Pokémon Season 9: Battle Frontier — Ash takes on Kanto's Battle Frontier facilities

Season 9 is a wrap-up season. Titled Battle Frontier, it closes out cycle 2 of the anime, brings Ash back to where he grew up and gives the Hoenn group one last shared goal before they go their separate ways. Forty-seven episodes later, the foursome is no more and the road leads to a brand-new region. It's a season that reads less like a beginning than like a long, methodical conclusion.

Contents

• Where season 9 fits in the series
• Broadcast and episode count
• Kanto, a familiar setting seen through new eyes
• Ash, Brock, May and Max: the foursome's last lap
• The Battle Frontier, the real heart of the season
• The Kanto Grand Festival and May's journey
• The Pokémon that define the season
• Team Rocket and the other opponents
• "Home Is Where the Start Is": the farewell episode
• What season 9 leaves behind
• Season 9 at a glance
• Frequently Asked Questions

Where season 9 fits in the series

Season 9 is the fourth and final season of cycle 2, known as Advanced Generation. It follows season 8, Advanced Battle, and comes before season 10, which kicks off a brand-new cycle. In the continuous numbering of the series, it covers episodes 420 to 466, listed as episodes AG146 to AG192. In other words, it holds both the most thankless and the most interesting spot: the final chapter, tasked with settling storylines opened three seasons earlier.

One point is worth making right away, because it's behind nearly all the confusion on this subject: splitting the show into seasons is a Western convention, not a Japanese one. In Japan, the series airs continuously, episode after episode, under the series name of its cycle. The blocks of forty to fifty episodes we call "seasons" were cut to fit American and European TV schedules, then given their own logo and theme song. So you should never present a Japanese series name as the title of a season, or work out Japanese air dates from Western ones.

This season is also the last stretch of Ash's journey with May and Max, which makes it an important milestone in the character's overall arc, traced in our feature on Ash's complete journey. Cycle 2 opened with Ash starting over in an unfamiliar region; it closes with Ash coming home for one last test.

Broadcast and episode count

Season 9 has 47 episodes, from AG146 to AG192. No episode was dropped along the way, which isn't always the case in this series: later seasons will have broadcast gaps that we'll cover in due course. So the figure of 47 holds for the Japanese version and the dubbed versions alike.

The three broadcast schedules are very clearly out of step with one another, and you need to keep them carefully apart. In Japan, the corresponding episodes aired from October 6, 2005 to September 14, 2006. In the United States, the season started almost a year after Japan, on September 8, 2006, with Fear Factor Phony, and ended on March 3, 2007, with Home Is Where the Start Is. In France, the broadcast came even later: sources place it sometime in 2007, with no exact dates documented for every episode.

As for physical media, the complete season was released on DVD in France, in individual box sets, by Warner Home Vision. That's another distinctive feature of this point in the series: the publisher changes with the following season, a sign that the move from one cycle to the next came with an industrial shake-up as much as an editorial one.

Finally, this season coincides with the English version changing hands, which explains many of the differences in tone viewers noticed at the time. The original studio's dubbing rights expired and were not renewed; the series also changed American broadcasters, leaving the broadcast network that had carried it from the start for a cable channel. The international theme song changed as well, and the French version adopted its own theme, Le Tournoi Extrême, while the end credits reuse an older theme from the series as an instrumental.

Kanto, a familiar setting seen through new eyes

The entire season takes place in the Kanto region, where the series first began. The choice is far from random: after three seasons in Hoenn, bringing Ash back to his home turf lets you measure how far he's come. The towns along the way are familiar, and so are the faces, but the challenge is new. To place Kanto among the other regions of the Pokémon world, our region overview gives you the key geographic landmarks.

This return has a direct consequence for the structure of the season: Ash no longer collects badges. He already made the rounds of Kanto's Gyms years earlier. The story engine lies elsewhere, in a parallel circuit, and the season gets an unusually free-wheeling tone out of it. The group no longer moves in a straight line from Gym to Gym: it hunts for scattered, sometimes hidden facilities, which makes room for plenty of detour episodes.

