Pokemon The Unown King (GBA) Download

Download Pre-Patched Pokemon The Unown King GBA ROM Hack

Creator: Clessidra
Version: 1.0
Hack of: Emerald
Released: November 4, 2025
Language: English
Status: Completed*

Pokemon The Unown King is a GBA ROM Hack by Clessidra based on Pokemon Emerald in English. And it is now available to download. It was released on November 4, 2025.

Table of Contents

Download Pre-Patched Pokemon The Unown King GBA ROM Hack

Also, be sure to check out Pokemon Elysium

The Unown King

Have you heard about the mighty Rey Unown? Do you know about the curse of the Unown King? Well, this Unown King is neither of those.

Pokemon The Unown King is a mystery-focused adventure created for the 2nd Team Aqua ROM-Hacking Competition, built using the pokeemerald-expansion decomp. Centered around the competition’s theme of myth, the game explores ancient lore surrounding a forgotten ruler of the Unown.

Plot & Lore

After creating time, space, and everything a world needs for its existence, Arceus created Mew in order to populate the universe. Mew could split itself in two, creating more and more life forms, but Arceus wanted more variety. Therefore, Arceus created the Unown species as well.

The Unown’s waves, combined in various ways, transformed Mew into completely new beings, but in order to bring balance to the ecosystems, the Unown needed help. Some entity had to coordinate them, thus Arceus created the Unown King, whose instructions would eventually bring life to the species we know today.

For some reason, however, the Unown King is said to have been sealed inside a temple, which is simply referred to as the Temple of the Unown King. It is unclear why, because its story was never written.

…or was it?

Apparently, the temple itself is home to inscriptions that allegedly tell the rest of the story, but unfortunately nobody has been able to read them. Will you be the first to decipher them and learn the truth?

Find all the Unown scattered inside (and outside!) the Temple of the Unown King and discover what the inscriptions reveal with their help!

Of course, you will need to win some battles to find them all. What will happen afterwards?

Features & Quirks

This ROM hack might appear grindy at first glance. Depending on how you approach it, it can be as well as not. I promise, the cheese factor is high.
After obtaining each HM, the corresponding move can be used outside of battle even if a Pokémon hasn’t learned it, as long as it can learn it.
Some bosses, instead of being traditional trainers with full teams, consist of a single Pokémon with a thick health bar.
The overworld is clearly inspired by the Gen 5 games.
Almost the entire soundtrack is composed of remixed tracks from Final Fantasy VIII.
Reading NPC dialogue is extremely important, especially early on. It can literally save you.
There are around 100 obtainable Pokemon, almost all from Generations 1–5, with only a couple of exceptions.

Known Bugs

English is not the developer’s first language (their native language is Italian, and this is technically an Italian ROM hack). They made every effort to ensure the dialogue is as correct and polished as possible, but some errors may still remain. If you notice additional mistakes, you please report them. Now, on to the actual bugs:

If a wild Pokémon’s item is stolen with Thief and the Pokémon is then caught, the Pokémon will have another one of the same item after being caught, allowing to obtain two of the same item for the price of one.
If an enemy Pokémon with the ability Illusion (which isn’t found in game) or Unknown (dangerous spoiler territory) transforms back into its species and faints, the sliding down effect won’t look correct because some portion of it will still be visible after sinking.
Using Dive outside of battle may lower the background music’s volume until the music changes, e.g. a battle occours or the player dismounts.
The audio’s ear-rape factor increases slightly over time, albeit not too much. This however was only experienced sometimes after speeding up emulation multiple times.
On mGBA, after idling for about a minute without entrying any input, square waves may become almost silent for a while, then sound correct again.

Additional Notes

Version 1.0.0 is the exact build submitted for the competition. It is technically a completed version, but some content was cut due to time constraints. This includes custom battle backgrounds and the true ending, which are planned for version 2.0.0.
Playtesting estimated roughly 10 hours of in-game time to complete, likely less when using emulator speed-up.
Version 1.0 does not include Repels, though there is an obscure method to reduce wild encounters, maybe a bit too obscure.
All testing was conducted on the mGBA emulator running on Windows 10.