Gym Leaders are the lifeblood of Pokemon. You could argue Pokemon are the lifeblood of Pokemon, but let’s hear me out first. Not only is every single player campaign in the core series designed around inevitably battling Gym Leaders, the anime puts a great emphasis on them whenever Ash gets ready for a badge battle. Sure, this is likely because they’re glorified cameos from the games, but that doesn’t change the fact that Gym Leaders are consistently depicted as important aspects of the Pokemon universe. When it comes to the Pokemon hierarchy, they’re in the top three right under the Elite Four and whoever the Champion of the region is.

With great Pokémon comes great responsibility. Or lack thereof in the case of msot Gym Leaders. When it comes down to it, as revered as Gym Leaders are, they could stand to follow a bit more of the series rules, in both the video games and anime. Gym Leaders are weird entity in both mediums as they represent bosses and challenges for Ash respectively. At the same time, they rarely ever offer a challenge and that’s because they don’t follow the same rules players and trainers do. With a bit of tweaking, Gym Leaders can offer an engaging and difficult challenge on every front. Getting to that point required a bit of overhauling, though. Where to start?

25 Don’t Use Full Restores To Prolong The Fight

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You don’t have to be a series veteran to know that the further you are in each game, the more likely it is the Gym Leader you’re battling will use a Full Restore near the end of the battle. If you’re up against the Elite Four, or the region’s Champion, you can guarantee you’ll see at least two Full Restores before the battle is done. Looking at Pokémon from a purely single-player context, this is a smart design choice that keeps trainers on their toes. Pokémon isn’t purely single player, though, and a Gym Leader using a Full Restore flies in the face of the metagame.

While what most people consider to be the metagame’s rules are governed by fans, the inability to heal using items is a multiplayer design choice implemented deliberately by GameFreak. When doing a linked or online battle, the games outright forbid you from using items. Since the metagame ends up eating the most of the average fans play time, it’s only natural that the single player should prepare them for it. By allowing Gym Leaders to heal, casual players get a false idea of what the post-game entails. Even the Battle Frontiers prohibit healing items. It’s simply just better for balancing to remove them from “boss” battles altogether.

24 Get Rid Of X Items

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In the same vein as Full Restores, there’s a very good chance you’re going to encounter at least a few X Items in your road to the Elite Four. X Attack, X Defense, X Sp. Attack, X. Sp. Defense, X Speed, and X Accuracy are all battle items that serve as buffs. You’re more likely to use them than the average Gym Leader, but it’s not unheard of to be on the receiving end of a battle item buff during a Badge battle, especially if you’re in Kanto. There’s a reason Generation I is often considered the hardest in the series: X Items.

Buffing should be done with moves, not items.

Although relatively uncommon in recent generations, the fact X Items were a part of Gym battles on the Leader’s end speaks volumes to the rather poor balancing done in Generation I. Not only was leveling up a part a challenge in and of itself, you’d occasionally find yourself at a serious disadvantage where your opponent was consistently out damaging you. If they used an X Speed or X Accuracy, you could basically kiss your party goodbye. There’s nothing inherently wrong with challenge, and the series would seriously benefit from it, but this isn’t the right approach. It’s borderline unfair.

23 Invest In Some Puzzles

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At its core, Pokémon is a JRPG and JRPGs often have dungeons to go alongside their gameplay. For Pokémon, there are a few set pieces that act as proper dungeons, but Gyms are where you’ll do most of the traditional dungeoneering. At least in theory. Gyms don’t have random battles like you’d expect in a JRPG dungeon, but they do: fixed battles, puzzles to solve, a unifying theme, and a boss battle at the end. That’s all just in theory, though. While all dungeons have fixed battles, a unifying theme, and a boss battle at the end, most are lacking in conventional puzzles.

This goes double for the anime where Ash rarely needs to do anything more than asking the Gym Leader for a match. It would be great to see him actually overcome a mental or physical challenge before earning his Badge battle. The games don’t take the puzzle concept nearly as far as they could or should, but they’re still present in the latter half of most games. In the anime, they’re basically non existent. To its credit, all four of Ash’s badges in the Orange Islands were earned via puzzles, but that’s really as far as the anime ever went with the concept.

