Players will be stepping into the pre-industrial Hisui region when Pokémon Legends: Arceus launches early next year, but the more promotional material that gets revealed, the more the game continues to contradict the tenets of its own setting. Modern technology such as a smart phone-like device and an analog video camera have conflated the idea of a more technologically rudimentary era, making the themes feel unfocused.
The Hisui region is an older name for what is now known as the Sinnoh region. Sinnoh is where Pokémon Diamond and Pearl take place, and where their upcoming remakes will return to. Legends: Arceus takes place at some unspecified time before modern, technologically advanced society had conquered the wilds of the region. Players will be tasked with completing the Hisui region's first Pokédex in Legends: Arceus, equipped with steam powered Poké Balls to become a pioneer of Pokémon training and battling along the way.
Pokémon games have more or less always taken place in a contemporary setting, with plenty of science fiction leaning elements to support the nature of Pokémon training. Legends: Arceus was poised to have a wholly unique time period, having players set out from Jubilife when it was just a village, handwriting the first Hisui Pokédex. First, players learned that they would be given a device that would function like a modern-day smart phone, unironically called an Arc Phone, and now a new "rare footage" trailer from the Official Pokémon YouTube channel posits the existence of video cameras in some capacity. The time period for Pokémon Legends: Arceus is entirely fictional, but these contradictory elements only serve to make the setting and its theoretical uniqueness feel less genuine.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus Appears Inconsistent With Technology
Early promotional material for Pokémon Legends: Arceus focused heavily on its setting for good reason. A consistent criticism of the series is its stagnancy, and Legends: Arceus looks to give players an experience still revolving around training and battling, but in a setting that lacks the typical town-and-route layout of the mainline games. This is still largely true, but advanced technology has now been shoehorned into the setting in a way that feels like little more than a vehicle to deliver gameplay mechanics in a familiar medium.
The non-open world gameplay of Legends: Arceus may end up feeling more akin to Monster Hunter, but the inclusion of the Arc Phone feels more than a little like Breath of the Wild and Sheikah Slate imitation. BOTW managed to justify its use of advanced, borderline magical technology through a narrative that heavily relied on ancient technology developed by the Sheikah Tribe. The Pokémon Legends: Arceus website suggests that the Arc Phone has a connection to Arceus, but its so far the only piece of modern technology that's been shown. The only feature revealed thus far for the Arc Phone is giving players access to a digital map, which is so far beyond any other technology yet seen that it makes the Arc Phone feel like a gimmick created to deliver modern gameplay features.
The found footage horror style of the latest Legends: Arceus trailer is not quite as egregious as the Arc Phone, but it still wildly convolutes the direction of the game's setting. There's a chance that the footage could have been recorded sometime after the game takes place - following the advent of video cameras - but the camera operator makes mention of "hoping to document some wild ....... using this strange device," which implies they've never seen such technology before. The various Pokédex entries for Arceus all allude to a creation myth, so it's not impossible that the legendary Pokémon is introducing more technology than just the Arc Phone to the denizens of Pokémon Legends: Arceus' Hisui region in order to fulfill its mythology of shaping the world, but until there's sufficient narrative justification, the game is continually contradicting the relatively primitive setting it originally established.
Source: Pokémon (Official Website, YouTube)