Every Gym Leader in Pokemon Generation 5 (Unova)

Black and White reached Japan in September 2010 carrying 156 Pokemon nobody had ever seen and not one that anybody had. Junichi Masuda explained the decision to Nintendo Power the following March: he had made every Pokemon in the new region completely new, “so that everyone would start on the same page, whether they were a longtime fan or completely new to the series.” The people running the gyms were new too, and unusually, they did not stay that way.

Then Game Freak did something it has done exactly once: it made a direct sequel to a pair of games from its own generation. Black 2 and White 2 return to the same region two years later, and the badge circuit has quietly rearranged itself in the interval. Three gyms have shut. Three others have opened. A leader has been promoted out of the job entirely, and the boy who spent the first pair of games losing to you has taken over a gym of his own.

All that churn is why the region ended up with more gym leaders than any other, and why counting them is less obvious than it looks. Kanto’s original eight-gym circuit and its leaders stayed put for a generation. Unova has one gym staffed by three brothers, and another that changes hands depending on which cartridge you bought. Here is every person who ever ran one.

Cilan, Chili, and Cress

The first gym in Black and White is rigged against the player, politely and on purpose. Three brothers run the Striaton Gym, each with a different type, and which one you face is decided by the starter you chose back in Nuvema Town. Pick Oshawott, a Water type, and you are sent to Cilan and his Grass Pokemon. Pick Tepig and you get Cress and his Water Pokemon. Pick Snivy and you get Chili and his Fire. Every route hands the player the one matchup their starter is worst against.

The building is a restaurant, which is why the puzzle involves stepping on the correct colored panel to open each curtain rather than shoving boulders around a cave. Beat whichever brother is yours, and only that one, and you collect the Trio Badge and TM83, Work Up, which is a Normal-type move. No other gym in the games hands out a prize TM whose type fails to match its leader’s own specialty.

By the sequels all three have resigned. A Memory Link flashback titled “A Triple Team” shows the Shadow Triad beating the brothers three on three and leaving unimpressed, after which Cilan tells the others, “Let’s resign as Gym Leaders and start our training over from the ground up.” The gym is a restaurant full time now. Their Japanese names are all varieties of corn.

Lenora

To reach the Nacrene Gym you have to solve a library. It sits at the back of the Nacrene Museum, behind five bookshelves holding a chain of clues: a volume called “Nice to Meet You, Pokemon!” points to Patrat, Patrat points to a locomotive, the locomotive points to a Poffin, and the Poffin sets a riddle about moving two backward, one left, two forward, one right and one back again. Finish the chain and a bookcase slides aside to reveal a staircase.

Lenora is an archaeologist and the museum’s director, and she takes the second badge slot with a Herdier and a Watchog. Her husband Hawes runs the tour upstairs. He introduces himself as the assistant director, explains that the enormous skeleton in the hall belonged to a Dragon-type Pokemon that “had an accident while it was flying around the world,” and signs off with “the Gym Leader Lenora happens to be my wife!”

By the sequels she has given up the badge counter to work the museum full time. On the player’s first visit she offers a choice between a Cover Fossil and a Plume Fossil, which revive at level 25 into Tirtouga and Archen, two of the fossil Pokemon and their real prehistoric originals. She is the only leader from the first pair you cannot fight again outside the tournament.

Burgh

Two of the largest Pokemon reference sites print the wrong name for Burgh’s badge. Serebii and Pokemon Database both call it the Beetle Badge on their Black and White pages, then both call the identical object the Insect Badge on their Black 2 and White 2 pages. Insect Badge is correct; Beetle Badge is a straight translation of the Japanese. The joke underneath is that Burgh’s English name is the Japanese name of Bugsy’s Johto badge, which in English is the Hive Badge. The localizers swapped the two names across a decade and never mentioned it.

Burgh holds Castelia City, which Masuda described in an Iwata Asks interview by saying of the region, “We modeled it after New York,” with Manhattan at the middle of his hexagon. Game Freak’s developer blog later described the harbor as a hand, the five piers standing in for fingers. Burgh’s gym is a working art gallery hung with his own paintings.

Burgh holds the Castelia post through all four releases, and the gym keeps changing underneath him: honey walls and hexagonal rooms in the first pair, then silk cocoons working as elevators in the sequels. Paldea’s Grass-type leader Brassius still brings up those cocoons, years later, when he meets you at Blueberry Academy.

Elesa

The Nimbasa Gym moved house between the two pairs of games, and the old building never closed. In Black and White it is a roller coaster the player rides between switch-thrown junctions. Elesa then built a new gym next door, a long catwalk with three trainers on it named Nikola, Fleming and Ampere, and the original building is still open under a sign reading “The Shining Roller Coaster, Former Nimbasa City Pokemon Gym.” You still have to walk through the coaster to get to the catwalk.

