Dumb Things We Ignore In Palworld
"Palworld" has proven that it is more than just a game-of-the-week fad. It has some real staying power, in part because its world and characters have surprising depth. Look into the lore of the cute Pals that helped sell the game, and you'll find some seriously messed-up secrets that are only going to make you want to investigate more. The Palpagos Islands where the game is set are populated with a number of mysteries, and fans still have a ton of unanswered questions about "Palworld" that we hope get addressed in future updates.
But like most any other story, "Palworld" also contains plenty of dumb things in it that we need to ignore to keep playing. Logical inconsistencies and silly contrivances are the secret fuel of much fiction, but sometimes "Palworld" pushes suspension of disbelief to its absolute breaking point. Feel free to examine some of the goofy things the game wants us to look past (or embrace), but don't blame us if thinking about "Palworld" too hard ruins the experience for you.
Pals shouldn't be able to pull triggers
"Palworld" has been described as "'Pokémon' with guns" far too many times at this point, especially considering that in reality the game is so much more. By now, players are so invested in what makes "Palworld" so different from "Pokémon" that it's easy to forget how much "Palworld" leaned into that comparison when it was first released. The original trailers on Steam put cute creatures with heavy armaments front-and-center and really made it seem like the whole appeal of the game was getting a little sheep-looking fellow to mow down your enemies with an AK.
Maybe it's not the main focus of the game, but arming your Pals is still a big part of the "Palworld" experience, which is a little strange if you stop to think about it. Maybe we can buy the fact that Pals are intelligent enough to understand how to use a gun, but it's much harder to get us to believe that they'd be any good at shooting. Lamballs don't even have opposable thumbs! There's no way they're firing 15 rounds a second. Then again, maybe it's possible that some serious modifications could make a gun work with a paw or hoof. Engineers, get back to us on that one.
Pals wouldn't make a great labor force
Another "Palworld" feature that the game's marketing made explicitly clear is that Pals aren't just meant to be cute friends or travel companions. You're supposed to put Pals to work. The more you become invested in building an elaborate base, the more you'll come to realize that you need all kinds of Pals to gather resources, move items around, and craft gear for your next adventures. Without Pal labor, the Palpagos Islands would fall apart, and "Palworld" would be missing a huge part of its gameplay loop.
Listen, it's great to have Pals available to cater to a player's every whim, but they would make terrible employees in reality. First of all, how are many of these quadrupedal creatures farming or crafting anything? Even setting that aside, just consider the upkeep a Pal labor force would require — or the physical ramifications of this kind of work. Players might not have to pay their Pals, but they definitely need to feed them if they're keep working. No one knows much about Pal biology, but in the real world, horses can eat roughly 19 pounds of food every day. And for some reason, Pals never seem to need to go to the bathroom. Something's not adding up here.
Pals should be the ones running the world
We've talked about how ridiculous it is that Pals can use guns and effectively run our entire base of operations by themselves. It doesn't make real-world sense for Pals to be able to do any of that, but even within the video game logic of "Palworld," the capabilities of Pals raise some serious questions. Realistically, we wouldn't get far on the Palagos Islands without the help of our little buddies. From combat to labor, players rely on Pals for everything, so why exactly are humans the ones in charge?
To be fair to "Palworld," it does make some attempts to show that the balance of power between humans and Pals is always shifting somewhat. Humanity has gone out of its way to control Pals, creating Pal Spheres and the towers for this very purpose. Clearly humans have some good tech, but it still doesn't make sense that they've basically come out on top. Pals are shown to be quite intelligent, with some of them being as smart as humans. They're also competent in just about every way humans are, plus they have abilities that are borderline magic. Sure, not all Pals work for humans, but it doesn't even make sense that this many do. Realistically — much like in the world of "Pokémon" — Pals should be the ones running the show.
People don't journal this much
This is admittedly a contrived thing that pops up in so many games, for completely understandable reasons. Video game writers don't have easy jobs. They need to convey world-building elements, character backstories, and entire plotlines while also leaving enough room for player action to be the real focus on the experience. As important as the story is, gameplay elements are typically going to be a developer's main priority.
In "Palworld," as in so many other games, that means we learn almost everything about the world from picking up discarded journals. Apparently every important character in the world is suffering from hypergraphia, and none of them care about keeping their journals in a secure location. People are just constantly writing autobiographies, historical studies, and Pal ethnographies and then leaving their pages lying around for anyone to pick up. It's completely ridiculous, but it's also a video game trope that's become so common, it's almost unnoticeable until you really take a step back.
Humans evolving from Pals is a big stretch
It might seem obvious to say, but Pals don't make any biological sense at all. "Palworld" is populated by completely regular human beings who are physically just like us, who somehow coexist alongside magical creatures that could easily dominate the world. Fine, this type of story always requires some suspension of disbelief, but if you really dig into the lore of the Pals, you'll discover that this game asks you to ignore something even more unbelievable.
The Paldeck entry for Robinquills tells us that Pals and humans apparently share an ancestry. It says, "[The Robinquill] may prove to be a key for understanding what Pals are and how they diverged from humans so long ago." On an evolutionary scale, we technically all have a common ancestor, but it seems beyond silly that humans and Pals are biologically one and the same. These things can shoot fire, so they're clearly aliens or something, right? The true origin of Pals is still a bit of a mystery in the game, and that luckily makes this quite a bit easier to ignore.