Nintendo has been dealt a bit of a legal blow in Japan as the Patent Office has rejected an application relevant to the company’s ongoing case against Pocketpair’s Palworld.
This patent is related to monster catching à la Pokémon, but it’s not quite the same one filed in the US reported on back in September 2025. This one appears to be linked to the act of throwing and aiming objects to either capture a creature or initiate a battle.
GameFray reports that the patent in question (which is pending application no. 2024-031879, so not specifically one of the Palworld applications, but related) has been rejected as the application lacks an inventive step, determined after looking at “prior art”, with ARK mentioned as a specific example.
The Notice of Reasons for Refusal, dated 22nd October 2025, states (via machine translation) that “the claimed invention(s) could have easily been made by persons who have common knowledge in the technical field.”
Evidence submitted against the application includes a video from ARK of a character throwing a pod-like item at the ground, and at other creatures, and aiming with a blue crosshair, and a list of tools from the survival game that can be used in-game, including an arrow that can be used to stun another creature.
Other games mentioned for comparison are manuals, tutorials, and Wikis for Craftopia, Monster Hunter 4, Pokémon GO, and the free web browser game KanColle (also known as Kantai Collection).
While the rejection is non-final — meaning Nintendo can resubmit their application with modifcations — it also shares a parent with JP7493117 (which focuses on character movement, collision, interaction, and throwing creatures at one another to initiate battle) and is the parent of JP7545191 (which is the aiming to catch or battle in a virtual space) both of which are crucial to the main Palworld case.
As GameFray notes, if one member of a patent family is faced with issues, it can often highlight other problems with the rest of the group. Plus, judges often respect the decisions made by patent examiners. So we’ll have to see what Nintendo’s response is.
With the wider Palworld case, proceedings are still ongoing. Nintendo first filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Pocketpair in September 2024 which “seeks an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages on the grounds that Palworld, a game developed and released by the Defendant, infringes multiple patent rights.”
Since the lawsuit, Palworld has changed its Pal catching and summoning mechanic, which Pocketpair has gone on to speak about with disappointment a number of times. But the developer is still considering bringing the game to Switch 2.
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