She redesigned herself at the same time, growing out her hair and dyeing it black, and she is the only returning leader from the first pair to get that treatment. Game Freak said in a Nintendo Dream interview that they gave her deliberately long legs, aiming at what they called a slightly android kind of design, on the grounds that a model reads differently on screen from a fighter.

Her team changes three ways. Black and White give her two Emolga and a Zebstrika; the sequels swap one Emolga for a Flaaffy; and a fourth Pokemon, a Joltik, turns up only for players who picked Challenge Mode. In Black and White she also pays out less than any of the four trainers guarding her, which happens at no other gym in those two games.

Clay

Clay refuses to battle you at first, because letting you into town is what caused his problem. Lowering the Driftveil Drawbridge to let the player into town gave a group of captured Team Plasma members the confusion they needed to escape, and he will not open his gym until you have gone and beaten them at the Cold Storage. His first line about it is unbothered: “when we lowered that bridge, the Team Plasma guys we’d caught done escaped in all the ruckus!”

His gym sits at the bottom of a mine shaft, reached by elevators and girders in the first pair and by a conveyor system in the sequels. One of his own trainers explains that the depth is deliberate, there to remind Clay he once had nothing. Another calls him a company president, though Bulbapedia notes flatly that it is not known what business Clay actually owns.

Two years later the Cold Storage is gone, demolished to make room for the Pokemon World Tournament, which stands on the same ground. It was built by Clay, the game says, to encourage development in Driftveil City, and fourteen separate tournaments run inside it. That is a considerable amount of civic ambition to put on the footprint of a demolished freezer.

Skyla

There is one cargo flight a day out of Mistralton City, and the runway it uses takes up nearly two-thirds of the town. Skyla flies it. Her gym is a converted hangar sitting north of the tarmac, in a place with a population of 37 in Black and White, and for the rest of the day the runway is open to the public. Residents grow vegetables along the edges so the produce can go straight out.

Getting into the gym at all requires patience. On arrival Skyla is not there; she is up at Celestial Tower looking after a Flying-type Pokemon she spotted in trouble from the air, and only comes back once the player has rung the bell at the top. Inside, in the first pair, the challenge is a set of cannons that fire you between platforms, some of them helpfully and some of them backward into a waiting trainer. The sequels replaced the cannons with industrial fans that blow you across the floor, which you dodge by hugging the walls.

The games say exactly one thing about her family, and then stop: her grandfather is said to have been a pilot of some renown. No name, no gym, no inheritance. Everything else attached to that sentence over the years belongs to the animated series, where an entirely separate character was invented to fill the gap.

Brycen

Brycen was a film star before he was a gym leader. He retired from acting after hurting himself during a reckless stunt, had no idea what to do next, took Alder’s advice, and became a trainer instead. It worked out: by Black and White he holds Icirrus City with a Vanillish, a Cryogonal and a Beartic, the only Ice specialist in the series whose entire team is pure Ice with no second typing anywhere.

His badge is the Freeze Badge, and it gets misnamed in exactly the way Burgh’s does: Serebii and Pokemon Database both print Icicle Badge for it. Icicle is the romanized Japanese name, and there is a three-generation chain of that behind it: Mahogany’s English Glacier Badge is the Japanese Ice Badge, Snowpoint’s English Icicle Badge is the Japanese Glacier Badge, and Icirrus’s English Freeze Badge is the Japanese Icicle Badge. Each set of localizers pushed the names one gym further along. The guard at the Route 10 gate is no help either, greeting the correct badge with “Oh, holder of the Freeze Badge! Show the sharp edge of an icicle!”

By the sequels he has gone back to acting, playing a masked villain across four films at Pokestar Studios. His old gym is still standing, still enterable, ice puzzle still working, sign outside now reading “Former Icirrus City Pokemon Gym.” Nobody is left inside to battle. Brycen waits at the end of the ice, chats briefly, and goes.

Drayden

Opelucid City looks like two entirely different places, and which one you get has nothing to do with who runs the gym. In Black and Black 2 it is futuristic and neon-lit, with a keytar line running under the town music. In White and White 2 it is old and wooden, and an erhu plays instead. Drayden is the leader in Black 2 and in White 2 both, so he spends the sequels presiding over a city that cannot decide what century it is in.

He is also the mayor, which is what he does in Pokemon White, where he stays home and lets Iris take the gym. He is said to train by wrestling Pokemon, and the in-game gossip column reports a daily routine of ten thousand sit-ups, the same number of push-ups, and the same again in squats.

