Every Gym Leader in Pokemon Generation 6 (Kalos)

Pokemon X and Y went on sale in Japan, Europe and the Americas on the same day, October 12, 2013, the first time the series had launched everywhere at once. Nintendo counted more than 4 million copies sold over the opening weekend. Every one of those players then walked into the same buildings in the same sequence as everybody else.

That sequence is not a convention, it is enforced. A Worker blocks Route 14, the road running north out of Lumiose City toward Laverre, and he will not move aside until the player is carrying Clemont’s badge and has been to the Lysandre Cafe. Nine years later Scarlet and Violet would let players take on Paldea’s eight gym leaders, in any order, which makes the Kalos arrangement look less like a journey than a queue.

Kalos has never been remade. When the region did come back, in October 2025, Pokemon Legends: Z-A dropped players into Lumiose City five years on and swapped the badge circuit for a nightly ranking ladder, appointing nobody. So the roster below is still the only gym circuit Kalos has ever had, assembled for the games that rebuilt the series in polygons and shipped Mega Evolution for 28 Pokemon.

Viola

A spider web spans the room below the Santalune Gym’s entrance hall, strung between wooden platforms in the dark among enormous plants, and the player has to walk across it to reach her, avoiding the darker patches that will not take weight. The hall above is a photograph gallery hung with Viola’s own work, two pieces of which are titled To Be Evolved, which is a Metapod, and Nectar’s Siren Song, which is a Butterfree.

She specializes in Bug types and fields two, a Level 10 Surskit and a Level 12 Vivillon. Vivillon carries 20 wing patterns across Generations VI and VII, 18 of them tied to real-world regions, and which one a save file produces is fixed the moment that file is created, from the region set in the Nintendo 3DS system menu. Changing it means deleting the save and starting over.

Beating her earns the Bug Badge and TM83 Infestation, and pulls back the tent behind her to reveal a staircase. It comes out behind one of the photographs in the gallery upstairs, which slides quietly back into place once the player has gone. The first gym in Kalos has a concealed exit, and it is hidden behind a picture she took herself.

Grant

Grant is under the impression that the player has come for the bicycle race. “I’m afraid you’re too late,” he says, on the path below his own gym in Cyllage City. “The race is over, and I took first place. I feel bad that you missed it.” He then hands over HM04 Strength by way of consolation for an event nobody had mentioned. The climbing all happens indoors anyway: Cyllage Gym is a cave built around a rocky hill honeycombed with walls, an underground waterfall running somewhere behind them.

His team is two Pokemon at Level 25 and both are fossils, Tyrunt revived from the Jaw Fossil and Amaura from the Sail Fossil. Like every fossil Pokemon and the real prehistoric creature behind it, they have named ancestors, Tyrannosaurus and Amargasaurus, both confirmed by the man who designed them, Hitoshi Ariga. A single copy of the game only ever yields one, because the assistant in Glittering Cave makes the player choose, and neither comes back to life in Cyllage City at all. That happens at the Fossil Lab in Ambrette Town, one route south.

His badge is the Cliff Badge in English and the Wall Badge in Japanese, and its official description has it shaped like a cliff or a rock-climbing wall. “You have proven to be a wall that I am unable to surmount,” Grant says afterwards, having been beaten by somebody who never entered his race.

Korrina

A Lucario bolts away from its trainer on Route 5 and comes straight at the player, drawn by an aura it can apparently read from some distance. The trainer catches up and introduces herself as Korrina, Gym Leader of Shalour City. She will turn up twice more before the badge is settled, and once again immediately after it.

She and Mega Evolution were unveiled together. A CoroCoro scan in August 2013 announced a character named Koruni who “holds the key to understanding Mega Evolutions”, two months before the games shipped and before she had an English name at all. The Japanese one is a joke she shares with her grandfather: Koruni is cornichon, a pickled gherkin, and Gurkinn is Concombre, cucumber. Toshinobu Matsumiya, a Game Freak scenario writer, confirmed the pairing in October 2013.

Her gym is a roller-skating rink, and her team is Machoke at Level 28, Mienfoo at 29 and Hawlucha at 32, with no Lucario on it anywhere. The Lucario arrives afterwards at the Tower of Mastery, a building Junichi Masuda has said was modeled on Mont-Saint-Michel, where she hands over the Mega Ring and lends the player one of hers to Mega Evolve against the other. Then she offers to let the player keep it. Anyone who accepts leaves with a Lucario coded so that it can never be Shiny.

Ramos

Thirty years, according to the in-game television programme Gym Freaks, is how long Ramos has owned the same pair of gardening scissors. His gym in Coumarine City is one enormous tree he built himself out of plants he collected, hung with a vine course of climbs and swings, and it is the least hurried place in the region. The player has to beat their rival in front of the door before it opens.

The team is Jumpluff at Level 30, Weepinbell at 31 and Gogoat at 34, and Gogoat is the one species here with a job outside the gym. Lumiose City runs a Gogoat Shuttle, a fare-paying transit service that carries players between marked stops on the boulevards for 200 Pokedollars a ride. Ramos’s ace is public transport. The Kalos Pokedex has the species reading a rider’s mood through changes in grip on its horns; a later entry puts its history of carrying people at five thousand years.

