One thing that has always bothered me is how people kept calling Palworld "the game Pokémon fans have always wanted." I put around 30 hours into it, and I just don't agree:
well at first it sucked me in mostly due to the novelty of being a new Game but once the shock value wore off it just became old. There's no real story and progression sucks, and the game is just Ark with Pokemon and I already hated Ark, not to mention this game is also buggy and unoptimized as hell even with 1.0 and while it's more excusable than Pokemon for being in the same state, it's still inexcusable
Oh and also the creature designs are not the best . Like even when I first played the game I was like "some of these designs are basically asking for a lawsuit slap from Nintendo". Like I cannot name a single Pal aside from Chillet bc it's basically the mascot now, Grizzbolt cuz I kept losing to it, or Lovelander cuz it was the mascot of that weird dating sim they released "as a joke" . I don't even blame people for thinking they used Al to create these dudes because some of them genuinely look like Pokemon processed through ChatGPT. This game basically copied and regurgitated Pokemon's art style...I know that dragon quest comparison image is floating around but you need to have serious cognitive dissonance to think that they're similar in any way.... Nobody's mistaking Pokemon for dragon quest monsters and vice versa
Plus, its fanbase is based less around their love for it but rather a huge circlejerk that pat themselves on the back for "sticking it to gamefreak" and "how superior they are to the normies" (their words, not mine)
The sad reality is that Almost nobody outside of Pokemon and SMT/persona fans care about the Monster Tamer genre, One of The reasons Palworld gained traction so much is because IGN/media, haters, and gaming influencers saw it as something they could use against Pokemon.
Overall, Palworld is not a good replacement for Pokémon. What I want is better replicated in Persona/SMT, Cassette Beasts, Monster Hunter Stories and certain ROM hacks
It's an Ark Survival evolved clone pretending to be a pokemon clone. It's an ok game that some people insist is the greatest game of all time, and those people are incredibly unpleasant and hostile. It doesn't help that the ultra-edgelord "You enslave these creatures and make them suffer with guns and violence" that a lot of the advertising focused on resulted in the fanbase being full of incredibly toxic edglords, who like you say, are more interested in "owning the normies" or whatever than actually playing a fun game.
It's not even really a pokemon game, if the "Pals" were just generic fantasy monster looking things literally no one would've cared about this game, it's only got any attention because of the fake pokemon designs, there's something kind of sickening about that. The game just strikes me as a lazy cash grab, with no real "heart" of its own. It's ok, but doesn't do anything to be unique, it is only noteworthy for how blatantly it rips off other stuff.
If you're looking for a fun creature catching game that does things differently to pokemon without just trying to imitate it, I'd recommend Monster Sanctuary, it's got a really fun 3v3 battle system and a metrovania style exploration system, where you can get to pretty late parts of the game early if you know what you're doing, so it rewards exploration really well.