Every Gym Leader in Pokemon Generation 2 (Johto)

Johto’s Gym Leaders deal in Flying, Bug, Normal, Ghost, Fighting, Steel, Ice and Dragon. Kanto’s eight Gym Leaders had already claimed Rock, Water, Electric, Grass, Poison, Psychic, Fire and Ground, which left exactly seven of the original types with no gym to their name. Johto took all seven. Then it added one that had not existed anywhere in Pokemon before.

Generation 2 introduced two new types, Steel and Dark. Steel got a gym almost at once, at Olivine. Dark got Karen, a seat on the Elite Four, and then nothing whatsoever: the first Dark-type Gym Leader in the core series is Piers of Spikemuth, who arrives among Galar’s Gym Leaders in Generation 8, six generations later.

What follows is the Johto circuit as Gold, Silver and Crystal run it, in the order the badges come. Violet City first, Blackthorn City last, one lighthouse detour in the middle. Teams and levels are the ones those three games field. HeartGold and SoulSilver changed a good deal when they returned to Johto, and where the difference is the interesting part, it is named.

Falkner

A level 7 Pidgey and a level 9 Pidgeotto are the lowest-levelled Pokemon any Gym Leader fields in any gym in any region, which makes Violet City the gentlest opening the series has ever arranged. Two Bird Keepers get in first, Abe with a level 9 Spearow and Rod with a pair of Pidgey, and then Falkner hands over the Zephyr Badge along with TM31, which contains Mud-Slap. Mud-Slap is a Ground-type move. Generation 2 shipped without a single Flying-type TM, so the region’s one bird specialist sends challengers away with the move his own birds have spent the fight throwing at them. Both of them know it.

He inherited the job, after a fashion. The games never name or show his father, who is “reported to be training out on the road, but is never seen in the game,” and Falkner’s own defeat line mentions only “My Dad’s cherished bird Pokemon.” The name Walker belongs to the Pokemon Adventures manga, which eventually gave the missing father a face, a boomerang Poke Ball made from shed Skarmory feathers, and the Violet Gym post his son sat an exam to inherit. In the games he stays a rumour.

The oddest thing about Falkner never shipped at all. In the unreleased 1999 Spaceworld demo of Gold and Silver he fielded a third Pokemon, a level 10 Pidgeot, fully evolved 26 levels earlier than Pidgeotto normally manages it. Someone thought better of that.

Bugsy

Bugsy waits in the middle of an indoor forest maze, behind the Twins and Bug Catchers posted through it, with two cocoons and a problem. A level 14 Metapod and a level 14 Kakuna are roughly what a second gym ought to be fielding. The level 16 Scyther behind them is not: Scyther cannot evolve by levelling up at all in Generation 2, becoming Scizor only when traded while holding a Metal Coat, so the one a player meets here is already the finished article and will stay that way for hours.

Pokemon Crystal’s internal trainer data flags him female in the array that selects battle dialogue, one of only two male characters coded that way, alongside Will. His Gold and Silver Pokemon are all male. His HeartGold and SoulSilver team is entirely female.

Then there is the badge. The English games award the Hive Badge, whose Japanese name translates as Insect Badge, and there is a genuine Insect Badge already spoken for – Burgh hands it out at the Castelia Gym in Pokemon Black and White, in another region entirely. Serebii’s Generation 2 gym pages print “Insect Badge” in Bugsy’s reward line and then call it the Hive Badge two sentences later. For a boy who introduces himself as the coming authority on bug Pokemon, and who takes personal credit for discovering Fury Cutter, it must be galling.

Whitney

Rollout doubles in power on every consecutive turn it lands, up to five of them, and resets only if it is interrupted or the five run out. Whitney opens with a level 18 Clefairy and follows it with a level 20 Miltank carrying Rollout, Stomp, Attract and Milk Drink, and Miltank belongs to a species with 105 base Defense and 95 base HP, which is precisely enough body to keep standing while the arithmetic compounds. Pokemon’s own thirtieth-anniversary retrospective concedes the point: “if you weren’t prepared for her Miltank’s Rollout attack, you were likely sent packing to the Pokemon Center.”

Then she loses, and refuses to settle up. She cries, does not produce the Plain Badge, and stays put until Lass Bridget explains that this always happens; only after Whitney has dried her eyes and blown her nose does the badge appear, TM45 Attract attached, with a note of self-assessment: “Isn’t it just perfect for a cutie like me?” Speak to her once more and she is entirely restored. “Ah, that was a good cry!”

She also starts a lineage. The next Normal-type specialist handed a gym is Norman of Petalburg City, who awards the Balance Badge to anyone working through every Hoenn Gym Leader a generation later. Time then left her almost alone: both her Pokemon keep identical movesets in HeartGold and SoulSilver, the only Gym Leader in the series of whom that is true. Each simply dropped a level.

Morty

An elderly man stands in the doorway of the Ecruteak Gym in Pokemon Crystal and refuses to let anybody past, because Morty is off at the Burned Tower with Eusine, hunting the roaming beasts. The gym opens only once the challenger has woken Raikou, Entei and Suicune personally. None of this happens in Gold and Silver, where Eusine does not exist. Crystal invented the friend and the errand, and the remakes kept both.

Generation 2 introduced exactly one new Ghost-type Pokemon, Misdreavus, the fewest of any generation, which leaves Morty running a Ghost gym entirely on Kanto stock: Gastly at level 21, Haunter at 21 and 23, Gengar at 25, all four Ghost and Poison rather than pure Ghost. There is a reason the shelves were bare. In Generation 1 a coding error had made Ghost moves do nothing at all to Psychic types, despite strategy guides and the anime insisting otherwise. The fix arrived with Morty’s own generation. He fights on an invisible floor above a pit, his trainers standing in mid-air.

