It’s very weird. I’ve seen plenty of actually edgy pokemon games, every other pokemon romhack has a ton of “and the pokemon die for real in this one! It’s super dark and mature and edgy!” stuff in it.

A lot of this weird freaking out about this game seems to come from people who seem to think “pokemon” is the only thing that has ever done a creature catching and battling game, and have never heard of any other games in the genre.

(and have never actually played Palworld, because it’s much more of an Ark survival evolved knock off than a pokemon knockoff, the creature designs are just very heavily inspired by pokemon, with a few being directly based on specific pokemon, so people look at a screenshot of one of them and say that they “ripped off” pokemon, because drawing cute cartoony creatures with anime eyes in that style means it must be a rip off and not homage or inspiration.)