That VGC site has a pretty good sum up of Palworld: cynical and souless, but nonetheless a pretty fun game to play, and I fully agree. Pretty much every design up to version 0.3 was fully copied from pokemon. The more recent patch that added the big island on the south has more original-looking monster designs, though others are still pretty obvious ripoffs.

Additionally, the game involves using handheld ball devices thrown at wild world-roaming creatures you capture after cutting down their health by some amount to increase the catch percentage and different “grade” balls have increased chance for capture.

They did that on Craftopia, too, only it was to catch animals rather than monsters.

There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.

Not really. There is a criminal syndicate, a bunch of violent hypocritical hippies, a corrupt police and some Borderlands style psychos, none “competing” with you, they just want you dead. I think only the syndicate would “count as team rocket”, but they’re up for all crimes.

This feels like taking advantage of grey area in the realm of visual IP similarity to shut down someone making their gameplay design mechanics look antiquated by comparison.

Palworld became a target at first because of that visual similarity but, as much as the pals obviously resemble pokemons, they’re visually different enough to be considered original and a case on those grounds alone would go nowhere. Which is why Nintendo shifted from IP to Patent bullshit.