With the obvious exception of Giovanni, who is the worst gym leader of all time?
The Leader who is incompetent, petulant, ignorant of any devious plots or problems happening around them, and has a team not at all representative of their town/city/region
I'll nominate a couple
Erika
Whitney
The 3 Brothers
the fighting guys from gen 2 and 3
they are so interchangeable and have the same gimmick of being a fighting type gym on an island but have generic pure fighting job mons
I think the 3rd gen fighting guy at least doesn't seem oblivious to the rest of the world around him. The 2nd generation guy Chuck doesn't seem to know the lighthouse is out across the sea or that those mystical whirlpool caves right off his coast might be important
So you're saying Chuck is based, then?
I think he belongs in the dojo in saffron. He doesn't have what it takes to be a leader
Chuck trains on Route 47 all day.
Tbf, the lighthouse is more Jasmine's duty, considering she actually lives in Olivine
Falkner
>Borrowed a pidgey to fight you
Bugsy
>2/3 mons use only poison sting
Tate and Liza
>RS version is all gimmick no fight
Viola
>Has a surskit
Ramos
>Has a Jumpluff as a lead and a Weepingbell as an Ace
>Viola
>Has a surskit
She's literally the first leader and you fight her before even meeting the professor bro calm down
Several times it has already been established that leaders use different teams depending on your level or number of medals, if you are going to criticize them for their team the correct thing is to judge their more complete and higher level versions.
>borrowed a Pidgey
Bro didn't want to beat your noob ass with a Skarmory, I respect that.
>Whitney
>The only casual filter in this entire 10 generation
>Incompetent
Cope harder, Cyndiquilgay
Whitney doesn't have a clue the radio tower is in danger despite spending loads of time there, and normal types like a cow and a pink ball of fur don't mesh with Goldenrod, the most high tech city of the region by far. Something like the steel type would be much better for her, and the normal type could move to olivine which is more rural and literally has a farm up north
The normal type black lady from gen 5. A puppy and a prairie dog don't feel suitable for a gym leader
If pokemon had better worldbuilding and bigger balls I think she'd be a lot better if they leaned into the mammy persona.
A normal type gym in the segregated part of a southern town in the mid 20th century. Not much to work with but she does have what shes caught.
>A puppy and a prairie dog
Yeah embracing the mammy type would work better for her, instead she's pulled in the rural direction while also having a big library and museum. Never sure what to think of her
i feel like BW's climax automatically excludes any of the BW leaders from being the worst.
Marlon, however, can eat shit.
Nah, Lenora at least had some strategy with Watchog being a dedicated Cripple Lead and having Herdier come in immediately with Retaliate to take out whatever beat its partner.
Volkner causes blackouts due to redesigning his gym puzzel which effect Sunyshore, all because he's depressed by not having worthy Challengers showing up
I thought about him but at the very least thematically an electric type trainer in a port city with a big lighthouse makes sense.
Still incredibly irresponsible to frick up his city like that
He easily the weakest in Gen IV for sure
I don't like Hoenn's gym leaders
Except for Norman being your dad and Flannery being hotter than her pokemons I really didn't care for any of the,
All other first 5 gens have fun gym leaders in my opinion
I guess I don't like gen 6 leaders either but it honestly might be because I only played it once and ignored it for years afterwards
Juan. Decide to make the Champion a water type trainer yet still keep the 8th Gym Leader as water when they could've made him anything. Clair at least had the excuse of being a part of the Dragon clan. Juan's only excuse was that he was Wallace's mentor. You can mentor someone without training the same type
Given how much raw power you get in gen 6 the the kalos leaders being as weak as they are is dumb. From gym 3 upwards you have mega evolution. The gym leaders don’t have any thing strong enough to really contend with this.
And for some reason they doubled down on this for ORAS, giving you not a Mega Lucario but a FRICKING MEGA LEGENDARY just in case your mega starter wasn't enough (because Speed Boost Blaziken on crack is clearly not enough)
I like megas but this is one thing I'll praise Dynamax/Tera for. Megas just felt cheap because outside of the champion and the final battle against the team leader npcs never used them
That one dragon type gym leader who doesn't give you your rightfully-earned badge.