22 Stop Using Pre-Evos

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In Pokémon’s lore, it’s established that Gym Leaders take into account how many badges a trainer has before fighting them. This is implied to be the case for Ash’s fights in the anime, albeit not overtly, while the games stick to a fixed team for each Gym Leader for design purposes. Logically, the reason Gym Leaders take badges into account before accepting a trainer’s challenge is for balancing purposes, but it doesn’t seem like many Gym Leaders actually care about how many badges you have. Especially in the games where they have set teams. That said, it’s not the fact they have fixed teams that’s the problem.

You're not fighting a pre-evolved Pokémon. You're fighting filler.

Rather, it’s the fact that so many Gym Leaders use pre-evolved Pokémon on their team. Far too often, you’ll need to wade through weaker, pre-evos before getting to the meat of a badge battle. To put it bluntly, pre-evos are just filler. They’re not actual challenges, they don’t engage the player in any way whatsoever, and they simply pad out fights. They could theoretically work if Gym Leaders, once again, adopted full parties for battles, but when a Gym Leader fights you with a party of three, chances are you don’t exactly want to see two pre-evos in their roster.

21 Team Up More Often Against Trainers

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By far, the biggest change Generation III brought with it was multi-battles. Rather than just fighting one Pokémon at a time, trainers would occasionally find themselves in situations where they were battling two on two. Most notably, Hoenn’s seventh Gym ended up having two Gym Leaders, leading to the first dual Gym battle in the series. Unfortunately, this isn’t a trend that’s carried on nearly as much as it should. Even if it’s just one Gym Leader using two Pokémon at once, it would go a long way in spicing up the typical Gym format. Heck, even just having the regular trainers in the Gym team up against the player would be a big feat.

Of course, this also goes for the anime where Ash rarely, if ever these days, ends up in a tag team battle. It was fairly relevant when he was in Hoenn, as it probably should have been all things considered, but it’s really just reserved for special occasions in later seasons. While that’s fine enough as it keeps the concept special, multi battles were a seemingly big mechanic that ended up relatively obscured by traditional gameplay. It feels more like a gimmick now when it was introduced as anything but. Perhaps it’s time to normalize them once again.

20 Take Advantage Of Move Pools

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On that note, it’s about time Gym Leaders invested in some better moves for their Pokémon. Excluding Whitney’s Miltank having Rollout for obvious reasons, can you name a single other Gym Leader with an attack so iconic that it halts progress in its tracks? Probably not. Chances are, you may have even struggled to think up another move altogether. When it comes down it, Gym Leaders have iconic Pokémon, but their Pokémon don’t have iconic moves.

Far more often than not, the average Gym leader simply doesn’t take advantage of the move pools at their disposal.

This may simply be because Gym Leaders traditionally use lower level teams and the better moves are tucked away in the latter half of a Pokémon leveling cycle, but there are TMs and HMs that offer some genuinely impressive techniques. Gym Leaders even give out TMs with what should be their iconic moves, but rarely ever are. With some clever design put behind how to format a Gym Leader’s team, GameFreak could get away with not giving them full parties or keeping themed teams. When it comes down to it, Pokémon is a game about moves. The better your moves, the better you’re going to do. If only Gym Leaders followed that philosophy.

19 Gyms Should Lock You In

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The average Pokémon Gym typically goes one of two ways. The first, players go in, defeat all the trainers, and head to the Gym Leader in one burst. The second, players go in, defeat as many trainers as they can, and head back to the Pokémon Center whenever they’re in dire need of healing. Given how each game is balanced, gyms are designed with the former strategy in mind. You’re meant to go in, exhaust your team and items, and hit up the Gym Leader at a slight disadvantage.

It’s really no different than the average JRPG dungeon.

The issue, however, is that leaving a Gym to heal is incredibly easy to do meaning that all the balancing done within the Gym itself can be nulled by a player who wants to be proactive. Although it might come off as overwhelming or unpopular, a better alternative would be to lock players in. Pokémon games are already very easy to clear with all the difficulty, if there even is difficulty, in the post-game. By locking players into a Gym they’ve started, they’re forced to finish it even in dire straits. This encourages smarter play and keeps tension high, as they should be considering the importance Gym battles are given in and out of universe.