He is sincere about all of it. “I believed that tale, so I have secretly trained here all my life. As a result, I can now see what others cannot.” Pokemon Stadium 2 shows what he was working with. His two Gym Leader Castle rounds run Gengar, Ariados, Sudowoodo, Marowak, Girafarig and Noctowl, then Gengar again with Mantine, Granbull, Lapras, Misdreavus and Exeggutor. Three Ghosts across twelve slots, and two of them are the same Gengar.

Chuck

Chuck’s introduction is a boulder, and it comes at the far end of the gym rather than the door. Four Black Belts and a Strength puzzle stand between the entrance and the leader, and only once a challenger has worked through all of that does Chuck announce that his Pokemon “will crush stones and shatter bones” and heave the rock aside. The waterfall he is famous for meditating under, oblivious to visitors until the water stops falling, is a HeartGold and SoulSilver addition. The Machoke he wrestles on a beach comes from the anime, and is not a Machop.

Cianwood City sits on its own landmass, reachable only by surfing the ocean routes out of Olivine, and the fifth gym on the circuit is defended by two Pokemon: Primeape at level 27 and Poliwrath at level 30. Poliwrath is half Water type. In a Fighting gym.

His wife waits outside and gets the better lines. Beforehand she makes an offer – “You crossed the sea to get here? That must have been hard. It would be much easier if your Pokemon knew how to Fly…” – and afterwards, provided the player thinks to speak to her, she produces HM02 Fly and a verdict on the household: “My husband lost to you, so he needs to train harder. That’s good, since he was getting a little chubby.” In Generation 2 she does not volunteer any of it. You have to ask.

Jasmine

The Olivine Gym has nobody in it. In Gold, Silver and Crystal there are no trainers and no puzzle between the front door and the Gym Leader, the only one of Johto’s eight arranged that way, and it scarcely matters, because Jasmine is not there either. She is six floors up the Olivine Lighthouse with Amphy, an Ampharos too ill to keep the beacon lit, and she stays there until somebody sails to Cianwood City for the SecretPotion and carries it back.

Steel was new, and she says so. Her pre-battle line calls it “a type that was only recently discovered,” which is a rare moment of a Pokemon game noticing its own machinery: Steel arrived with Generation 2, and Jasmine is the series’ first Steel-type specialist to be handed a gym. The second, Byron of Canalave, is two generations off. Magnemite and Magneton were retyped to suit her, the only family in the game to gain Steel that generation, so her two level 30 Magnemite carried a brand-new type from the moment the cartridge started. The level 35 Steelix behind them was a Generation 2 arrival too.

Nothing further joined the type chart for four more generations, until Fairy turned up with Valerie among all eight Kalos Gym Leaders. Jasmine had already switched once herself. A gentleman in the lighthouse mentions she used to raise Rock types, Onix among them.

Pryce

“I have been with Pokemon since before you were born.” Pryce says this to a child who has just slid across an ice puzzle to reach him, and it is as close as the games come to putting a figure on him. The frequently repeated fifty years is Bulbapedia’s own uncited summary, not a line anybody speaks. He is the seventh leader on the Johto circuit, he deals in Ice, and he awards the Glacier Badge with TM16, Icy Wind.

Kanto had an Ice specialist and never gave her a gym. Lorelei’s rank in Red, Blue and Yellow is Elite Four, which leaves Pryce as the first Ice-type Gym Leader the series produced. His team is Seel at level 27, Dewgong at 29 and Piloswine at 31, and that Piloswine knows a move it should not. Piloswine does not learn Fury Attack by levelling up until 33, and Swinub never learns it at all, so a level 31 Piloswine carrying it is a slip that has been sitting in the game since 1999.

Reaching him means dismantling Team Rocket first. The gym door stays shut until the player has cleared the Rocket headquarters hidden under a Mahogany Town souvenir shop and calmed the red Gyarados at the Lake of Rage, which are the same job twice, because the shop was broadcasting the signal forcing the lake’s Magikarp to evolve. A separate townsman blocks the eastern exit until seven badges are in hand, and offers to sell a RageCandyBar.

Clair

Beating Clair is not enough. She loses the battle at Blackthorn Gym, decides on the spot that the winner is not ready for the Pokemon League regardless, and keeps the Rising Badge. No other Gym Leader in the series does this. In Crystal she sends the challenger into the Dragon’s Den to find the shrine at its centre: “If you can prove that you’ve lost your lazy ideals, I will recognize you as a trainer worthy of a Gym Badge!” In Gold and Silver there is no shrine and no speech, only a Dragon Fang to fetch.

At the shrine, the Master of the Dragon Tamer clan asks five questions about how a trainer ought to treat Pokemon. Five right answers earn a Dratini that knows ExtremeSpeed; one wrong answer produces the identical Dratini knowing Leer. A perfect score gets this out of her: “That can’t be! You’re lying! Even I haven’t been approved!”

The family runs the region. The Master is grandfather to Clair and to Lance both, so the eighth badge on the circuit is surrendered, grudgingly, by the cousin of the Champion waiting at the Indigo Plateau. Her team is three level 37 Dragonair and a level 40 Kingdra, all of them female, the only gym in the games stocked entirely with Dragon types. It is also the only Johto team replaced outright when HeartGold and SoulSilver came round.