You are correct, I missed that it was still under speculation.

Pocketpair has a pretty good case against Nintendo here, I think, because other games have used these things before.

I know it was never actually released, but Scalebound had a mechanic that would have allowed a player to tell their dragon to perform a task, albeit, usually destructively.

Guild Wars 2 Added a mechanic years ago that let players traverse water and land by automatically a switching between mounts.

‘Releasing’ a creature into a 3d environment has been done by every minion-mancer class in an MMO since the dawn of the genre.

Looks like it’s over the game mechanics of ‘releasing a creature into a 3d environment and having it perform a contextual task’ & ‘having a rideable mount switch to a different rideable mount depending on terrain’

I don’t think either of these would work in the US, because you can’t protect game mechanics here, but I’m not sure about Japan’s take.

Edit: I missed that this was still under speculation at the time of the post:

https://bulbagarden.net/threads/nintendo-and-the-pokemon-company-jointly-file-lawsuit-for-patent-infringement-against-palworld-creator-pocketpair-inc-in-the-tokyo-district-court.303354/

Based on searching of Japanese patent databases, initial speculation is that these may include (but is not necessarily limited to) patents relating to game mechanics and gameplay features from Pokémon: Legends Arceus, and may include patents such as one for throwing and using Poké Balls in a 3D space (JP,2023-092953,A); and one for automatically switching between ride Pokémon as a player transitions between different terrain, such as between air and the ground (JP,2023-092954,A).