Japan’s patent office has rejected a Nintendo application related to its Palworld lawsuit, citing a lack of originality. The decision raises questions about the validity of several Nintendo patents describing creature capture systems that are central to the company’s complaint against Palworld.
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In late October 2025, the Japan Patent Office rejected Nintendo’s patent application no. 2024-031879, which is related to the family of creature-capture patents that Palworld is accused of infringing. A JPO patent examiner found that the application lacks originality to be deemed an invention, citing prior art such as Monster Hunter 4, ARK: Survival Evolved, gacha browser game Kantai Collection, Pocketpair’s own Craftopia, and even Pokemon GO. All of those were released prior to the December 2021 priority date from the rejected application.
Nintendo has 60 days from the date of its rejection notice to amend its application or appeal the decision, giving it until late December 2025 to do so. Since the application isn’t cited in the Palworld patent lawsuit directly, its rejection won’t have a direct impact on the ongoing case. However, as explained by Games Fray’s analyst Florian Mueller, the newly rejected application is a “key building block” in Nintendo’s strategy to capture a wide range of creature-capture system implementations. It is the child of patent JP7493117 and the parent of JP7545191, both of which are cited in Nintendo’s complaint.
tl:dr;
The Nintendo v PalWorld lawsuit is still on going, but Nintendo has been told it’s attempt to patent the concept of a capturable and summonable creature is invalid, in Japan.
As part of their ongoing lawsuit, Nintendo is claiming PalWorld has violated those… now invalid patents, so Nintendo’s overall case against PalWorld is now significantly more weak.
lol, I still remember being utterly baffled by how many Nintendo uberfans were just blown away by the kind of construction / physics elements of BotW.
Like… I’d been playing Garry’s mod for years before it even became a game, sold for money.
I was doing that kind of construction silliness … what, before Twilight Princess came out? Something like that?
Funniest part is that learning how to fuck around in lua there, was what spurred me on to learning programming… whereas Nintendo fans kind of tend to be the Apple fans of the video game world… on average, they don’t really know anything about hardware or software, compared to an Xbox or Playstation fan, if you compare people of similar ages in each of those fandoms.
So, I remeber ending up inadvertently triggering a fair number of BotW fans when I just started to describe havok/source physics calls, as well as contraptions I’d built an actual decade prior.
ACF is fucking bonkers, don’t know if its still maintained, but yeah I basically just made my model minfigs of tanks and ifvs and such in digital, functional form, hahah!