other Pals helping them out in the fights.  Most times you fight Pals in this game, it's fairly easy to capture them instead of defeating them, and since it oddly rewards you the same, that arguably feel like the compassionate option, but that gets much harder when several Pals gang up on you and others will take the opportunity to smack you down while you attempt to capture their comrade.  You also can't rely on your own Pal allies to draw attention away from them if your plan is to capture each one instead of killing them, since your Pals will go right ahead and land the killing blow if not recalled in time.  You could just try to evade other Pals and capture just the boss, which might be doable in the overworld, but in dungeons where things are cramped, not so much. So basically, against boss mobs, especially in dungeons, it will often boil down to "kill or be killed", at least for some of the members.

That essentially wraps up the combat aspect of Palworld's potential cruelty, albeit without a clear answer. (Deja vu!)  It's not presented anywhere near as innately cruel as selective trailers made it seem, and generally (though not always) there are compassionate ways to get around killing (or whatever you do when you drain all of a Pal's HP), and so many people will be able to go through it with a clear conscience, but there are also many iffy elements to those who look for such things.  And of course, whether catching a Pal is truly more compassionate than just "defeating" it may depend on its life in captivity, so let's talk about that, next.

Home is Where the Heart Is

While a strong case can be made that Palworld encourages you to harm and exploit Pals while in the field, the same can't be said for how it handles bases, and if your impression of this game is based mostly on that early trailer Skyhoppers saw (particularly the bit with a Pal collapsing in an assault rifle factory), you might be surprised at how wholesome it gets.  Whether that's a pleasant surprise or not depends on the player.

There exist some people who will always consider the base labor system to be slavery.  After all, you capture these wild animals in balls, and clearly these balls do something to their brains, because from then on the captured creatures become willing to serve you.  But as often is the case, when judging this it's important to compare it to Pokemon, because not only is that equally true there, but in most Pokemon games that servitude is utilized mostly to make these creatures fight each other for people's amusement and personal glory.  It seems ironic that this fantastical cockfighting has become accepted as fine and child-friendly, while utilizing these creatures' loyalty to do things like growing and cooking food, building structures, and sewing clothes is morally dubious.  After all, keeping people fed, housed and clothed is usually considered very benign.  

The go-to justification for the heavy combat focus of Pokemon is that they enjoy it, and they don't die or even get permanently maimed in combat; the worst that will happen is they faint.  That's all a bit "take our word for it", but to be fair, if people could make such a full recovery from combat, a lot of them would probably be beating each other up for fun, too.  With that in mind, so far as I've seen, your Pals can't actually die from working in a base, either.  They will indeed collapse from exhaustion and also starvation, but this just results in them being "incapacitated", and as with Pals that have been rendered unconscious from damage, a trip back to the Pal Box will fix that, given time.  That is fortunate, because this game's AI pathfinding and collision detection are very faulty at the moment, which far too often means Pals getting stuck somewhere and then starving. (A big enough issue for the developers to name it specifically as something to fix with patches.)  The game also intends for you to pay attention to their ailments, as the UI will alert you to them.

Are you sure you're in a good condition?  Because you have a major injury.  Might want to get that checked out!

 What is more, base-building comes with its own unique mission objectives, requesting you to build specific things and rewarding you with the ability to deploy more pals to the base concurrently, and many of those things relate your Pals' well-being.  For example, they must eat to survive (or at least, maintain consciousness), and you can hand-feed them, which is quite cute, but a more convenient option is to build a feeder box, which you can place food in, and Pals will then go eat from whenever they get hungry.  You can also build planter boxes to grow that food, and devices to cook it into various meals.  Pals also need to sleep, and you will be tasked with building beds for them and alerted when there aren't enough beds for the amount of Pals you have in your base; without them, they will still sleep but get angry.  You can even make them a hot tub so they can take a good therapeutic soak!  Not only is the well-being of all your Pals noted verbally, but the developers have gone above and beyond to give them facial expressions and body language to convey whether they're feeling good or bad.  A certain sort of player will take pride in pushing Pals to their breaking point, but for everyone else, it'll feel rewarding to make them happy and healthy.

