Pragmatic answer is that the Pokédex is just like that sometimes, for reasons only known to Game Freak. For instance, why does Stakataka’s Ultra Moon entry say this:
> “When stone walls started moving and attacking, the brute’s true identity was this mysterious life-form, which brings to mind an Ultra Beast.”
“Brings to mind an Ultra Beast”? Like come on guys, we know it categorically is one. There’s no need to get all Cosmog/Necrozma-style ambiguous with the thing introduced to us as UB Assembly.
I think there’s only so much they can realistically do here, because Hisuian Voltorb is, plain and simply, a retcon. Kantonian Voltorb’s entries were written that way because, at the time, that was their vision for it within the lore of the world. Later, they decided to introduce its antecedent, but also wanted to preserve the ambiguity around Voltorb’s existence as a whole, and so didn’t try to connect the wires directly. Since Voltorb’s origins have always been kept vague and mysterious, the introduction of Hisuian Voltorb into those origins doesn’t really contradict anything specific. It just adds to the curiosity of the thing.
I mean, on one hand, I’d say that Pokémon is a fun kids’ game about collecting magical creatures that doesn’t take itself too seriously, so it’s never exactly looking to secure itself with iron-clad logistics.
On the other hand, even off the top of my head, I can think of a similar example of that scenario which has already been documented — Kabuto. Many of its Pokédex entries mention that while it lived 300 million years ago, there have been extremely rare cases of living specimens being discovered. So despite being considered perilously close to extinct, we know that there must still be some populations of Kabuto out there which have managed to persist for considerably longer than the entire existence of humanity. Compared to that, I think a pod of Hisuian Voltorb huddling up next to a Poké Ball factory during the transition to industrial Poké Ball production is fairly reasonable.
As for what happens if a future region shows Hisuian Voltorb out in the wild, I’m just not really concerned about that, personally. I don’t need a fun little theory I crafted to bridge the gap between Voltorb forms to be thoroughly futureproofed so that it can uphold the lore of the series in perpetuity — if and when the games present new evidence, I’ll simply do as the Pokémon themselves do, and adapt.
And that, in turn, is yet another possible theory, which works just fine because again, Voltorb’s origins are deliberately left mysterious. We don’t know what birthed Hisuian Voltorb any more than we know what birthed Kantonian Voltorb. We have a couple of hints, but that’s all.
The only thing I would say I’m skeptical of about this, though, is that I’m not really sure it’d be that much trouble for them to trademark a single term, especially when they’re going to have to trademark a whole slew of new terms anyway. While I can’t claim to have any insight into the legal procedure of Pokémon development, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were something like, “Game Freak come up with what they’re going to come up with, then hand it off to TPC’s legal department to sort out, and then adjust based on the results.”
Actually, now that I think about it, given that Kitakami is just the name of a real place, would they even need to trademark it? I’m not sure what kind of nuances that would introduce.
Yes. And what I’m saying is that there’s enough vaguespace for Hisuian Voltorb to have been somehow involved in that accidental process.
