Pokémon

One of the strangest and most mysterious Pokémon introduced in Pokémon Gold and Silver is this one – the aptly named Unown. Flat, thin, and glyph-like, the Unown resemble alphabetic characters and are commonly found in ancient ruins. Are they natural, biological entities? Or are they man-made artefacts – relics of a lost civilisation that have somehow come to life? Even today, nearly 30 years after Unown made its debut, we still know very little about this peculiar Pokémon.

Each Unown is essentially an eye centred inside an often asymmetrical shape that matches a written symbol – primarily the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet (A through Z), plus two punctuation marks (‘?’ and ‘!’). Each form is a single-character silhouette. It has no limbs and no mouth. The only clear biological feature is that single eye, which reinforces this Pokémon’s inscrutable nature.

In the Pokémon games, Unown are typically encountered in old ruins or locations associated with ancient writing, such as the Ruins of Alph in Johto and the Solaceon Ruins in Sinnoh. In such places, they often tie into puzzles where Unown-like pictograms must be decoded or aligned. Although Unown can float around in the air, they usually stick themselves to the walls of the ruins they inhabit, looking even more like ancient texts. It could be that some early humans, upon discovering these mysterious Pokémon, based the characters of their alphabet on the various forms that the Unown take. Indeed, the Pokédex states that it is a mystery as to which came first, the Unown or the ancient writings.

There is some debate as to whether Unown communicate with each other via electromagnetic waves (specifically radio waves) or telepathy. When they’re alone, they can’t do much – and, indeed, they’re pretty much useless in battle, with low stats and only a single move. But when two or more Unown come together, an ‘odd power’ is said to emerge, according to the Pokédex. The Unown being weak alone and strong together may be inspired by the idea that a single letter cannot convey much information, but several letters forming a sentence can communicate a hypothetically infinite number of interpretations and ideas.

Outside the core games, the anime amplifies this Pokémon’s capabilities. In the third Pokémon movie, Spell of the Unown, the Unown live in their own dimension and rarely venture outside. They seem to have a hive mind and are shown to be capable of reading the thoughts of other life forms. Large numbers of Unown can distort and reshape reality to suit the dreams and wishes of whoever controls them. Perhaps this is the ‘odd power’ that the Pokédex mentions – but if it is, it is far beyond what the games ever explicitly state.

Unown is clearly a ‘gimmick Pokémon’ – a Pokémon designed around a unique, specific mechanic, ability, or form that defines its identity, often meant to showcase new gameplay features. Most gimmick Pokémon have an interesting move to call their own – Ditto, for example, can use Transform to turn into its opponent, while Smeargle can use Sketch to learn almost any move in the game – but Unown’s only move is Hidden Power, an attack that varies in type and power depending on the Pokémon using it, which can also be learned by several other Pokémon in the franchise. I suppose Unown’s real gimmick is that you can catch all 28 versions of it if you so wish. However, there’s never been a satisfying reward for doing that, and simply catching one Unown, no matter which type, is enough to fill this Pokémon’s slot in the standard Pokédex.

Like many other Pokémon in the early games, Unown was created by Ken Sugimori, who says that the idea for it came to him in a sudden burst of inspiration. ‘Usually, it’s pretty easy to tell what the motif was for a Pokémon,’ Sugimori says. ‘This one’s based on a bird; that one’s based on a mouse. I had wanted to make one that wasn’t so obvious, something with a more surreal design. Like a Pokémon that had come from outer space or something.’ The result was Unown.

What makes Unown special to me is that it remains just as mysterious today as it was when Pokémon Gold and Silver were first released in 1999. The games consistently present them as ancient, strange, and not fully understood. We know almost nothing about their ecology, reproduction, diet, or life cycle. Are the 28 forms of Unown fixed species or individual metamorphoses? If anything, this Pokémon has become even more mystifying over time, because the games hint at a connection between the Unown and the ‘god’ Pokémon Arceus, which is said to have created the entire Pokémon universe. The fact that the Unown’s radio signal mimics the Azure Flute melody used to summon Arceus in the games hints at a deep, fundamental link between the two – but what that link may be, we simply don’t know.

And what is the ‘odd power’ that emerges when multiple Unown come together? Other Pokémon media, such as the anime, have gone as far as to say the Unown have immensely powerful reality-bending abilities. But in the mainline games, they remain tantalisingly vague and under-explained – a deliberate creative choice that has turned Unown into one of Pokémon’s longest-running enigmas.