Enjoy your break; I'll take over mining for a bit.

The ultimate measure of a successful base, though, is reaching a point of self-sufficiency.  Much like different buildings have different purposes, different Pals have different skills.  Not all of them will be able to build things, not all of them will be able to plant things, not all of them will be able to spray things, not all of them will be able to harvest things, and not all of them will be able to transport things.  But obtaining and deploying a combination of Pals can give your base that vital combination of skills needed to handle a every part of the food supply chain.  Once you get that working, the threat of starvation wanes a lot, and it starts to look less like a gulag and more like a co-op.

Taking care of that will make your base ready to take on more heavy and advanced industries.  It's still on you to choose what buildings to make and where to make them, as well as to place orders in any building that can produce more than one thing, but once you've made those choices, there are Pals that can help with those tasks, too.  You'll be motivated to build better and better stuff, because raiders will try to invade your base from time to time, and they get stronger as you level up.  So stay ahead, make sure at least some of the Pals you've assigned to your base are good fighters, and build yourself some weapons!

And with all of that in mind, it must be asked, what actually is this?  Is it slavery, with workers obediently building and growing what their overseer demands?  Is it late-stage capitalism, with every facet of society obligated to take in things and make them into other things?  Is it "true" communism, when so many things have been made that now without being ordered, everyone labors voluntarily and happily, but only as long their capacities permit, never getting paid but never needing to because they never need to pay for their necessities, and never taking more than they need to?  Is it libertarian survivalism, erecting off-the-grid outposts that are completely independent from the outside world and prepared to fight hard to defend that independence?  Or is it simply ranching, ever a world unto itself detached from politics and economics, and unrecognized as such merely because the creatures in this game can do some things that real livestock can't.  Maybe so.  To a large extent, it depends on how you look at things and how you run things.

Which, come to think of it, is a fitting microcosm of Palworld, as a whole.

At One with Everything

As noted above, there are quite a few mixed messages in Palworld, with regards to overall ethics.  I've done my best to present them all as factually as possible without coming to any definitive conclusion, but I expect other people will come to a wide variety of opinions about it, and perhaps that is not unrelated to how many other things about Palworld have also generated a wide variety of opinions, running the spectrum from love to hate.   

Palworld's unexpected blend of elements hasn't been unanimously hailed as good game design, but it has proven to be the perfect blend for generating conversation about it.  In some ways, the game feels a bit like a mirror to reflect the gaming culture and Internet culture that exist at the moment, and so many people who look at it can find something to substantiate their own opinions.  If you go in wanting to see the game as a love letter to the Pokemon fanbase, endeavoring to let them experience the dreams of what they'd do if they had Pokemon instead of just what Ash Ketchum does, you'll find many aspects that confirm that.  If you'd rather see it as a brutal and judgmental satire of Pokemon that holds that franchise's entire premise in contempt and rubs players' noses in everything potentially problematic about that premise, there are also certainly things that would seem to corroborate such a take, albeit in a way that makes its morbid take amusing rather than depressing. (As even the darkest satires tend to do.)  You can take the now-infamous design philosophies of Pocketpair's CEO as shameless bandwagoning or as a sign of great respect towards gamers, being very in touch with many things they like and being willing to provide them at a reasonable price.  It can cater to player desires, both to inflict misery on other living beings and to build them an adorable utopia where they're all smiles, providing many poignant photo opportunities either way.  Or maybe even a combination!

A memorable moment on my base, seconds after my squad of adorable cats mauled some raiders to death.

Society may never reach a consensus about this game's ethics, nor many other aspects of it.  But the game's overpowering ability to be so many different things to so many different people may be a very big part of why it has gotten so huge.  All of the debates raging back and forth about it provide free publicity, and this, in turn, drives more and more people to actually buy and play it.  Sometimes, it seems, controversy really does sell...and perhaps that could spawn an ethical debate of its own.