Ramos speaks in a broad rural burr and explains his own badge without being asked: the Plant Badge permits Fly outside battle and gets Pokemon up to Level 60 to listen, “easy as falling off a log.” His Japanese leader title translates as the old tree that still blooms. He has lately taken up tea as well, gathering the leaves from the places they grow, and holds that steam rising straight off a cup means good luck in a certain country.

Clemont

On the way up, a child stops the player four times and makes them name a Pokemon from its silhouette. Bonnie is the Gym Leader’s younger sister and she runs the Lumiose Gym quiz in the games themselves, not only in the cartoon: “Quiz time! Who’s that Pokemon?!”, then a choice of three elevators. Pick one and the trainer inside fights the player whether the answer was right or wrong. Only the correct elevator rises. Six floors of this gives Lumiose more storeys than any other gym in the series.

The gym occupies Prism Tower, the spike at the centre of Kalos’s largest city. Pokemon’s own feature on Lumiose says it evokes “the grandeur of the Eiffel Tower”, and Junichi Masuda’s blog, which is where that reading comes from, adds a detail nobody would guess: he asked the tower’s designer to work from the shapes of fragrance bottles. Clemont suits the building, an inventor credited in-game with the Super Training system and with a good many other machines that do not work.

His team is Emolga and Magneton at Level 35 and Heliolisk at 37, which looks like an invitation to bring one Ground type and go home early. It is not. Emolga is Electric and Flying, and Flying types take nothing whatsoever from Ground moves. The obvious answer clears two thirds of the gym and then stops dead.

Valerie

Valerie came to Kalos from Johto, a region with its own eight gym leaders and no Fairy type in it at all when she left. Her town has never been confirmed, and the Kyoto-inflected Japanese she speaks in the original script is a hint rather than an address. Laverre is the first Fairy-type Gym the series ever built, and she is still the only Fairy specialist Generation VI produced.

Her gym is a dollhouse and the route through it is a warp-panel puzzle that keeps depositing challengers in the wrong room. The team is Mawile at Level 38, Mr. Mime at 39 and Sylveon at 42, and Mawile is the trap. It spent three generations as a pure Steel type and picked up Fairy retroactively when X and Y arrived, which turns the reflexive Fighting-type answer from double damage into nothing special at all.

The costume is her own design, and Gym Freaks puts it at 33 pounds, or 15 kilograms, adding that she used to model, which is offered as the explanation for the heels. “I’ve always wanted to be a Pokemon, you see,” she tells the player. By the end of the game she has moved on to asking what separates the two, and whether it needs to.

Olympia

From outside, the Anistar Gym is a small empty house. Stand in the middle of its carpet and the walls go, leaving a layered sphere of glowing walkways on three stacked levels, blue at the top, purple at the bottom, green between them, hanging in a night sky with galaxies, a comet and constellations shaped like Pikachu and Lunatone and Staryu. Warp panels join the levels wherever the paths overlap.

“A ritual to decide your fate and future. The battle begins!” is how Olympia opens, and fate is what she talks about the whole way through. Her team is Sigilyph at Level 44, Slowking at 45 and a female Meowstic at 48, and the sex matters more than it usually does: male and female Meowstic carry different hidden abilities and different learnsets, and in Generations VI and VII only the female could learn Me First.

The odder object in Anistar City sits outside the gym. A crystal sundial stands north of town, and the game’s own map text calls it an enigmatic device before floating the possibility that it came from outer space. Its rings turn for one hour a night, between 8 PM and 9 PM, when sunlight comes through a hole in the crystal. Late in the game that hour acquires a purpose: a Mega Ring recalibrated at the sundial by Professor Sycamore can locate Mega Stones anywhere in Kalos, and only while the rings are moving.

Wulfric

Wulfric is not at his gym when the player arrives in Snowbelle City. He is west of it, through the Winding Woods of Route 20, in the Pokemon Village, and he is not hiding. “Most of the Pokemon here are runaways”, he explains, “escaped from bad people who did awful things to them.” Others are simply too strong to have found a place outside. He comes to check on them, then walks home and takes up his position.

The Snowbelle Gym is the last of the circuit, and it was the first Ice-type gym in the series to build its puzzle without ice tiles, which is to say without the sliding floor the type is known for. It has four rotating platforms worked by coloured buttons instead, one trainer guarding each. Ice specialists are scarce enough that a whole generation went by without one: Alola abolished gyms outright, and the next Ice-type leader is Melony of Circhester, among Galar’s ten gym leaders.

His own team is Cryogonal at Level 55, Abomasnow at 56 and Avalugg at 59, whose base Defense of 184 is the highest of any Ice type. Then, having handed over the Iceberg Badge, he says the thing that does not match his face. “Being rigid can make you tough, but it will also render you fragile. You’re better off being flexible.” Some people, he goes on, are fluid like water. “Not me, though. I guess I’m too stubborn. Maybe that’s why I love Ice types.”