Every Gym Leader in Pokemon Generation 9 (Paldea)

In 1996, every badge run began the same way: Brock, in a stone-floored room in Pewter City, waiting for you because the game gave you nowhere else to go. The eight Kanto gym leaders of 1996 formed a ladder, and you climbed it one rung at a time. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, released twenty-six years later, handed players a map of Paldea with eight gyms on it and no instructions about which door to knock on first.

The franchise had rethought the badge circuit once before. In 2016, Alola’s trial captains and island kahunas replaced gyms outright, swapping badges for passport stamps. Paldea took the opposite path: it kept the gyms and loosened everything around them, to the point that seven of Paldea’s eight leaders work the gym around another career entirely. It tells you something about what the position pays.

The open world comes with an asterisk, though. Leader teams sit at fixed levels that never scale to yours, so the freedom to fight anyone first is also the freedom to be flattened by the wrong gym. The badge circuit – Victory Road, the game calls it – is only one of three storylines running in parallel, but it is the one with the personnel. This list covers all eight leaders in the recommended order, from the bakery in Cortondo to the mountain where the circuit ends.

Katy

Katy runs a bakery called Patisserie Soapberry, and her official bio gives the pastries equal billing with the badge. Her stated philosophy holds that sweets and Bug-type Pokemon share a virtue: both are small and yet very powerful. She has clearly given the overlap some thought.

Cortondo’s test requires no battling unless you choose it. Challengers push a giant olive through a fence maze to a goal, and the only fights available are optional shortcuts guarded by Gym Trainers and wild Smoliv. There is no clock on a first attempt, but a harder timed version unlocks once Katy is beaten, and finishing its course inside two and a half minutes earns the top reward tier. Somewhere in Paldea there are trainers speedrunning an olive.

The battle that follows is the gentlest on the circuit, built for players fresh out of the academy gates. Her ace is a Teddiursa – an ordinary Normal-type bear cub until she Terastallizes it into a crystalline Bug. Katy also made the jump to television: she appeared in the Pokemon Horizons anime in an episode that aired in Japan in April 2024, administering a Terastallization trial to the series lead Liko. She examined the protagonist there, too. Some people are simply born to grade others.

Brassius

Scattered across the town of Artazon are Sunflora statues with distinctly miserable expressions. This is Surrendering Sunflora, the signature installation of Brassius, and the game’s art enthusiasts debate what it means with the seriousness of a Venice Biennale panel.

The statues nearly did not exist. The games’ backstory has Brassius falling severely ill while making the piece and coming close to abandoning art altogether; he finished it on the encouragement of his close friend Hassel, the academy’s art teacher and a member of Paldea’s Elite Four. The recovered artist now runs the Grass-type gym as the Verdant Virtuoso, and his gym test is an extension of his medium – challengers must find ten Sunflora hidden around town, some of which object to being found and start a fight. The game refuses to let you catch any of them. They are art, not inventory.

His ace is a Sudowoodo, which is the joke hiding in the battle. Sudowoodo is a Rock-type whose entire evolutionary strategy is pretending to be a tree, and Brassius turns it Grass at the first opportunity – letting it stand in, for one battle at a time, as the thing it has spent its whole life imitating. In January 2026 he arrived in Pokemon Masters EX with that same Sudowoodo at his side, still performing the same trick on cue.

Iono

On October 12, 2022, the official Pokemon channels posted a teaser video in which a pink-and-blue streamer asked fans to guess the identity of her partner Pokemon, then withheld the answer for two days before revealing Bellibolt in a follow-up. Iono, in other words, was marketed exactly the way she would have marketed herself. A fictional influencer ran a real engagement-bait campaign on an audience of entirely actual humans.

In Levincia she hosts the Iono Zone, and her official bio notes that she places great emphasis on viewer engagement and view counts. The commitment runs to the character design: her twin ponytails end in Magnemite-shaped hair clips that animate with her mood. Her gym test conscripts the challenger as a guest star: a segment called Where in Levincia Is Mr. Walksabout?, in which the challenger scans live shots of the city to spot the hiding academy director Clavell, three rounds running.

The franchise has built celebrity leaders before – Galar’s stadium-filling gym leaders fought in televised arenas before roaring crowds – but Iono trades the stadium for a ring light and an audience she never sees. Her ace follows the showbiz logic: a Mismagius, Ghost-born, that goes Electric the moment the cameras find it. Even her strongest Pokemon is doing a costume change.

Kofu

No other gym on the circuit opens with its leader sprinting out of the building. Kofu of Cascarrafa, mid-errand, has left his wallet behind, and a gym staffer hands the challenger the job of returning it to him at the Porto Marinada market. The badge circuit’s fourth test opens as a courier run after a forgetful chef.

It gets better when you arrive. Kofu takes the wallet, thanks you, and hands over 50,000 of his own money so you can bid on rare Hoenn wakame at the market’s seaweed auction on his behalf. Whatever you do not spend, he lets you keep. The auction house itself is no set piece either – once unlocked it keeps operating, restocking daily, which makes Kofu’s errand an accidental tutorial for a real recurring shop.

