One Of Pokemon's Best Gyms Is Also One Of Its Least Respected

thegamer.com:

I've been working my way through Pokemon Blue again this year, keeping track of my journey each month and trying to treat it like a tourist. You can catch up on my adventure here, if you're so inclined, but this week I reached Saffron City. It always felt like a city operating well within its own potential, getting a suitable glow-up in Let's Go but even then seeming like it had a little more juice left in the tank. Here's hoping Pokemon Scarlet & Violet finally take advantage of the fact that they can be so much more expansive with its world building and city design, but Saffron should not be overlooked. It's the home of one of Pokemon's most interesting stories.

Pokemon cities have one gym. That's the rule. Occasionally they have zero, and have some other central point of interest (a tradition that dates back to Kanto's own Lavender Town), but it feels like Pokemon's world is built around gyms because that's the aim of the game. Win the gym badge to progress. Sure, there's a villain team story running alongside it, but gyms are the 'point' of the game. Scarlet & Violet again has promised to shake things up, offering two fully fledged stories alongside the gym saga. Back where it all started though, Saffron shook up the one gym rule.

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Saffron has two gyms, which look identical from the outside, giving both an air of legitimacy. However, the Fighting Dojo is no longer recognised by the League having been defeated and taken over by the Psychic gym next door. This seems especially harsh when you consider that Fighting is weak to Psychic and, thanks to a bug, Gen 1 Psychics were weak to nothing. Any gym could feasibly do this, and it