I haven't seen a pocket monster in a fortnight! Let's Play Palworld!

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The Dragon Element

As a group:
Pokemon typing is based on what kind of matter or energy the mon can manipulate half the time. The other half is based on the mons' body structure. Palworld copied that part straight over, of course. "Dragon" isn't an elemental power or a particular kind of energy, it's just how the monster is shaped.
Couple of dinosaurs, a couple standard-Western-dragon hexapod forms, couple sea serpents. Apart from Chillet and Dinossom, they're late-midgame to endgame appearances. Credit where it's due, there are a handful of subverted expectations from the bogstandard "choose from either elegant/aloof or intimidating badass" designs. Relaxaurus looks dopey, Quivern is fluffy, Elphidran looks like a plastic toy. But the only novel thing here is Chillet, which may explain its runaway success in the fandom.

Honorable mentions:
Chillet: duh

Compared to first-gen:
Well the only comparison is Dratini/Dragonair/Dragonite. Or should I say, Chillet/Azurobe/Quivern?

Compared to the Pokedex as a whole:
It did take TPC a while to get around to dragons, on account of them not showing up much until third gen. But once they got comfortable slapping dragon typing onto any old thing, they definitely broke out of the "hexapod reptile"/"serpent" body type. There's a fluffy bird, an antlion, a slug, a bat, various forms of apple, pieces of sushi, and a very, very tall coconut tree. Surprisingly there are only a couple of dinosaurs on the list, as prehistoric anything tends to get rock-type instead. At this point I'm pretty sure TPC is just getting weird with the dragon type because they use the amount of "WHY ISN'T CHARIZARD A DRAGON THOUGH" as some kind of internal feedback metric, but still, they get weird with it. Don't be afraid to get weird, PocketPair!

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The Water Element

In general:
If you're used to Pokemon games, particularly the third-gen games, then the sheer lack of water-element Pals is the big surprise here. There are only eleven of them, not counting the elemental variants on account of arbitrary decision not to.
I think the real surprise for water-element Pals is the lack of any honest-to-god fish. Celaray is based on a cartiliginous fish, yeah, but when it comes to fins-and-gills-and-khakis the closest you're gonna get is Jormuntide, or maybe Gobfin. There is an emphasis on various sorts of sea-serpents, but still. Props for not taking the low-hanging fruit on this one!

Honorable Mentions:
Teafant: Water-element elephants aren't something you see too often, though at this point I have to wonder if Breath of the Wild was a design factor. Making the elephant a little teapot is a cute variation on the idea.

Compared to first-gen:
Psyduck is really a platypus but it turns out so is Fuack, so that's parallel. But first-gen also gave us a starfish, one of those weird frogs with translucent skin so you can see their internal organs from the outside, an ammonite, a horseshoe crab/trilobite mantis monster, and some vaguely otter-like sort of thing that catches prey using its own tail as bait. Even one of the plain fish has a memorable gimmick, by turning into one of the sea serpents Palworld loves so much (and Gyarados still has one up on Jormuntide for its design evoking a koinobori).

Compared to the Pokedex as a whole:
But man, after those first few bangers it takes TPC a long time to break away from simple variations on fish, amphibians, or old gimmicks. The gun archerfish that turns into a tank octopus is a cool idea, but they downplayed the gun/tank angle so much it just seems bizarre now. The scallop with a pearl inside that's actually an egg that hatches into an eel of some sort is a good idea. But then it takes a couple more games of uninspired adaptions of real-world species before they come up with the ghost jellyfish royalty, the ninja frog, the barnacle colony Voltron, the mantis shrimp cannon, and Pyukumuku. Maybe it's really hard to come up with cool and unique water monsters because there are so many weird-ass examples that already exist IRL life.

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The Ice Element

In general:
There are only eleven ice-element Pals to be found, and four of them come in pairs. Swee and Sweepa hardly count as unique designs, and Penking doesn't really do much with the pirate motif to differentiate it from Pengullet. What I like most about the ice-element Pal designs, I think, is that few of them are so obviously their element as the fire- or grass-elements are. Apart from penguins being Antarctic birds there's nothing about Pengullet or Penking that suggest ice. There's certainly nothing icy about Swee/Sweepa, Chillet, Sibelyx, and arguably Wumpo.