The man himself is a celebrity chef known as the Surging Chef, owner and head cook of the Kofu Lounge restaurant. His battle is the Water gym’s actual test of strength, and his ace is a Crabominable – a boxing crab that is natively Fighting and Ice – which he converts to a proper Water type mid-fight. He remains the only leader in Paldea who hands you money before the battle rather than after it.

Larry

The Paldea League employs one man twice, and he visibly wishes it employed him never. The official site introduces Larry with the sentence ‘This Normal-type Gym Leader is also a businessman, and he’s not very motivated,' which for promotional copy is remarkably honest. He runs the Medali gym, sits on the Elite Four – the only person in the region doing both – and switches specialties between jobs, Normal at the gym and Flying at the League.

The test he sets is finding out what he wants for lunch. Challengers gather clues from students and deliver a precise order at the Treasure Eatery counter: grilled rice balls, medium serving, extra crispy, Fire Blast style, with lemon. Larry is waiting at the table. His employer does not escape comment either – his dialogue includes the observation that his boss will dock his pay if he spends too much time chatting, the boss in question being Top Champion Geeta.

In the mobile game Pokemon Masters EX, he explains the double duty by saying the Paldean League is short-staffed, then admits under questioning that this is only somewhat true and he simply prefers an unremarkable life. Players adored him; Kotaku profiled him as a breakout favorite within months of launch. He would find the attention exhausting.

Ryme

Four shiny Pokemon guard the Ghost badge: a Banette, a Mimikyu, and a Houndstone at level 41, then a level 42 Toxtricity, every one wearing its rare alternate coloration. Ryme, the Ghost-type leader of Montenevera, walks into work with a team of collector’s items.

Hers is also the only gym battle in Paldea fought two-on-two. Every fight in the building, from the warm-up rounds to Ryme herself, is a Double Battle, staged on a concert floor where the audience hands out stat boosts to whichever side impresses it. The test itself is three consecutive Double Battles billed as warming up the crowd for the headliner. Ryme is a rapper – the MC of RIP – and the gym is her venue.

She inherited the room. Her older sister Tyme once held the Montenevera gym post herself and now teaches mathematics at the academy, making the region’s spookiest gym a family business that changed hands. The role demands range offscreen too: Melique Berger, who voices her in the Pokemon Horizons anime, said in a 2025 interview that rapping for the part was a first for her and ‘not easy at all.' In the Indigo Disk expansion, Ryme turns up at Blueberry Academy as a recruitable special coach, still taking bookings. Retirement does not appear to be under consideration.

Tulip

Alfornada is the town Paldea makes you earn. Reaching it on foot means scaling cliffs in the region’s southwest and then walking the length of a cavern, and the reward at the far end is one of the least accessible gyms on the circuit and its Psychic-type leader, Tulip – a makeup artist whose official bio says she applies seemingly magical makeup with the help of her Pokemon.

Getting to her requires the Emotional Spectrum Practice, run by her childhood friend Dendra, the academy’s battle instructor, who – the story goes – administers it after losing a bet to Tulip. Challengers mirror the emotions performed by Dendra’s Medicham in a straight-faced game of psychic Simon Says, twice, with trainer battles between rounds.

Paldea’s Psychic gym is a one-woman operation, which was not always the type’s way – Hoenn’s twin gym leaders Tate and Liza co-led theirs at Mossdeep and fought every challenger as a pair. Her ace is a Florges, a Fairy-type she recasts as Psychic for the fight, and her name carries a bilingual joke: in Japanese she is Rippu, a pun folding lipstick into the flower. The English localization kept the tulip and quietly binned the cosmetics. Her battle animations keep a smaller signature: she recalls a Pokemon by resting the returning ball against her temple, psychic to the last.

Grusha

Grusha introduces himself to challengers with a small autobiography: ‘I’m a snowboarder. Used to be pro, actually. Now I’m a Gym Leader.' The official site fills in the rest – the snowboarding career is over, and running the Glaseado Gym is what he does full-time now, with his partner Cetitan at his side.

The same official page notes that he is usually coolheaded but that heated battles bring out the emotions he keeps pushed down, which is about as close as a Pokemon character bio gets to an arc.

His gym test makes the challenger do his old job. The Snow Slope Run sends you down Glaseado Mountain on Koraidon or Miraidon through a gate course with a 90-second target, every missed gate adding five seconds – a retired professional grading amateurs on his old event. The gym sits at the top of the recommended circuit, its teams the highest-leveled of the eight – the position Wulfric held among Kalos’s eight gym leaders a decade earlier.

There is a small surprise in his battle. Cetitan is the partner on the official page, but the Pokemon Grusha actually Terastallizes is his level 48 Altaria, a Dragon-and-Flying songbird converted to Ice for the occasion. The advertised partner fights at level 47; the finisher and the crystal go to the songbird.