Nintendo is no stranger to litigation, but its latest fight with Japan’s patent system has reportedly irritated the Japan Patent Office so much that the examiner didn’t bother with polite silence. In a refusal decision sent earlier this month, the JPO rejected Nintendo’s challenge to an earlier refusal of Patent Application 2026-019762, and the examiner even described Nintendo’s position as an “absurd misunderstanding.”

The details matter because Nintendo’s core argument was not just “we disagree.” It was “the examiner used the wrong kind of evidence, and also misidentified what the evidence shows.” According to PC Gamer, in April 2026 the JPO issued a notice of refusal for 2026-019762, finding Nintendo’s described Pokémon mechanics too similar to prior art. Nintendo then submitted a written opinion in June contesting that refusal, and the JPO has now shut that down, keeping the judgment unchanged.

At the center of the dispute is Nintendo’s Patent Application 2026-019762, part of a broader portfolio of Pokémon-related patent filings aimed at securing ownership over systems related to catching, battling, and riding Pokémon. The JPO’s rejection hinges on patentability basics, specifically that something must demonstrate “an inventive step” to be non-obvious to practitioners in the relevant field. In this case, the examiner said the mechanics described in Nintendo’s application were too close to earlier work.

Here’s the controversial part: the rejection referenced a 13-year-old gameplay video of an unofficial, fan-made Pokémon game. The logic is straightforward. If a gameplay video demonstrates software concepts similar to what you’re claiming in 2026, it can function as prior art for the inventive-step analysis, even if it is not an official product. Nintendo did not like that. In its written opinion, Nintendo reportedly argued that the examiner didn’t cite a “fan game” so much as “merely a video,” and insisted that videos cannot count as disqualifying prior art for a videogame patent because videos are not videogames.

Nintendo then escalated the argument into copyright territory. It claimed the video is an unlicensed work using Pokémon designs and characters, calling it copyright infringement. Nintendo argued that something cannot be considered obvious if it is illegal. It also attacked the examiner’s phrasing, saying it was “extremely inappropriate” for the examiner to deliberately misidentify the infringing product as if it were a genuine product by using official Pokémon terminology. Nintendo’s critique included that the examiner referred to characters by their “official, god-given Christian names” like “Bulbasaur” and “Pikachu,” and that the examiner should have used more cautious language like “a character that infringes on Pikachu” or “a character that infringes on Bulbasaur.”

The JPO response is what makes this story feel less like a technical patent squabble and more like a system-level impatience moment. The examiner explicitly noted that Nintendo’s copyright infringement assertions have no bearing on patentability considerations. In Japanese patent law, the decision reportedly states there is “no provision excluding inventions that infringe upon the copyright of others.” Whether the cited work infringes on copyright, the examiner wrote, is irrelevant to the inventive-step judgment, and the JPO described this view as standard among patent practitioners.

And on the “you misnamed the characters” complaint, the JPO basically ran it through a precision grinder. The examiner argued that even if the terms were rewritten in a more generic way, the underlying novelty problem would remain. PC Gamer quotes the examiner deploying what amounts to Advanced Pedantry, suggesting alternatives like identifying elements by form rather than branded names: “an object in the form of a small animal” instead of “Pokémon,” “an object in the form of a boy wearing a red hat” instead of “Ash,” “an object in the form of a small yellow animal” instead of “Pikachu,” “an object in the form of a small green animal” instead of “Bulbasaur,” and “a spherical object with a red upper half and a white lower half” instead of “Poké Ball.” The examiner then concluded that even with that sort of reframing, Nintendo’s claims would not become inventive.

The examiner also addressed the evidence-type dispute over whether a gameplay video can demonstrate the relevant software concepts. PC Gamer reports the examiner said it was unclear whether Nintendo believed a video of gameplay can’t be sufficient evidence, or whether Nintendo thought it could be a video animation narrated in a way meant to look like a videogame. The decision reportedly says the first interpretation is enough for refusal, while the second is “too ridiculous” to consider. That is where the “absurd misunderstanding” language lands.

For decision-makers, the strategic signal is that this is not just about one patent filing. Nintendo’s tone suggests it wants stronger claim positioning, but the JPO’s message is about how examiners evaluate novelty and non-obviousness, not about litigating the legitimacy of cited works. Even if Nintendo has three months to petition for an appeal trial before JPO judges, and could file further divisional patent applications with more carefully crafted claims, this application is noted as unrelated to the Palworld dispute. Still, for any board, IP committee, or in-house counsel reading along, the second-order takeaway is simple: when regulators say copyright is irrelevant to inventive step, your debate framework changes. Your leverage shifts from “is the prior art illegal” to “is the claimed invention actually non-obvious,” because the patent office is not going to let you relitigate the world before it decides what can be patented.