Honorable Mentions:
That said, that also means none of the Pals really do anything surprising with an ice-type design. We get either "animal with ice parts" like Reindrix or "that doesn't look much like an ice monster at all".

Compared to first-gen and the Pokedex as a whole:
Ice is one of the rarer types to find in Pokemon, and if it wasn't the go-to answer for dragon-type in both Pokemon and Palworld it probably wouldn't have much reason to exist at all. Three of the five ice-type lines in first gen -- Dewgong, Cloyster, and Lapras -- seem more representative of the water-type to me. That leaves, uh, Jynx and Articuno. And man, looking at them as a whole, by the time you break away from "Yokai living on the windswept mountaintops", "animal with maybe some ice slapped on", or "monster made of ice", there ain't much left. Say what you will about Delibird and Vanilluxe, at least they tried.

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The Fire Element

In general:
From its resting place lodged deep in the human psyche, fire is the low-hanging fruit of elemental archetypes. Lots of hair or fur turned into flames, of course. Lot of red and orange motifs, to the point that Kitsun can be hard to find in the Paldeck simply because it's blue and white instead.

Honorable mentions:
Flambelle: Designed to evoke a melting candle makes Flambelle one of the few designs that isn't "animal with fire fur".
Suzaku: It's a take on the Vermillion Bird, but if you look closely, it doesn't look very bird-like. The face is all wrong, it's got horns, there's no feet, and the tail is that weird tripod thing. There's already a traditional phoenix in Faleris, so I'm glad they spruced up Suzaku a little.

Compared to first-gen and the Pokedex as a whole:
Now to be fair to PocketPair here it's not like the lion's share of fire-type Pokemon aren't also animals that are red or orange in color and have their fur or plumage set on fire (including, yes, the fire-type lion). The problem is that when Pokemon deviates from that gimmick you get some really good design concepts, like the lava snail whose body cooled into rock to form its shell, or the turtle-shell landmine, or the anteater with the fire tongue that eats metal ants. So by comparison, the Paldeck still looks pretty dull.

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The Grass Element

In general:
I see leaves of green... green leaves, too. I see green leaves, on me and you. And I think to myself, "What an uninspired design motif." There are just so many weird plant- or plant-adjacent real-world organisms that slapping a couple of flowers onto animals and calling it a day smacks of laziness.
With the inclusion of Cinnamoth, Beegarde, and Elizabee the grass-element also covers Pokemon's bug-type, but again doesn't do much with the concept. As I said in their own writeups, Cinnamoth is a sort of generic cute moth critter and Beegarde and Elizabee are humanoids with a few insect parts stuck on.

Honorable Mentions:
Gumoss: Despite being kind of useless in gameplay I gotta say "sapient blob of tree sap" is a pretty good idea for the mandatory video game slime monster.
Lifmunk: Brought up here only because I learned between the writeup for Lifmunk back on the first page and now that the game's internal files refer to it as "Carbunclo". So yes, the thing that isn't an animal covered in leaves is supposed to look like a Final Fantasy summon.

Compared to first gen:
Pokemon Red/Blue gave us a poisonous flower toad dinosaur, a mandragora that grows into a corpse flower, a cordyceps-infected beetle before cordyceps was well-known enough to be trendy, a pitcher-plant, an ambulatory psychic coconut tree, and a Fry Kid. That's all the grass-types in the game, and every goddamn one of those is a banger in its own right.

Compared to the Pokedex as a whole: ...to say nothing of the cat dandelion fluff, the dancing pineapple in a sombrero that speaks only in machine-translated Spanish, the boxing mushroom kangaroo, the cactus scarecrow, the world-turtle, a yeti conifer, a proper Venus flytrap, a cactus rattle full of seeds, a haunted tree stump, Rowlet, a clump of seaweed swinging an anchor it found in a shipwreck, and the dinosaur that liked bananas so much it started growing bananas off its own body. Okay, I take it all back, there's no way anybody's going to match the fantastic absurdity of all the plant monsters in Pokemon. Palworld gets a pass on this one.

