Japan's Patent Office has placed a rejected patent application under review after Nintendo filed a counterargument.
The application, Patent Publication No. 2026-077713, describes a game mechanic for capturing monsters and is linked to Nintendo's ongoing infringement lawsuit against Palworld.
According to attorney Kiyoshi Kurihara, as reported by Automaton, legal professionals noted unusual sparring between Nintendo and regulators over the inventiveness of the mechanic.
The Patent Office initially cited a 13-year-old gameplay video of Pokemon: Generations, an unofficial indie title, to argue that selecting and throwing a capture item was not uniquely inventive.
Nintendo challenged the decision, asserting that citing a copyright-infringing game was improper.
The Patent Office responded that copyright status does not affect inventive step evaluations.
It added that technical precision would require cumbersome descriptions of characters and items, such as referring to Pikachu as "an object in the form of a small yellow animal" and a Poke Ball as "a spherical object with a red upper half and a white lower half."
Regulators maintained that even with such rephrasing, the logical structure of the grounds for refusal remains unchanged.
Following Nintendo's petition, the official website for Japan's Patent Office updated the status of the application to show that its rejection decision is currently under review.