The interesting change in the sequels is positional. In Black he is the last gym on the circuit; the sequels move him down to seventh, because a newer gym claimed the final slot. That demotion follows him into the mechanics, since obedience in Unova is pegged to a badge’s position rather than its name: the Legend Badge makes every Pokemon obey when it is eighth, and stops at level 80 when it is seventh. Drayton, his grandson, surfaced four generations later in Scarlet and Violet and is already playable in Pokemon Masters EX. Drayden is the only Unova gym leader who is not.

Iris

Of the fourteen people who run a Unova gym, Iris is the only one who runs it in a single release. She holds the Opelucid Gym in Pokemon White and only in Pokemon White; in Black, and in both sequels, the job belongs to Drayden. Drayden, her opposite number at the same gym, carries the job into both sequels. Nobody else in the region is pinned to a single cartridge, and the gym she is pinned to is the last of the eight.

By the sequels she is the Unova Champion, having trained under Drayden and then beaten Alder after he stepped down. The team she defends the title with runs to six Pokemon, twice what she brought to the gym. She calls Drayden her grandfather, a relationship the record is careful to note is not biological. Her sneakers have a dragon paw print on them. She is also the only Unova leader in the first pair with no second job at all, which puts her in a room full of models, artists, pilots, archaeologists and waiters with nothing to declare but dragons.

Version-split gyms became a design idea rather than an accident later on: Galar’s ten gyms, two of them split by version do deliberately what Opelucid did once. Iris got there first, and then left to run the whole League.

Cheren

Cheren spends Black and White as the player’s rival, the clever friend from Nuvema Town who always picks the starter that beats yours. Two years later, in Black 2 and White 2, he is running the Aspertia Gym himself, and he has become a schoolteacher. The gym sits in the backyard of the Aspertia Trainers’ School, out in the open air, and it is the only one in the games that is.

He also inherits Lenora’s badge without inheriting her gym. The Basic Badge is the only badge in the entire series handed out by two different gyms, Lenora’s at Nacrene in the first pair and Cheren’s at Aspertia in the sequels; Nacrene simply stopped being a gym when Lenora went to the museum, and a new one opened in a schoolyard on the far side of the region. The badge is second in the order in Black and White and first in the sequels, which means it also quietly lost ten levels of obedience on the way.

His gym battle is the gentlest in the generation, a level 11 Patrat and a level 13 Lillipup, on the reasonable grounds that it is now the first one. He has also stopped wearing his glasses, and an NPC reports catching him miming a pair with his fingers.

Roxie

The Virbank Gym is too loud to hear you knock. It is an underground music club with a stage and a booth for a DJ, reached down a staircase off a Virbank alley, and Roxie will not notice a challenger until two of her bandmates have been beaten first, Roughneck Nicky and Guitarist Billy Jo, on the stated grounds that the band is playing over everything. When she finally loses she complains, “Wait! I was right in the middle of the chorus!”

She plays bass, she gives out the Toxic Badge and TM09, Venoshock, and her father runs the ferry to Castelia City when he is not moonlighting at Pokestar Studios, where his film debut casts him as a hero called Riolu-Man who loses. He is the one who explains the arrangement, telling her that if she can split her time between a gym and a band, he can manage two jobs as well.

The oddest thing in the building is not in the English release at all. Roxie sings over the Virbank Gym’s own theme, spelling a word out letter by letter, and on the Japanese track the word is DOGARS, which is Koffing’s Japanese name. Every other version of the game, English included, has her spell POKEMON.

Marlon

There are no switches in the Humilau Gym. No statues to rotate, no elevators, no branching routes. The player steps onto a lily pad, the current carries them one way across an open stretch of water, and five Ace Trainers are waiting at intervals along it, with a sixth who fights only if spoken to. At the far end is Marlon, who is off swimming when you arrive and who, on losing, dives into the sea and swims away rather than stay for the conversation.

Humilau City floats. Its buildings sit on the waves like small islands, and the elegant way in is the Marine Tube, a walk-through aquarium of glass just under ten inches thick that was assembled on land, lowered into the sea and run across a trench six miles deep. A resident notes that it was designed to see, not to move. It went up during the two years between the games, to commemorate a friendship between Humilau City and Undella Town, which is a considerable amount of marine engineering for a gesture.

Marlon is the eighth and final gym of the sequels, which is why the badge order shifted around him. Being last is a fixed idea in Unova, where the route is the route. Paldea’s eight gyms, beatable in any order would eventually throw the whole notion out.