No, Nintendo and Pokemon did not patent 'summoning characters and making them battle'

"As first noted by Games Fray last week, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company were granted a US patent earlier this month involving summoning characters and making them battle. Headlines popped up with similarly vague language as concern spread on social media: That's a thing in tons of games! Can they do that? Is that even allowed? Well, no, because that's not exactly what they patented. And what they did patent might not stand up to any hypothetical challenges in court."

"The patent in question, US Patent No. 12,403,397, was filed in March 2023. It does involve summoning and battle mechanics, but it's more specific than that: The claims describe a system that sounds a lot like auto-battling from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, in which the player can send a pokémon into the overworld to automatically fight wild pokémon rather than initiating a typical turn-based battle that the player controls."

A US patent (No. 12,403,397) filed in March 2023 describes a system that manages summoned sub characters in an overworld. The system determines whether to start a player-controlled battle, an automatic battle using the summoned sub character, or automatic movement by that sub character. The described mechanics resemble auto-battling behavior seen in recent Pokémon games where a Pokémon fights wild Pokémon in the overworld instead of entering turn-based encounters. The patent's claims are specific, and legal experts consider the patent's enforceability and breadth to be potentially limited and uncertain.

Read at The Verge