This post was written as part of NEXON PEAK activities.

Hello.

Hangul Day, observed on October 9, commemorates the promulgation of Hunminjeongeum, the Korean writing system. A day of great cultural and national significance for Korea, it was reinstated as a public holiday in 2013. History often offers such moments of wonder: a writing system created in 1446 remains in widespread use today.

Hangul Day also holds particular significance for MapleStory, which has celebrated the occasion with events every year since 2013, without missing a single year.

New Year and Chuseok, both significant occasions in their own right, have sometimes passed without commemorative events. Hangul Day, however, has an unbroken record that MapleStory has proudly acknowledged in official messaging, suggesting that the team takes considerable pride in this tradition.

For this article, I have gathered the Hangul Day events from the past 5 years to offer a look at the more recent part of that history.

A Summary of Hangul Day Events from the Past 5 Years

Year	Event Name	Event Format	Rewards
2026	Gathering Hangul	Block minigame	Hats/Titles/Medals
2025	The Energy of Hangul	Medal phrase combinations	Medals
2024	Scholar Moon Bunny's Hangul Studies	Typing game	Chair
2023	Have You Taken It? The Hangul Day Civil Service Exam & Have You Seen It? Our Love for Hangul	Medal phrase submissions & 10 consecutive days of Hangul Day quizzes	3 medals bearing the winning phrases & various Hangul Day-themed cosmetic items
2022	Happy Birthday, Hunminjeongeum	Commemorative gifts	Hunminjeongeum T-Shirt Selection Coupon

2026 Hangul Day Event: Gathering Hangul

The Hangul Day event for 2026 is [Gathering Hangul].

This block-fitting minigame uses Hangul letters as its pieces, with the aim of clearing horizontal rows, accumulating points, and surviving as long as possible. The particularly unwieldy shapes of “ㅊ” and “ㅎ” drew plenty of complaints.

In keeping with the recent approach to events, the minigame could be played while hunting, and some players said it actually encouraged them to spend longer hunting. It had an appeal of its own that kept them engaged.

Cumulative score rewards included hats shaped like the Hangul letters mieum, ieung, and pieup, along with a title displaying the player's highest score.

The event also featured a ranking system spanning all worlds, with medals reportedly due to be awarded based on players' rankings after the event ends. Every entry in the current rankings has the maximum possible score of 500,000, which many players have found rather puzzling.

2025 Hangul Day Event: The Energy of Hangul

The Hangul Day event for 2025 was [The Energy of Hangul]. As its icon suggests, the event centered on medals, with a particularly interesting approach to customization.

Players collected a currency called Hangul Energy and used it to randomly reset the wording on their medals. Its reasonably high drop rate made participation straightforward, while the wide variety of phrases made browsing other players' creations part of the enjoyment. The full list of phrases is shown below.

As you can see, there were many possible combinations, and a reasonable amount of hunting could produce the wording a player wanted, making this an enjoyable event. However, allowing a character's nickname to serve as the subject at the end of the phrase led to a large number of embarrassing medals. The nicknames in question were reportedly addressed afterward under the game's operating policies.

If that issue could be resolved, I think a season 2 with an expanded selection of phrases would be well received.

2024 Hangul Day Event: Scholar Moon Bunny's Hangul Studies

The Hangul Day event for 2024 was [Scholar Moon Bunny's Hangul Studies]. Billed as a minigame, it took the form of a Hangul typing game.

I remember feeling a little pressure from being matched against other players in a competitive format, although the lack of any substantial penalty for losing made it easy to participate without much concern.

The reward was a Samulnori Chair.

2023 Hangul Day Events: Have You Taken It? The Hangul Day Civil Service Exam & Have You Seen It? Our Love for Hangul

There were two Hangul Day events in 2023, both fairly substantial in scope. Their titles may seem out of context today, but they borrowed a line from 아서, an NPC in an earlier event. Looking back, it is interesting to see how each event used a different meaning of the Korean expression “보셨나요?”—asking whether someone had taken an exam or seen something.

The Civil Service Exam event selected top candidates in a format modeled on the civil service examinations of the past. Players submitted phrases for medals, a shortlist was drawn up, and a player vote determined the top 3. Each winning phrase became an in-game medal, and its creator received a NEXON Cash reward.

The final rankings and the resulting medals are shown above. The first-place winner received 1,000,000 NEXON Cash.

The other event, Our Love for Hangul, featured Hangul Day riddles over a full 10 consecutive days. I remember how difficult it was to document everything at the time. The text in this UI officially acknowledges the unbroken record of holding Hangul Day events.

I will not go into the individual missions here, but the 10 missions were accompanied by 10 rewards. Some had been offered before, of course, yet even in retrospect, the event stands out for its scale in several respects.

The event took place in 2023, the year Hangul Day was reinstated as a public holiday and exactly 10 years after MapleStory began celebrating it. Its larger scale appears to have been intended to mark the occasion.

2022 Hangul Day Event: Happy Birthday, Hunminjeongeum

The final event in this article, 2022's [Happy Birthday, Hunminjeongeum], was straightforward: players could choose and receive one of several T-shirts bearing Hunminjeongeum text.

As shown above, these T-shirts were also offered as rewards in the 2023 event, but they have not been made available again since.

That concludes this look at MapleStory's recent Hangul Day events. There is value in finding a different way to commemorate such a meaningful day each year, and I hope the tradition continues.

Thank you for reading.