Nintendo Tried to Patent Catching Pokémon. Japan Said No — Twice.

Nintendo has more lawyers on staff than some countries have librarians, and this week a single patent examiner in Japan handed them their second loss on the same application — using a decade-old fan game almost nobody remembers as the deciding piece of evidence. Normally I’d skim a headline like this and move on. This one I read twice, because the tone of the rejection is doing more damage to Nintendo’s public image than the actual legal outcome is.

What Actually Happened

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filed a divisional patent application — No. 2026-019762 — covering an “in-game monster-capturing system.” We’re talking the actual building blocks of Pokémon: throwing an item to catch a creature, riding or summoning battle creatures, switching between combat and non-combat catching. It’s a sibling of the patents Nintendo is actively suing Palworld developer Pocketpair with, though this specific application wasn’t directly used in that lawsuit.

Japan’s Patent Office rejected it. Twice. Once in April, and again in July after Nintendo formally objected. The grounds: the application lacked an “inventive step,” meaning it wasn’t novel enough to deserve a patent in the first place. The evidence the examiner leaned on to prove that? A 13-year-old YouTube video of a fan-made indie game called Pokémon Generations, doing basically the same things back in 2013

Nintendo’s counter-argument was that the video shouldn’t count as valid prior art because the fan game itself infringed on Pokémon’s copyright. The JPO’s response, paraphrased generously: that’s not how any of this works — the video still proves the mechanic isn’t original, and whether the source material was itself legal has nothing to do with patentability. Japanese patent attorney Kiyoshi Kurihara described the whole exchange as containing things rarely seen in standard patent practice — which, in patent-speak, is basically a public roasting.

Is This Actually a Win for Palworld?

A loss for Nintendo, sure. Albeit a limited one.

This specific application isn’t one of the patents currently being used against Pocketpair in the active lawsuit, so its rejection doesn’t directly gut the case.

But it’s from the same patent family, built on the same catching/riding/battling claims. The reasoning the JPO used here — these mechanics aren’t inventive, older games already did this — is the same reasoning that could eventually threaten the patents Nintendo is actually suing with, if Pocketpair or anyone else challenges them directly. It’s less a direct hit and more a preview of where the cracks are.

Nintendo still has options. They can appeal to the JPO Commissioner within three months, or refile a narrower application built around the eight claims that weren’t rejected.

This also isn’t happening in a vacuum. It follows a similar USPTO rejection in the US back in April, where an examiner threw out all 26 claims in a related “summon and fight” patent. That’s patent offices in two different countries, independently pushing back on Nintendo’s monster-catching IP claims in the same year. At some point that stops being a fluke and starts being a pattern.

Why Everyone’s Talking About It

Two things, honestly. First, the David vs. Goliath thing is just too easy — Pocketpair’s the little guy getting hauled into court by Nintendo, so every single stumble in this case turns into an underdog moment online, even when the actual legal weight of it is basically nothing. Fine, whatever, I get it, I do it too.

Second, and this is the one that actually pulled me in: patent examiners aren’t supposed to have a personality. Have you ever talked to one? I don’t think I have, but I doubt I’d remember it if I did. One can only imagine that they’re like architects — just boring AF. Their whole job is just — read the filing, cite the prior art, stay dry, go home. This one didn’t stay dry. And now I’ve got Japanese patent Twitter passing around lines from an actual rejection notice like it’s a group chat screenshot, which is a sentence I did not expect to type this year. I read government paperwork for a hobby now, apparently.

Bottom Line

This doesn’t end the Palworld lawsuit and it doesn’t invalidate any of Nintendo’s already-granted patents. But it’s an embarrassing second rejection in the same patent family, it undercuts the “we’re just untouchable because we are Nintendo and we’re protecting original innovation” story Nintendo has been telling publicly, and it hands Pocketpair’s prior-art strategy — surfacing older games and mods as evidence — more credibility heading into the actual trial. Not a knockout. Just another crack in the foundation.

One More Thing, Because I Can’t Not Say It

Let’s be clear about scale here, because the internet loves to pretend every legal loss is the beginning of the end for a trillion-dollar company. This is not that. Nothing about a rejected divisional patent application is bringing Nintendo down, dinging their stock, or teaching a giant a lesson. It’s a paper cut at most. It might — might, and I genuinely mean maybe a little, sort of, kind of — have some marginal influence on the actual Palworld lawsuit down the line. I wouldn’t bet on it doing much more than that.

That being said, we also can’t all keep collectively pretending Palworld didn’t intentionally lift a huge amount of its look and feel from Pokémon. It obviously did. Anyone who’s played five minutes of it knows exactly what it’s doing and who it’s doing it to.

But — and I really do want people to actually read this part — I think the game rules. I’ve sunk an embarrassing number of hours into it and had a genuinely great time doing it. Also, because I am not a lawyer and I am deeply, proudly ignorant about how any of this legal machinery actually works, I have boldly assumed for a long time that Palworld would just be protected under something like parody law — the same general idea that lets Saturday Night Live get away with as much as it does. A clear parody isn’t supposed to be an easy lawsuit target. That was my working theory. I have no idea if it’s remotely correct.

see what sparked this post

Elfishchunk had never once said the phrase “inventive step” out loud before this week. That streak is over now, and he’s already used it in an argument that had nothing to do with patents.