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The Neutral Type

In general: Neutral-types are neutral because they lack the conceptual shorthand suggested by one of the other elements, so one might think all the strongest designs, the ones that could stand on their own, would go here. Instead, we get five Pals whose entire gimmick is having a fluffy coat of fur, and only Woolipop does anything interesting with the concept.

Honorable Mentions:
Grintale: In a lineup of forgettable designs the glowing eyes and leering smile stand out of the crowd.
Lunaris: Without a "psychic" type this telekinetic alien rabbit ended up in Neutral somehow.
Lovander: I dunno man it still feels like punching down

Compared to first-gen:
We've got Lamball/Cattiva/Chikipi filling in the "early, weak in a fight" Red and Blue made traditional with the likes of Rattata and Meowth. Nitewing and Galeclaw fill in the "early, forgettable bird" slots occupied by Pidgey and Spearow. Ribbuny and Vixy cover "aww, aren't they cute?" for Jigglypuff and Clefairy. What's left?

Compared to Pokedex as a whole:
The complaints about Pal designs in general, writ large. I'm not saying Pokemon doesn't have its share of dull Normal-types, but come on! Neutral-type is the part where you put all the really weird, bizarre shit! There's nothing on the list so charming as a two-headed flightless bird, a palindrome giraffe, a dopey beaver, a mascot suit, the living embodiment of hibernation, whatever the hell a Dunsparce is, or a perfectly round sheep. (Oh, wait, I guess they got that one.)

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The Dark Element

In general:
The game seems to use the dark-element as a shorthand for "dangerous, look out". Which, in a game where you're supposed to be leveraging anything you can for survival against hostile monsters, means it gets slapped around a lot. Dark-element Pals combine the obvious dark-type Pokemon, along with hints of Ghost-type. Poison attacks are represented in Palworld by dark-element moves, so I guess lump those in, too.
Which leaves a lot of archetypes to cover! Dark-type Pokemon are assorted jerks, the occasional goodhearted creature that's wrongfully perceived as a menace, and once in a while, the sacred night. Ghost-types are sneaky and mischievous when they're not the walking dead. Poison-type covers all sorts of toxins, venoms, pollution of the air and water, garbage, acid and chemical corrosion, or just plain ol' stank.
I suppose trying to lump all of that together meant they needed a lot of dark-types in the game... but it still feels kind of overdone. Without considering elemental variants, dark is tied with neutral as the most common element in the game, both beating grass by one. Of the elemental variants, there are seven "Cryst" to add to eleven original ice-elements. There are 0 neutral-element variations, whatever they would be called if there were any. There's only one "Botan" variant to add to grass's stock of nineteen. But there are six "Noct" or "Libero" variants on top of dark's 20 native types, making them the most common element in the Paldeck.

Honorable Mentions:
Depresso: An instant fan favorite for its perpetually bored, irritated expression.
Hoocrates and Cawgnito: "Smart bird" is an odd angle for dark-element to take, but sure, okay.
Leezpunk and Tombat: Dark-type Pokemon are jerks, but a couple of dark-element Pals play with that. They're not particularly hostile or dangerous (more so than any other Pals), but they have a desperate need for attention and validation. Again, another weird angle, but a refreshing change from "grr dangerous" that monopolizes the element later on.

Compared to first gen:
There weren't any dark-types in first-gen Pokemon! We're looking at Gengar (and I guess the various poisonous plants and bugs, which don't really merit the comparison).

Compared to the Pokedex as a whole:
They're spooky! They're dangerous! They're jealous and vindictive! You'll be cursed, or worse! Even if they mean well they might kill you! There's no shortage of dark- or ghost-type Pokemon later on but damned if the dark-element Pal list is just "Tyranitar and Darkrai" repeated again and again.