18 Provide Healing In House For Weak Trainers

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All that said, it’s not entirely likely that GameFreak would embrace such a conventionally challenging style of design for their flagship series. In that case, it would be better to cut the middleman altogether and just offer healing in the Gym itself so players don’t have to backtrack all the way to the town’s Pokémon Center just so they can head back through the Gym, potentially do the Gym puzzle again, and finally defeat the Gym Leader. By giving players a method of healing within the Gym, it would cut back on backtracking severely while also keeping the Gym experience complete, so to speak.

More importantly, offering a healing service within the Gym can be seen as a challenge of sorts. It simply being present could create an effect where some players might feel like their pride is at stake. They got through most of the Gym without needing to heal so why heal now? Maybe even incentivize not healing by having the Gym Leader toss in some extra money or a duplicate of their offered TM. Either way, though, players who need to heal don’t need their experience bogged down by backtracking and players who don’t need to, or simply don’t want to, can ignore it and head right to the Gym Leader.

17 Rely More On Held Items

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Instead of Gym Leaders using Full Restores and X Items, you know what would be a good idea? If they relied more often on held items like berries. Not only do held items keep the flow of battle going since they’re used automatically, the multiple different types of held items ensure that Gym Leaders don’t all fall into the same pattern of using Full Restores near the end of the fight. Berries, Leftovers, or maybe just a buff based item can go a long way in making battles more engaging on the player’s end. There’s no need to bog trainers down with the same old Full Restores.

This is something that should be applied to the anime as well. How many times in the series does Ash face off against a Gym Leader who uses a held item to their advantage? On that note, how many times does Ash face off against a Gym Leader who actually gives him some legitimate trouble? Not very often. In general, Gym Leaders in the anime need to take more advantage of what’s at their disposal. Berries aren’t a game exclusive thing. They exist in the anime’s continuity. Anime Gym Leaders need to start pulling their weight and tossing some Leftovers onto their Pokémon.

16 Build Up A Full Party For A Better Challenge

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Name a single Gym Leader who fights with a full party, either in the games or the anime. I’ll wait… Done thinking? You should be considering there isn’t a single one between both mediums who actually battles with a full party of six Pokémon. Whether it be through game design or in-series lore, it’s about time Gym Leaders actually took their jobs seriously. Between both mediums, the idea is: the less badges a trainer has, the easier you go on them. Unfortunately, while this makes a degree of sense, most trainers always have a full team of six on them so the logical solution would be to go easy on them with a full party.

As it stands, battling trainers with a party less than six Pokémon benefits nobody.

In the games, players get a (relatively easy) progression of difficulty leading up to the final fight with the region’s Champion, who typically does use a full party, at the expense of not properly preparing them for the metagame. In the anime, it gives weak trainers the chance to get a badge at the expense of not properly preparing them for real, full party battles. You’re allowed to have a team of six so you should be challenged with a team of six.

15 Ditch Themed Teams Altogether

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Far more relevant in the games than in the anime, themed teams are a way of offering players an advantage they otherwise wouldn’t have when heading into a Gym. Brock’s Gym in Generation III is perhaps the best example of this philosophy. With the addition of Charmander learning Metal Claw, all three starters can take on Brock without much trouble whatsoever. He’s a naturally difficult opponent as Pokémon Yellow proves, but the right types utterly trivialize him. At first glance, this seems like a good design choice since, of course, players will want an advantage, but it’s actually Pokémon Yellow that does it right.

Themed gyms are only good when the put the player at a disadvantage. Pokémon is first and foremost a video game, but it doesn’t try all that often to challenge the player, at least not nowadays. The logical solution at this point would be do get rid of themed teams altogether. Now, this isn’t to say that Gym Leaders shouldn’t have a theme, but they should have Pokémon that outright punish players for building a party to counter a theme specifically. You have a water type Gym? Maybe throw in a random fire type to knock out any trainers with a grass based team. It’s an easy way to encourage smart play.

14 The Harder, The Better

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To follow along on this same thread, Gyms need to start offering a more consistent challenge from the very first badge to the eighth and last. With very few exceptions, in both video games and anime surprisingly enough, Gyms are easy to conquer on a whole. It rarely takes Ash more than a single episode to defeat a Gym Leader and earn his badge, and themed teams make it simple enough for players to just dominate a Gym without putting much thought into what they’re doing. Whitney in Generation II is a great example of a Gym Leader who genuinely challenges players.

A Gym should be challenging. 

