Dakota's Fandom Box

Obviously this element is only possible because pokemon is a franchise set in the digital era... Which is how the canon-keepers ran into a problem when they made Pokemon Legends Arceus, a game set well before the digital era.

The game dances around it alright enough, you store the pokemon in a pasture instead, and trading is instead represented as the physical pokeball launching into the sky like a rocket.... But the pokeball itself remains an issue. How do they explain the pokemon fitting in there in an era before digitization?

They straight up say pokemon can just shrink. All of them can just do that.

The video above is a full translation of an official Pokemon book written by the team, with lost Pokedex entries. Ken Sugimori's iconic artwork was made for this very book. It was recently translated by the original translator for the older games. Inside this book are not only a ton of lost Pokedex entries, but also an in-universe lecture from Professor Oak, where he explains exactly how Pokeballs work. He even recounts a situation where another scientist tried to mentally make a Pokemon *think* they were being captured, resulting in a very tiny Primape resting in the other professor's glasses case. Not only that, they also claim that the reason that Pokemon cannot be immediately captured is because of something Oak only calls "Angry Energy". And in Legends Arceus, the plot revolves Pokemon are constantly raging and therefore uncatchable before being calmed! So basically, Laventon is right, educate yourselves.