Punctuation Unown

Posted March 17, 2024

Unown, the alphabet Pokémon, has been around since Generation 2 (Gold & Silver). Today I have a tidbit about Heart Gold & Soul Silver, the remakes from 2010.

There are 26 obvious Unown, one for each letter of the Roman alphabet.

This one is F

There are also 2 punctuation Unown (? and !), who are absolutely sick of this shit.

Question Mark	Exclamation Mark

Just look at how dissatisfied they are.

Getting the punctuation Unown is relatively involved. There are a bunch of guides about how to do that online.

I did this recently and I ran into a tiny quibble that none of the guides mentioned. (Setting aside that I caught 36 Shadow Pokémon and purified 41 of them in Pokémon Colosseum to get a Ho-oh for one of the puzzles - ANYWAY!)

This took so long! But now’s not the time to get distracted

The guides all talk about the 4 puzzles and the 4 secret rooms. _{^{(I also had to find a Water Stone by showing a Staryu to Bill’s grandfather, but he didn’t want to see the Staryu first, I had to find two other - ANYWAY!)}}

Guides like this one from Psypoke

I completed all 4 puzzles and all 4 secret rooms and then went and talked to the guy in the Research Center. He unlocked page 7 of the Unown report for me. All the guides say “complete the 4 puzzles and the 4 hidden rooms” and some of them specifically mention “and then you’ll get page 7 of the Unown report”, and then they tell you to go to the entrance of the Ruins of Alph, where a cutscene will play and the punctuation Unown will unlock.

But it didn’t work. I couldn’t trigger the cutscene that would allow me to catch the punctuation Unown in the entrance tunnel.

I, who was reading from guides online and had not seen this completed before, didn’t know that the researcher had only given me the first half of page 7 of the Unown report.

Because it turns out that you don’t only have to complete the 4 puzzles and enter the 4 secret rooms. You also have to drop down the hole at the back of every secret room.

Yes, the layout of the room clearly suggests you do this

One of the rooms was quite close to the start of the Ruins of Alph, and after completing the room, I knew how to get to the other one. So rather than walk through the underground section of the ruins and fend off a bunch of Unown along the way, I backed out and walked to the next secret room after only picking up the items.

Thankfully I worked this out by dropping through each of them in sequence. (The text on the Unown report actually was quite helpful here.)

Hint: go look at the letters on the floor

The “letters on the floor” are what you see when you drop through the hole at the back of each secret room (which you can see in the Psypoke screenshot farther up).

So there you have it! In addition to completing the 4 puzzles and entering the 4 secret rooms, you must also drop from each of the secret rooms into the Ruins in order to unlock the final part of page 7 of the Unown Report, which allows you to trigger the cutscene that causes the punctuation Unown to appear at the Ruins entrance.

Now you, and the internet, know that. Because I panicked back before it did.

Seriously, because it happened to be a Thursday, Genzo the photographer character happened to be in that room in the Ruins and I took a completely unnecessary team photo thinking maybe he was blocking the cutscene. But isn’t it nice to have something to commemorate the moment by?

This was clearly what fixed it (it wasn’t)