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."
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.
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