Gacha Life is an anime-style game about roleplaying and creation. Create and customize characters and act out exciting stories with the game’s powerful studio and export images and videos!

What is Gacha Life About?

Gacha Life is one of a series of similar games made by developer Lunime. Like other games in the “gacha” collection, Gacha Life centers around a powerful character customization engine and a feature called “Gacha Studio” that allows you to take pictures and videos of your favorite characters. Gacha Studio can export scenes as pictures and videos, meaning you can upload your creations on YouTube, DeviantArt, or the social media site of your choice.

Confusing Names

Gacha Life and its fellow Lunime games all have the word “gacha” in the name. Gacha refers to a type of Japanese gambling machine that allows users to get a single capsule by inserting money and pulling a lever. Capsules are distributed randomly and have various contents, forcing gamblers to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to complete their collection and get the capsules they want. While the term “gacha” is frequently used to describe games that force you to acquire things like characters or items via a similar lottery, it’s a bit of a misnomer in the case of Gacha Life. Virtually everyone plays Gacha Life for the studio and character customization, which is entirely free.

Gacha Life Description

Gacha Life features a powerful, totally free character customization engine with a plethora of anime-inspired options. It’s got all of the tools you need to create and dress up any character, whether it’s a character from your favorite book, movie, game, or television show, something you came up with, or something totally random. You can save plenty of characters meaning it’s easy to recreate scenes from media or come up with your own crazy crossovers. If you want to tell stories about Goku meeting Lebron James, make an anime avatar you can use to represent yourself on social media, or play with anime characters as if they were action figures or dolls, Gacha Life will give you the tools you need to do that.

While Gacha Life is a fun game to play on your own, it’s often used in the context of online communities. Lots of online communities exist that showcase the game’s creation tools. These communities might center around YouTubers who post stories, focus on ongoing comic series, or just exist as places to hang out and share Gacha Studio scenes and clips. If someone is looking to play Gacha Life, they very likely have heard of some of these communities and are trying to join them and create content of their own.

There’s been a considerable amount of contention about the community surrounding Gacha Life. The app itself is totally safe, but the content created by the app isn’t always appropriate for children. The powerful studio allows users to create speech bubbles to tell stories, and these stories can get very dark and inappropriate very fast. Many of these inappropriate stories are simply children exploring topics that they don’t understand, but it’s still not necessarily a good idea to expose your kids to the community of Gacha Life without doing your due diligence as a parent or guardian and ensuring that you know what’s out there. Be extra vigilant and ensure that they stick to communities that are well moderated and have a zero-tolerance policy for inappropriate themes.

Gacha Life is not a game that you can win or lose in the traditional sense. While there are a handful of minigames with various rewards, these aren’t the point of the game for most people. Importantly, the rewards you get from these games are totally free and can only be acquired through playing, meaning there’s no way to get ahead other than to simply play a lot. Once you’ve gotten all of the gifts, you’re all set!

As a parent, it’s incredibly important to be vigilant about the online spaces that your kids hang out in. Gacha Life is a tool that allows minors to create unregulated content and post it online. If your child is asking about or playing Gacha Life already, be sure to do a very thorough check of where they’ve been spending time online for the past couple of weeks. You’ll want to check out these locations, make sure that they’re moderated by well-meaning adults or older kids, and set some boundaries about the communities that your kids are allowed to visit online. The game itself is totally benign – it’s essentially a virtual dollhouse – but the things that other kids do with the dollhouse aren’t always things that you will be comfortable exposing your kids to.