Ruin Maniac Cave progression only requires seen Unown forms - Pokemon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum
Channel: Flametix
Date: 2022-02-02

In Brilliant Diamond I accidentally caught a second S Unown instead of a Z,  but the Maniac Tunnel still progressed to the final room, and I only realized this when trying to unlock the ball capsule slots that you need to show every Unown for. I did have a Z seen, so I figured the game only cares about seen forms and not caught, so I tested it out here in debug Diamond to see if a set of seen Unown would work.

It seems to be true that you only have to see all 26 Unown and not catch them, despite what the NPC and most sources claim. I guess if anyone was seeing all Unown forms, it would be with the intent to catch them anyway so it makes sense this subtle difference hasn't been documented well. I also checked the save structure with PKHeX and pokedex forms only seem to have a seen flag.

Since this is my first DS video, I'll mention that I tried out OBS's Point scaling since initial attempts looked blurry and I remembered reading about it being better for game footage somewhere. Apparently Area scaling is aimed for retro games though, so I might keep that in mind and try it in the future.