The Pokémon series is host to a long list of difficult battles, treacherous environments, and brain-testing puzzles. Nowhere is this truer than in Pokémon Gyms, containing a maze of♔ trainers💧 and infrastructure that you must maneuver before taking on the Gym Leader that waits at the other end.
The level of difficulty and depth to these gyms has varied a lot between the original Pokemon Red & Blue to the recent 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Sword & Shield. These are five of the best gyms from throughout Pokémon history, and five that are much more forgettable.
10 Great:ꦇ Turrfield (Pokémon Sword & Shield)
While many first gyms are incredibly basic, involving a quick path to the gym leader with a few trainers, Milo gives your adventure in Pokémon Sword & Shield a 🀅much more memorable start. This is through a Wooloo-herding activity that ends up being significantly more enjoyable and memorable.
While a new trainer shouldn’t be expected to do anything too difficult, this doesn’t mean that i🍰t should be bland. Milo’s gym is just challenging enough to be easy without being effortless, and by warming up to his fight with the internet’s favorite sheep Pokémon it’s much more iconic than any other starting gym.
9 Boring: Nacrene City (Pokémon Bl🐽ack & White)
Pokémon Black & White has an incredibly slow s♕tart, and while Lenora isn’t the first gym leader you face, she slows the game to a halt once you reach her. This gym involves reading books from a library and answering questions based on some short paragraphs.
Mazes and puzzles certainly don’t have to be the ꦉonly way to reach a Gym Leader, but it’s much more of a chore than it is interesting or skill-testing. What makes this gym worse is that Lenora uses some of the most common Normal-type Pokémon, Herdier and Watchog, making your fight with her completely forgettable.
8 🉐 Great: Sooto💮polis City (Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire)
This final gym in Hoenn is certainly difficult, but incredibly satisfying. In it, you have to walk over all the ice without stepping on a block twice to open a staircase. This leads to a surprisingly deep puzzle, acting like a game of Snake with the punishmꦯent of trainer battles if you lose.
This is followed up with a battle with Wallace,🌱 who sports some much more defensive and powerful Pokémon than most other Water-type Gym Leaders. As a final gym, it f✨eels , making you feel smart for succeeding and strong for winning.
7 ꧒ Boring: Veilstone City (Pokémon Platinum)
Sinnoh’s Fighting-type gym also features a puzzle to make a pathway, but rather than interesting it’s mostly just time-consuming. You need to push punching bags acros🍬s ziplines to break boxes, opening a path to Gym Leader Maylene, before a surprisingly dif🦩ficult fight for only the third gym in the game.
What makes this a slog is that these bags move extremely slow, and pushing a bag too early means you need to backtrack and wait for it to sway back. By the time you reach Maylene, any excitement you might have had for battling her stylish Lucario w𒈔ill probably have disappeared.
6 Great: Saf♌fron City (Pokémon Red & B꧅lue)
This gym from the original Pokemon Red & Blue is one of the trickiest mazes of all the mazes. The entire building is full of square rooms with teleporters, which you have to map out yourself to find a way to🦹 find Gym Leader Sabrina, waiting in the center of the gy🧔m as you bounce around the building.
It can be incredibly difficult, but with tons of trainers and effort o💛n your end to learn where each teleporter goes, it’s a worthwhile challenge that you’ll be proud to finally achieve. Sabrina’s Psychic-type team also makes for a challenge that’ll test you just as much, making for a consistent level of difficulty that not many gyms have.
5 Boring: Petalburg City🌠 (Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire) ไ
Your father’s gym in Hoenn is interesting in theory but much duller in practice. Each room of the gym has two doors leading to single-Pokémon t🦋rainers who’ll use an item to boost one of their partner’s stats with an item at the start of battle.
No other gym 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:uses items in this way and it does make the gym unique, but it doesn’t make things any more difficult as it mostly just makes your opponents waste their first turn. Norman’s t💟eam is quite difficult, but the trainers that fill his gym are an absolut🍎e waste of your time.
4 Great: Shalour City (Pokémon X &♊; Y)
Korrina already stands out from Fighting-type Gym Leaders by being a roller racer rather than a martial artist, and her gym is equally unique as a result. This giant roller rink is full of rails, 𒁃fast-moving trainers doing full laps, and a puzzle to open up a sporty path right to her with your rollerblades.
It’s a simple puzzle, but one that’s made fun by just how fast you move compared to other gyms, which get rid of your speedier movement options and make you slow down. This gym is easily the most fun to navigate in the whole Pokémon series, as well as o𒆙ne of the most aesthetically unique.
3 Boring: Cyllage C𓆉ity (Pokémon X & Y)
Similar to Petalburg, this Rock-type gym is much more interesting in theory than in practice. Instead of navigating yourself forward, you instead have to climb upwards across several rock-climbing walls to reach Gym Leader Grant, each of which makes you move signifiꦚcantly slower than you’ve been moving on the massive journey to this city.
It certainly stands out from the less exciting Rock-type gyms of other games, 🍬but at least those tend to go fast. Just like Veilstone City, this ends up being time-consuming and requiring way too much backtracking to be enjoyable, even with Grant’s beautiful team of fossil Pokémon waiting at the end.
2 𒈔 Great: Motostoke (Pokémon Sword & Shield) 🅰
Kabu’s gym in Motostoke is mechanically different compared to most other gyms, bein💎g one of the only ones with wild Pokémon that you have to catch. Once you’ve captured some of them and proved you can do more than battle, you then can finally take on Kabu yourself.
Kabu himself is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:disappointingly easy, but the task that precedes him is completely underrated. Gyms rarely involve more than fighting and solving puzzles, but Kabu thankfully gives a great opportunity to show the other half of being a great trainer, and it would be great to see again in future Pokémon games.
1 Boring: Vermil꧃lion City (Pokémon Red & Blue)
Lt. Surge’s gym is one of the most arbitrary and nonsensical experiences in any Pokémon game in history. To fight him, you’ll have to check several trash cans for two buttons, but if you fail to find the location of the s🎃econd one right after the first then both locations change.
The buttons typically tend to be next to each other, but it’s the only gym that’s essentially random every time you face it and find the first button is time-consuming enough. While Pokémon games all have some aspects of chance and probability, this is one of the most ♋frustrating moments of luck in the entire series.