👟 Not a single badge left to earn: this season, Ash leaves Kanto's well-marked routes for improvised detours, and our Pokémon shoes go with you on yours.

The setting also lends itself to reunions and handoffs. Ash's old Pokémon, left at Professor Oak's lab, are no longer on the other side of the world: they're within calling distance, and the season makes the most of it. It's the kind of detail you only notice on a rewatch, but it explains why this season has such a different flavor from the previous three.

Finally, it's worth noting that the season doesn't just recycle familiar places: several of the circuit's facilities are located in places the series had never shown before, such as Metallica Island, off the Seafoam Islands, or the small town created for the show that is home to the Battle Tower. Kanto gains unexpected depth from it, and the mental map the first season had laid down grows noticeably wider.

Ash, Brock, May and Max: the foursome's last lap

The season 9 cast is exactly the one from the end of cycle 2, and that's worth stressing, because it will change completely from the very next season. Ash travels with Brock, the former Gym Leader of Pewter City who has become the group's caretaker, with May, a Coordinator from Hoenn, and with Max, May's little brother, still too young to have Pokémon of his own. This foursome stays intact from the season's first episode to its last.

Even so, each of them pursues a separate goal, and that's what gives the season its twin storylines. Ash chases the battle circuit's Symbols; May works her way through Contests to collect the Ribbons that will earn her a place in the Kanto Grand Festival. Brock plays his usual role of adviser and cook, but the season gives him a break from routine: he enters his first Contest and ends up facing May herself in the episode What I Did for Love!.

Max, finally, takes on the role of the group's observer and resident encyclopedia. He has no team, so no track record, but he carries a good share of the season's emotional weight: he's the one who dreams out loud about the day he'll set off on his own journey. That thread closes in the very last episode, when he announces he's heading to Petalburg City to wait for his own departure. May and Max won't follow Ash into season 10, where only Brock will rejoin him, starting in the second episode: that's exactly the turning point where the cast changes.

The Battle Frontier, the real heart of the season

The thread running through it all is the Battle Frontier. It's made up of seven battle facilities scattered across Kanto, each run by an elite opponent known in English as a Frontier Brain and in the French version as a génie extrême. Beating one of them earns you a Frontier Symbol. Scott, the recruiter who offers Ash the challenge, crisscrosses the region looking for Trainers who can keep up. The whole setup is directly inspired by the Battle Frontier introduced in Pokémon Emerald, the third-generation game released during this cycle.

Here are the seven sites in detail, with who runs each one: Noland's Battle Factory, near Cerulean City; Greta's Battle Arena, near Saffron City; Tucker's Battle Dome, in Lavender Town; Lucy's Battle Pike, in Fuchsia City; Spenser's Battle Palace, on Metallica Island; Anabel's Battle Tower, the sixth stop on the circuit; and Brandon's Battle Pyramid, whose location is revealed only to Trainers holding the other six Symbols, since it flies and regularly moves from place to place.

🏅 One Frontier Symbol for every Frontier Brain beaten, from Tucker's Dome to Brandon's flying, ever-moving Pyramid: our Pokémon stickers let you line up your own collection on your bedroom door.

One point needs clarifying here, because it's regularly misreported: season 9 doesn't cover all seven challenges, only six. The first one, at the Battle Factory, had already been won at the end of season 8. So season 9 runs through Greta, Tucker, Lucy, Spenser, Anabel and then Brandon. Two of these battles require a rematch: Anabel beats Ash the first time before losing the return match, and Brandon gets the better of him twice before the third showdown finally goes Ash's way.