Her Miltank is basically a meme at this point thanks to Rollout, but that’s actually kind of incredibly if you think about. Whitney is the third Gym Leader in Generation II, and its remakes, and she’s easily the hardest part of the Johto Badge challenge. After her, nothing comes close to offering the same degree of difficulty. Just imagine if every Gym in Johto were as hard as hers. Sure, it might be overwhelming at first, but it would actually encourage players to play smarter and build up an appropriate team. A whole region of Whitneys would make the average Pokémon single player all the more worthwhile.

13 Use More Varied Pokémon

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More than anything else, and this goes for both the video games and anime, Gym Leaders need to vary up their Pokémon. Now, this isn’t the same as just ditching themed teams. Rather, this is the idea of forcing Gym Leaders not to have duplicates in their party. Far too often, Gym Leaders take their teams to an extreme and feature two of the same Pokémon on their team. Facing a rock type Gym Leader? There’s a good chance they’ll have two Geodudes for some reason. Facing a flying type? Here, fight these two Pidgeots.

Now, this would make sense to a degree if all Gym Leaders were forced to build up a full party, but they’re not. What this means is that far more interesting Pokémon, whether they be themed or not, get ignored in favor of bland choices for the sake of simplicity. What fun is it battling two Pidgeots? How does that engage a trainer in any sense? By simply spicing up a team, Gym Leaders can offer a more fulfilling battle. There’s nothing exciting or enjoying about taking out a Geodude only to fight against another Geodude. From an animation perspective, it’s also just boring to watch.

12 Don’t Be Afraid To Sweep A Team

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Sweeping refers to the act of taking out an entire team with just one Pokémon. More specifically, to sweep you need a Pokémon that has a high enough speed stat to consistently attack first. Combined with a proper move pool, sweeping is one of the cruelest, but still fair, things you can do to another trainer. Which is why it should happen more often. In the video games at least. We don’t need Ash losing anymore often than he already does, do we? It would truly be amazing if, even if just once per game, there was a Gym Leader capable of sweeping a player’s team.

Of course, they shouldn’t be able to sweep to the point where it’s guaranteed to happen every time, that’s just unfair, but the risk should be there. Build a bad team? Get sweeped. Didn’t train your party properly? Get sweeped. Pokémon is not a punishing series by nature, but it easily can be while also keeping its identity in check. Easiness doesn’t define the series, but it’s slowly becoming a staple. By placing legitimate danger in a player’s way, the franchise can get away from this lack of difficulty it’s slowly ingraining into its core identity.

11 Don’t Abandon The Gym

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For some weird reason, Ash is constantly meeting Gym Leaders for the first time outside of their Gym, and often without the context that they’re Gym Leaders. Obviously, Gym Leaders are people and don’t live at their Gym, but the consistency at which Ash bumps into them outside of their place of work, while on his way to their place of work mind you, is quite telling. If you go by just the anime, you get the sense that Gym Leaders don’t spend all that much time doing, you know, their job. When your career is defined around building a Gym for trainers to challenge you at, maybe stick around your Gym a bit more often.

Although this isn’t nearly as much of an issue in the video games, it is, nonetheless, an issue. Arguably, it’s even worse in the games when a Gym Leader is absent because regions in the games only have eight Gyms whereas the anime implies each region has more than eight and a trainer simply needs a total of eight badges to compete in their region’s league. When Giovanni is absent from his Gym in Generation I, that means anyone doing a badge run is effectively locked at seven until he returns. That should be cause for termination, honestly.

10 The Tier Dilemma

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Tiers in Pokémon are weird to say the least. Split up into six categories- Uber, OverUsed, UnderUsed, RarelyUsed, NeverUsed, and PU- tiers aren’t exactly official, but they’re official enough within the fandom that most fans abide by them for the metagame even though they’re not exactly enforced by Nintendo or GameFreak. In any situation where the fans have adopted a system so universal it may as well actually be official, it begs the question: should the games take tiers into consideration? It’s an odd question to ask, and one that seems almost counterproductive to legitimate game design, but Smogon’s tiers do have a place in the fandom.

