>>40272998Pokemon was always kind of anachronistic in it's setting, which I assume was born out of a combination of Game Freak being copycats (huge franchises like Dragonball and Sonic operate in similar kinds of worlds) and them trying to leave a blank slate so that they weren't tied down in terms of mechanics - things like the Time Machine in gen 2 come to mind.
...but also, as the franchise has gotten older Nintendo and TPC seem to be really doubling down on this idea of the Pokemon world as a hyper-idealized version of the real world - it's just Earth, but the animals are magic/super-powerful, humans and animals get along better and the technology is (mostly) cleaner. So I guess there was no specific point when the sci-fi shit 'happened', it's been creeping in slowly ever since the beginning.
