>>57489216He's referring to the fact that NoA and TPCi did a dogshit job of localizing supplementary material that explained Pokemon's worldbuilding in greater detail, such as the Zukan.
Since the western world's primary exposure to Pokemon was through the anime, which, for budget-saving reasons, depicted Pokemon being converted to and from beams of red energy, and any instances of them being depicted as shrunk down inside of a Poke Ball were taken as a cartoony gag, because there was no context given, meaning everyone saw it like all the other gags of the anime like Ash getting zapped by Pikachu and only ending up covered in soot with his hair frazzled.
They were perfectly content not addressing this fact, and the one excerpt from the games that explained this prior, an obscure postgame-only quote from DPPt's Lucian in Canalave Library, mistranslated the line entirely.
So when PLA came along and they had no choice but to confront the fact that Pokemon shrink, it was a "new reveal" that mindbroke stubborn twats who don't like new concepts being retroactively applied to the franchise, despite the fact this is a concept that's actually been common knowledge in Japan since day zero. Even without supplementary material, folks in Japan caught onto what Pokemon was going for near-instantly because the concept of "capsules that can compress something to be stored and then deployed later, especially monsters" has been popular there since Ultraseven in 1967.