With that in mind, what would a tier conscious Pokémon core game look like? For starters, it could go a long way in balancing Gyms. Perhaps the further a trainer progresses, the higher the tier Gym Leaders focus on. This could create a deeper sense of progression within the core gameplay while also showing off Pokémon who often don’t get the chance to shine. Of course, an overemphasis on tiers is also dangerous as it would subtly tell trainers that to do well they’d need to dip into higher tiers, potentially crippling several otherwise used and like Pokémon. It’s maybe just best to ignore tiers altogether and find some better ways to beef up the difficulty.

9 The Super Specific Species Clause

Lance Dragonite
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Lance Dragonite

Another fan governed rule that the game could benefit from, and one actually touched upon earlier in this article, is the species clause. The species clause states that no trainer should have more than one of the same Pokémon on their team. Earlier, it was brought up due to the fact that the games use it as a way of padding out Gym battles that could otherwise thrive with unique Pokémon to fight. The species clause goes in a different direction altogether, almost protecting the player from unfair situations. Remember how Lance has three Dragonites on his team in Generation II? That wouldn’t fly with the species clause because it’s unfair.

Imagine you’re fighting a Gym Leader with a full party and they toss out a Pokémon that you struggle against. You barely just beat them and it stands out as one of the defining moments of the match so far. Unfortunately, their next Pokémon is an exact replica of the one you defeated and now you’re at a disadvantage since the first match already took so much out of your team. Now imagine, they have a third version of that Pokémon. At that point, you may as well just give up and go grind.

8 Stop Using Agility Affecting Attacks

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To further expand on some of Smogon’s rules, agility affecting attacks aren’t exactly welcomed with open arms in the metagame. If you’re ever been hit with Sand Attack multiple times in the same fight, you likely understand why. Agility in Pokemon is one of the most valuable resources a trainer has. Battles happen fast and wasting a turn due to a miss is a surefire way of inevitably losing a battle. In a best case scenario, it puts you at a serious disadvantage without outright forcing a loss.

The idea behind banning agility affecting attacks is to ensure a scenario like this is never enforced onto a player by another trainer.

Obviously, the only way to remedy this situation would be to remove moves like Sand Attack from Pokemon outright. Of course, this does have unfortunate implications. For starters, it would dumb down the core gameplay. As frustrating as it can be to lose your agility, this is a form of difficulty in an otherwise fairly easy series. Secondly, and most importantly, it’s setting a precedent to remove buffs and debuffs altogether. Pokemon is a JRPG so why shouldn’t buffs and debuffs play a role? Like with the other fan made rules, this is a change that requires serious deliberation and one not without its consequences.

7 Acknowledge A Trainer’s Badges

4- Cheap Gym Badges
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As previously mentioned, Gym Leaders seriously need to do a better job at acknowledging a trainer’s badges, both in the games and anime. In the latter, this should simply mean Gym Leaders offering Ash a higher challenge the further he progresses. The anime already does this to an extent by having the later Gym battles pose a tougher battle for Ash, but nowhere near the extent they probably should. Most of the time, his battles are painfully short and done within a single episode. It’s about time Gym Leaders started making him earn his badges with a bit more intensity.

For the games, this would require a bit of non-linearity. Should the player somehow sequence break, a feat often possible within the series, the badge battles should reflect that. Gym Leaders should have set teams depending on how many badges a player has. This would make taking on a region all the more engaging while also encouraging players to replay the games with new paths in mind. Both Generations I and II allow players to do some Gyms out of order so it’s not as if adding such a system would run counter to what GameFreak has established for the series.

6 Bring Back Rematches

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Easily the best addition Platinum, HeartGold, and SoulSilver brought to the series, Generation IV’s dynamic rematches completely changed how Gym Leaders were represented in the series. Rather than just being pushovers you fought once and moved on from, you could now meet up with them for a rematch with they used a full party of actually trained Pokemon to potentially put you in your place. Not only does it go a long way in actually characterizing the Gym Leaders, it shows why they’re Gym Leaders in the first place by offering you a legitimate challenge that isn’t bogged down by the main game’s emphasis on easy progression.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a mechanic that’s been consistent within the series and it absolutely should be moving forward. Logicially, of course, Gym Leaders would want a rematch against the trainer who defeated them, especially since they’re not only going for the Elite Four, they’ve actually won it. In general, the franchise has a very bad habit of removing features from game to game and it’s about time GameFreak put a stop to that design philosophy. Rematches are, unquestionably, the best thing to ever happen to Gym Leaders within the series. It absolutely must become a mainstay for the franchise’s future.