Surprise, surprise, someone’s already modded actual Pokémon into Palworld

If the accusations of Palworld peeking at Pokémon’s homework for its catchable monster designs weren’t already rife enough, a modder has decided to take the Garth Marenghi approach and remove any possible question by turning Palworld’s Pokémon-a-likes into just straight-up Pokémon.

The overhaul mod shared by YouTube ToastedShoes swaps Palworld’s Pals for their Pokémon equivalents, meaning that the Pokémon-like creatures wielding guns and labouring away in mines and factories become actual Pokémon wielding guns and labouring away. Among the Pokémon visible in the brief gameplay clips are first-gen icons like Pikachu and Oddish, plus later additions such as Piplup, Hoothoot and Torchic.

The mod goes a step further, too, by changing the player character model into Pokémon anime protagonist Ash Ketchum and swapping out Palworld NPCs for Ash’s reformed gym-leader companions Brock and Misty, the latter of whom is shown carrying a shotgun. Meanwhile, Palworld’s first boss encounter against Zoe and the Electabuzz-like Grizzbolt becomes a face-off against Team Rocket’s Jessie and actual Electabuzz.

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While Palworld itself may ultimately skirt around breaking actual copyright law due to its similar-but-not-the-same designs – though questions over its monsters’ in-game models’ closeness to those in the Pokémon games have complicated the discussion – the Pokémon mod obviously draws the line even more directly between the two. Even if Palworld doesn’t quite draw the ire of Nintendo, a mod that literally hands actual Pikachu a machine gun may well finally step over that line.

For their part, Palworld developers Pocketpair have insisted that “we have absolutely no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies” and assured that the game cleared all legal checks before blowing up Steam – and its own servers, for a while – with its lightning bolt-popularity last week. Success deserved or undeserved, it’s hard to ignore what’s likely the biggest game of 2024 so far.