Palworld’s Panthalus looks like Pokémon’s Kyogre. Fans tried this fight in 2024.
Palworld 1.0 added a giant legendary whale on July 10, and Pokémon fans immediately called it a Kyogre copy. They ran this exact play in January 2024, and it fell apart on them inside a week.
Palworld hit 1.0 on July 10, 2026, adding more than 70 new Pals. One of them is Panthalus, a huge Water-type legendary whale you fight at the Deserted Islet after collecting four Echobones.
Players took one look and said Kyogre.
Screenshots went up on X. The argument started. Vice covered it within a day. Somebody also decided the new Ocean Titan, Neptilius, looks like Giratina.
We have been here before. It went badly.
Pokémon fans spent January 2024 trying to prove Pocketpair stole 3D models
Palworld launched into early access on January 19, 2024 and sold five million copies in three days. The design accusations started before the first weekend was over.
This wasn’t people saying the Pals looked samey. Fans went forensic. They pulled the actual 3D models out of both games and overlaid them, arguing the meshes lined up too well to be a coincidence.
The most-shared version came from an X user called byofrog, who put Pokémon’s Lycanroc model on top of a Pal and showed near-identical proportions. Former Blizzard designer Eric Covington posted that building a mesh that close by accident was practically impossible.
Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe said his artists were getting abuse and what looked like death threats. He told Automaton the studio had “no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies.”
The stolen-model claim fell apart in about a week
Other modelers went and checked.
An X user called MajoraZ pointed out the triangle topology in the Palworld models was nothing like the Pokémon ones. MetalDragonKid put up side-by-sides showing the meshes never actually line up.
Then byofrog started walking it back. They admitted scaling the models to compare them, told Dexerto they regretted using the word “exactly” so flippantly, and told Kotaku there wasn’t “100 percent conclusive evidence” and probably never would be.
Clownfish TV covered the collapse on January 25, 2024.
Attorney Richard Hoeg told VGC at the time what the difference was. Proof of actually stolen assets could build a real case. Being “inspired by” existing designs, even down to proportions and color rules, generally could not.
That’s the whole gap between “this looks like that” and “this is that.”
Nintendo sued Pocketpair over patents, not designs
Here’s the part that should end the argument.
Nintendo and The Pokémon Company sued Pocketpair on September 18, 2024 in Tokyo District Court. Not for copyright. Not for stealing designs. For patent infringement.
Pocketpair’s own disclosure named three patents: 7545191, 7493117, and 7528390. They cover mechanics. Throwing a thing to catch a creature. Summoning it. Riding it. The plaintiffs asked for an injunction and roughly 10 million yen, about $66,000.
Nintendo owns Kyogre. Nintendo has more lawyers than Pocketpair has employees. Nintendo had every screenshot the fans had, plus two years to look at them.
It sued over throwing a ball.
Techdirt argued in July 2026 that a copyright case would have forced Nintendo to prove the Pals were “substantially similar” to Pokémon, which is a famously soft standard that hands defendants a fair-use argument. Patents skipped all of that.
It hasn’t gone great anyway. Pocketpair patched the capture mechanic in November 2024. Japan’s Patent Office knocked back one of Nintendo’s patents in October 2025 for not being original. A US examiner rejected all 26 claims in Nintendo’s summoning patent as obvious, citing older Konami and Bandai Namco patents.
By late 2025 Nintendo had narrowed its case to target only old pre-patch versions of the game. Analyst Florian Mueller told Techdirt it now comes down to “a hypothetical injunction that doesn’t apply to current product versions.”
No verdict. No settlement. Two years and change, and the designs have never been in it.
So about that whale
One widely shared post got the actual point right while arguing the opposite side. Game Freak, it said, “doesn’t own the concept of a legendary/divine whale creature.”
That’s correct, and it’s the ballgame. Kyogre is a big blue whale god. So is Panthalus. So is every big blue whale god anyone has drawn since somebody first looked at a whale and thought it seemed important.
The rights-holder had two years, every screenshot, and more legal firepower than anyone in the industry. It looked at the designs and went after the ball-throwing instead.
Palworld’s card game lands July 30. Bring snacks.
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Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
Hat Tips:
Vice (July 14, 2026), verified for the Panthalus and Kyogre comparison spreading on X, the widely shared post’s wording, and the Neptilius and Giratina comparison
Game8 and PC Gamer (July 2026), verified for the Palworld 1.0 release date of July 10, 2026, Panthalus being a Water-type legendary added in 1.0, and the Echobone quest at the Deserted Islet
VGC (January 2024), verified for the plagiarism accusations, Takuro Mizobe’s response about abuse and death threats against his artists, and attorney Richard Hoeg’s distinction between stolen assets and being inspired by existing designs
PC Gamer (January 22, 2024), verified for the byofrog Lycanroc model overlay, Eric Covington’s comment on mesh proportions, and Mizobe’s statement to Automaton
Kotaku and Dexerto (January 2024), verified for byofrog admitting to scaling the models, regretting the word “exactly,” and conceding there was no conclusive evidence, plus the MajoraZ and MetalDragonKid rebuttals
Techdirt (July 2, 2026), verified for the current state of the case, Nintendo narrowing its claims in late 2025 to pre-patch versions, and Florian Mueller’s analysis via Games Fray
Clownfish TV (January 25, 2024), the sister-site coverage of the original debunk