oh, you’re my best friend, in a world we must defend

It’s the lunar event and a huge explore update dropped on Friday. So I thought, maybe I’ll roll to check it out; I can snag some lunar marks and IBF that litter I have cooking. But we were playing Palworld all weekend and I didn’t want to clock out every half hour to send out my hunters and spend down energy. Then I went back to forgetting that WD exists.

It’s like I said many months ago: I’m not the rarerolling sort. Either I roll or I don’t.

Anyway, Palworld! It’s an open-world Pokemon ripoff with base building aspects. A significant chunk of my Twitter feed is dedicated to people hating on this game. They’re grabbing their pitchforks over plagiarism, which is a fair critique: many of the monster designs are so clearly ripped from Pokemon that I’m surprised Nintendo hasn’t sued their pants off. (A few of the more egregious examples: palette-swapped Shaymin, Eevee with a blanket on, Clodsire with googly eyes, literally just Lycanroc and Luxray.) However, I’m not fussed about it. Nintendo is a big boy and can defend its IP if it wants, and in the meantime, the game is fun. I’m bemused by how many people are genuinely upset about this game.

As with any open-world game, I’m intensely scatterbrained: oh hey a lifmunk effigy! oh hey an egg! oh hey a pokemon to catch! The game actively encourages puttering around by giving a hefty exp bonus for the first 10 catches of each species, so catching random pokemon is the best way to level.

There’s also base management, which I have admittedly not involved myself much in. You can have your pokemon perform activities around the base (mining, logging, planting). It’s fun coming back to a bustling base and seeing them sleeping in their little beds at night. When you craft/cook/build something, pokemon with that area of expertise will run up and help you with it. It adds a lot of charm, and it’s neat to have a use for pokemon outside your battle team. However:

“We are short on coal and ore again,” announces meisnewbie.

Thus far, I’ve ignored all the logistics re: allocation of workers and balancing the various resources we need. I just return to base, make pokeballs and ammo, and set off into the wilderness again. Meanwhile newbie is constantly putting out fires. We have a dedicated server, which is glitchy in that pokemon sometimes get “stuck” and don’t eat or rest unless there’s a player nearby. Sometimes we log in and discover everyone at base three is starving and depressed.

• Base 1 (boss: Dante): A small, homey base. Straw beds, a variety of workbenches arrayed around the poke box, our first wooden house. It’s located near the edge of a cliff, and our pokemon kept falling off, so now there’s a wooden palisade around the perimeter. Also there are chests scattered everywhere because Dante needed to daisy chain 10K wood to base 2.
• Base 2 (boss: numbers): Our main base of operations, built on a large flat plateau (NO cliffs). Construction-wise, it’s variety hour: there’s an open-air wooden longhouse where the pokemon sleep, a three-story brutalist stone keep for chests (it was visually unacceptable until I added windows, multiple balconies, outdoor lighting fixtures, a keg stand, etc.), and a recently-constructed steel floor area for our workbenches and assembly lines.
• Base 3 (boss: newbie): The mining base. Basically just a work camp. But it’s still got a fun vibe because it’s full of Dumuds.