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Puzzles within gyms are a Pokemon trainer's last obstacle before challenging the powerful checkpoint trainers, but sometimes, those obstacles can get pretty weird.
Earlier Generations have a big problem in the weirdness department since their potential design was inhibited by the programming limitations of the time. To keep things fair, each gym will be considered as per when their respective games came out instead of overall.
So then, which gym leaders went out of their way to put together the strangest buildings for their challengers?
Note: This article is subjective and reflects the writer's opinions.
Five weirdest Pokemon gym layouts
#5 - Fuschia Gym
This gym isn't much to look at, honestly. It's just a few dudes standing around an empty room. What's so weird about that?
No, the weirdness comes in when players start bumping into the labyrinth of invisible walls the gym leader Koga has put in place. With no visual cues whatsoever for these walls, players are left to bumble and stumble their way around the room until either they find the correct path or their Pokemon succumb to the Psychic and Poison-type Pokemon of the surrounding trainers.
By today's standards, this might be considered a sub-par puzzle. But for Generation I's time, this puzzle was bewildering and overall very strange compared to the rest of the game's Pokemon gyms.
#4 - Castelia Gym - Black/White 2 Version
Conceptually, this type of Pokemon gym has been done to death. Gamers get into one 'teleporter' and come out from another. They go on one 'elevator' and arrive at the expected destination. No, what makes this gym weird is its buggy design.
The elevators/teleporters are silken chambers that the character enters, then travels inside of a thin strand of woven spider silk to another connected chamber. While, unlike with teleporters, players can tell where to go based on the silken strand's direction, the strands do not go straight up and down like an elevator.
Instead, they go wherever they please, leading the player on a wild journey throughout several layers of woven platforms until finally reaching Burgh's wondrously chromatic lair.
#3 - Santalune Gym
Yes, it's another Bug-type Pokemon gym. But this one is well worth noting. On paper, it's just another labyrinth-type gym where the player has to navigate to the gym leader to thrash their Pokemon.
However, what makes this gym strange to experience is that the labyrinth to be traversed is actually a series of dim and brightly-colored, dew-covered spider webs.
As the first Kalos gym, it's a remarkably easy puzzle. But it does make the gamer ask: how exactly is the character managing to travel along these webs so well?
And with no safety net to catch anyone who may slip, who exactly gave this gym clearance for letting first-time gym-goers enter?
#2 - Laverre Gym
The first Fairy-type Pokemon gym makes a glamorous appearance in Generation VI, though players wouldn't be able to tell from just the outside. If it weren't for the gym statue just to the left of the run-down building, a player might even miss the mystical gym. Inside, however, it's anything but missable.
Conceptually, it's nearly identical to Saffron City's gym from previous games. But instead of being a single floor of nine rooms side-by-side, the Laverre gym is set up to look like a dollhouse, creepily matching the gym leader's pixie-like appearance.
Even the view is reminiscent of a dollhouse as the player gets an outside-looking-in point of view as if there were no fourth wall instead of looking down from the ceiling like older generations of games would.
#1 - Stow-on-Side Gym
This entry is by far the craziest and weirdest Pokemon gym layout of them all. Players are put inside a ball and have to rotate themselves all the way down a course, getting punted about by either boxing gloves or ghastly palms.
Pokemon Sword and Shield likely has some of the most unique gyms in the franchise so far, but out of all of them, this one is simply the strangest, particularly Shield's Ghost version.
Those claws are much creepier to be batted around by than the semi-comedic boxing gloves.
