Interestingly, the patent makes explicit mention of 'motion of throwing ball toward front/enemy character'. I wonder if that makes any difference as to which situations the patent is applicable to. Another point of note is that the sub-character will battle the enemy character when said enemy gets close to the player character even if the sub-character hasn't appeared on the field. A third note is that the sub-character can automatically engage enemies in a certain radius so if the player sends the sub-character into a group of enemies the sub-character will battle them one after another until either being victorious over all of them or until losing a battle. Considering Palworld launched in 2024 and this patent was filed in 2022, I wonder if it was filed as a reaction to whatever material was available in the Palworld announcement of 2021.