That final match is the high point of the season. To take it on, Ash calls back his Kanto veterans — his Charizard, Squirtle and Bulbasaur join Pikachu for a four-on-four against Brandon's Dusclops, Ninjask, Solrock and Regice. The win earns him the Brave Symbol — and, right on its heels, an unexpected offer: to become a Frontier Brain himself and run his own facility. He turns it down, and that decision may be the most revealing character moment in the entire cycle.

The Kanto Grand Festival and May's journey

Alongside the battle circuit, the season follows May's campaign on the Contest circuit step by step. Along the way she runs into her usual rivals: Drew, the elegant, methodical one; Harley, whose bad faith turns into a combat sport; and Solidad, a seasoned Coordinator who outclasses them all. Harley picks his sabotage schemes back up right from the start of the season, determined to block her path to the very end.

The Kanto Grand Festival takes place at the Indigo Plateau, over three episodes. May gets through the qualifiers, knocks out Harley and then Drew, and makes it to the final four before falling in the semifinals to Solidad, who wins the Ribbon Cup. A fourth-place finish, then, but one earned by beating the two rivals who had haunted her since Hoenn along the way. The season clearly presents this run as progress, not as failure.

Her team grows at the same pace. May receives an Egg that hatches into an Eevee over the course of the season, and her Combusken reaches its final stage to become Blaziken in the second-to-last episode. She also travels with a Munchlax and a Squirtle. When she announces she wants to leave for Johto to compete on the circuit there, her decision is nothing like running away: it's the logical next step.

The Pokémon that define the season

On Ash's side, two evolutions shape the team. His Phanpy evolves into Donphan early in the season, and his Grovyle finally reaches its final stage as Sceptile, before losing its nerve and then finding it again over an episode devoted entirely to rebuilding its confidence. Traveling alongside them are his Pikachu, Swellow and Corphish, while his old Kanto companions return now and then as reinforcements.

The arrival with the biggest consequences comes late: Ash catches an Aipom during the Grand Festival. This mischievous little monkey won't leave the series for a long time, and it will play a decisive role at the very start of the following season. On Brock's side, Mudkip evolves into Marshtomp, the Onix he left at the family Gym has become a Steelix, and a Bonsly joins the team.

The season also features several appearances by rare Pokémon, handled as event episodes. A Pokémon Ranger comes to the rescue of an injured Celebi , then reappears a few episodes later when the group comes across a wild Deoxys , in a two-parter titled Pokémon Ranger — Deoxys' Crisis. These episodes echo the feature films of the period, listed in our complete guide to the films.

Team Rocket and the other opponents

Jessie, James and Meowth remain the recurring antagonists, doing what they've done since the series' very first episode: stubbornly chasing Pikachu, with the occasional accidentally helpful intervention. Their long history and their place in the organization are covered in detail in our feature on Team Rocket.

Their teams shift a little over the course of the season. Jessie fields her Wobbuffet, Seviper and Dustox, while keeping up her disguised forays onto the Contest circuit. For James, two changes come back to back in the same episode: he leaves his Chimecho with his grandparents so it can recover, and accidentally catches a Mime Jr. that will stay by his side from then on.

The trio also makes a decision with lasting consequences. When May leaves for Johto, Jessie refuses to follow her, despite Harley's offer, and chooses to stay on the trail of Ash and his Pikachu. That stubbornness is what explains why Team Rocket sets off for a whole new region at the end of the season, even though nothing forced them to.

"Home Is Where the Start Is": the farewell episode

The season's final episode, Home Is Where the Start Is, is built entirely around the group's breakup. May leaves for Johto, where Drew, Harley and Solidad are waiting for her. Brock heads back to Pewter City. Max sets course for Petalburg City. Ash, for his part, returns to Pallet Town. In just a few minutes, the lineup that had carried the series for three seasons scatters for good.

🎨 In just a few minutes, the foursome scatters for good: May leaves for Johto, Brock heads back to Pewter City and Ash returns to Pallet Town — our Pokémon decorations hang that final journey on your bedroom walls.