She works thematically with her town/region and doesn't actively harm her town
Gen 5 and Gen 6’s leaders and E4 suffer from the weird arbitrary cap reduction on Pokémon numbers that no other Gen before or after did. 3 Pokémon on GL 8 and 4 for the Elite 4 is disgusting.
Skyla for shooting you out of a cannon
Clair, by far. No one else literally refuses to uphold their duty as a gym leader and give you their badge when they lose. Sure, Whitney throws a crying fit, but at least she gets over it quick and gives it to you of her own accord. Clair throws a tantrum and sends you on a wild snipe hunt that even she wasn't able to pass when you beat her fair and square.
The only reason she wasn't fired on the spot was nepotism, plain and simple.
>b-but she fits her town's theme!
Yeah, her fully-aquatic team fits the aesthetic of the barren, mountainous wasteland town SO well.
volkner, marlon, or clair.
>volkner
actively fricks over the people in his town by causing massive blackouts that last for weeks, too autistic to just use weaker pokemon for the challenge he seeks, half his team isn't even electric type.
>marlon
ignores team plasma committing flagrant acts of terrorism and hanging out on his fricking doorstep, too much of a loser to do literally anything to protect his town. also his team sucks.
>clair
other anons have said it better than i could.
oh yeah, and marlon is even more pathetic in comparison because all the BW gym leaders actually stepped up and did shit when team plasma was threatening the region.
I've always thought Wulfric in Kalos deserved special mention for how he tells you flat-out before his battle that Ice type is fricking trash and you're probably going to sweep him easily.
How has no one said Iono yet? She quite literally is a gym leader for the sole purpose of getting clout for her streaming and all the other gym leaders basically tell her to go frick herself when asked to collab with her. I don't think anyone else has as little care for actually being a gym leader as she does.
I bet if there was an actual villain team in Paldea then you bet your ass Iono would have been made into an accomplice as all they would have to do is promise a big boost to her popularity and streams and she would have hopped on the doomsday train because that's literally all her vapid ass cares about.
>How has no one said Iono yet?
because gens 8 and 9 were shit and forgettable as frick
Candice for making freezing 10 year olds crash into dilapidated snowmen while she watches from her throne
The Striaton bros at least have a reason they didn't confront the Sages (Bianca's fat ass didn't reach them in time). Marlon, like others have mentioned, sees Team Plasma park their airship on Route 21 and goes "anyway I'm gonna go swim now teehee". League members even outside of Unova are supposed to keep things in order, keep evil teams in check, and yet this fricking moron just ignores it.
Surge probably committed tons of war crimes
>Lt. Surge electrocuted a bunch of sandBlack folk to death
Based.
thats more of a civil court dispute rather than anything else, imho.
An argument can be made for Whitney. She's a literal crybaby who refused to issue her badge to the victor per League rules and had to have a mental breakdown before she did her job, which was also implied to be a regular occurrence. However, the worst is Claire. She didn't have the same emotional outburst that Whitney had but she was arguably even more unprofessional by not accepting her loss and forcing the player to do an extra challenge and had to be verbally reprimanded by her superiors in the Dragons Den. Absolutely abysmal performance on the part of Johtos gym leaders and the league for not stepping in.
Also Jasmine spends more time worrying about a local sick sheep instead of working at the gym which was moronic. She could have sent someone else to get the secret potion for Amphy.
That's literally what she does and I think not letting ships drive ashore is a pretty worthwhile use of her time
All I'm saying is that a gym leader should have been able to delegate some of her authority and get someone else to care for Amphy. And what exactly was she going to do about the ships while she was worrying at the top of the tower?
Her Magnemites are electric types. They could probably do what Amphy was doing
Then she could have had literally anyone else with an electric type do it. There was no reason to have her up there other than her concern for the pokemon. Which, while admirable, didn't help anything really.
>With the obvious exception of Giovanni
I don't know. Fricking slander, ask me.
What's wrong with Erika?
Erika let Team Rocket build their criminal empire right under her nose. Sabrina is just as bad.
Why Jasmine wasn't electric type?
Sabrina, Surge, Blaine and Koga are villains related to the Team Rocket.
Only in the manga
It's Falker and it's not even close. Dude couldn't even use his own region's bird or go one route ahead to pick up a Natu.
Bugsy is pretty bad too, lots of neat bugs in Johto and he's using scraps from Kanto.
*Falkner
*gayner