It's also the episode that brings back Gary, Ash's eternal rival, fresh from a region Ash has so far only heard about. The battle that follows is over fast: Ash's Pikachu falls to the Electivire his rival brought back with him. Gary then heads back to study in that faraway region, and Ash in turn decides to go there — but to battle.

Ash's departure is deliberately stripped down: he leaves his entire team at Professor Oak's lab and takes only his Pikachu. Except that his Aipom has no intention of staying behind and quietly follows him. This stowaway is the link to season 10, and it explains why Ash arrives at his destination with two Pokémon instead of one.

What season 9 leaves behind

Season 9 serves a rare purpose in a series this long: it cleanly wraps up a cycle without leaving anything hanging. The battle circuit is completed, the Grand Festival is held, and every companion gets a clear exit. Nothing is put off until later. That's what lets the following season start from scratch with no narrative debt.

It also works as a full-scale test of the parallel-circuit formula. By swapping badges for Symbols, cycle 2 proved you could keep the backbone of the series while changing what's at stake — a principle later cycles would reuse in their own way. How the classic Gyms and the Elite Four work is covered in our feature on Gym Leaders and the Elite Four.

Finally, it gives Ash a refusal that speaks volumes. Being offered a Frontier Brain post means being offered a settled life and status. He declines so he can keep traveling. That choice, made three episodes before the end of the season, sheds light on the rest of his journey: the character consistently prefers the next departure to a secure position.

Season 9 at a glance

Frequently Asked Questions

• How many episodes are in Pokémon season 9?
  Season 9, titled Battle Frontier, has 47 episodes, numbered AG146 to AG192, i.e. episodes 420 to 466 in the series' continuous numbering. No episode from this season was dropped from Western broadcasts, so the total is the same in Japan and in the dubbed versions.
• What region is season 9 set in?
  All of season 9 takes place in the Kanto region, where the series began. Ash doesn't collect badges there, since he took on the Kanto Gyms much earlier: instead he tackles a parallel circuit, the Battle Frontier, whose seven facilities are scattered across the region.
• Who travels with Ash in season 9?
  Ash travels with Brock, May and Max, May's little brother. This foursome, formed during the Advanced Generation cycle, stays unchanged from the first to the last episode of season 9. The group splits up in the final episode, and only Brock hits the road with Ash again in season 10, rejoining him from the second episode; May and Max don't set off with him again.
• What is the Battle Frontier in season 9?
  The Battle Frontier is a set of seven battle facilities spread across the Kanto region, each run by an elite opponent known in English as a Frontier Brain and called a génie extrême in the French version. Beating them earns a Frontier Symbol. The seven are the Battle Factory, the Battle Arena, the Battle Dome, the Battle Pike, the Battle Palace, the Battle Tower and the Battle Pyramid, the last of which flies and can therefore move around. The whole concept is inspired by the Battle Frontier in the game Pokémon Emerald.
• Does Ash win every Frontier Symbol in season 9?
  No, not all of them within this one season. The Battle Factory challenge against Noland had already been won at the end of season 8. Season 9 covers the other six: Greta, Tucker, Lucy, Spenser, Anabel and then Brandon. Two of them take a rematch, with Ash losing once to Anabel and twice to Brandon before coming out on top.
• Why does the group split up at the end of season 9?
  Each character has reached the end of their goal for the cycle. May leaves for Johto to compete on the Contest circuit there, where Drew, Harley and Solidad are waiting for her. Brock returns to Pewter City and Max heads for Petalburg City. Ash, meanwhile, decides to set off for a new region after learning that his rival Gary has just come back from it. He takes only his Pikachu, but his Aipom quietly follows him.
• When did season 9 air in France?
  Season 9 aired in France during 2007, roughly a year after the American broadcast and nearly two years after the Japanese broadcast of the corresponding episodes. Exact dates are not documented for the whole season. The complete season was also released on DVD in France by Warner Home Vision.

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