Gacha Life 2 is the sequel to the widely popular app Gacha Life, published by Lunime Games. It’s available free-to-play on both Android and iOS.
Both these games are basically dress-up games that allow you to create highly customized 2D characters.
There really isn’t much of a competitive element; instead, Gacha Life 2 is mostly a creative app that allows you to create cute avatars of your OCs (original characters), dress them up, pose them in various backgrounds, and take screenshots.
And although a “game” of this nature might seem niche, the first Gacha Life game has quite a large community (100M downloads on Google Play!), with people using their Gacha Life avatars to create things like stop motion animations, comics, and music videos.
Gacha Life 2 is packed with tons of assets, giving you multiple pages of options for hair, eyes, clothing—you name it. It also comes with finer customization controls, such as color sliders and adjustments for different parts of the body and items of clothing.
So if this type of app seems like your cup of tea, it’s a good time to jump aboard the Gacha Life bandwagon. Here’s a little guide to get you started!
Presets
Right off the bat, the game will provide you with several ready-made characters or presets. You can keep them as-is if you like them, or use them as a base for customization.
They’re a good starting point if you’re new to the game, to give you a small glimpse of the sort of characters you can make.
Character Slots
On the home page you’ll see a section called Character Slots with 8 characters. But don’t worry—you can create way more characters than that—over 300, in fact!
Think of the “character slots” as your starting lineup of your favorite characters, that you can drop into a scene easily.
Creating Your Character
Whereas in other games, character creation is something you do at the start of the game, in Gacha Life 2 character creation is pretty much the main part of the game itself.
To start creating your character from scratch, simply tap on one of the empty additional character slots. This will give you a blank character canvas to work with.
Below are the different parts of your character you can customize.
Note: For some body/clothing parts you’ll have the option of adjusting the right side (e.g., right eye, right shirt sleeve) separately. This comes in handy if you want two sides to each be a different color, or, say, if the position of one looks off because of the pose.
Body
- Skin Tone Colors – This lets you pick your skin color. Select from one of the many swatches available, or use the color sliders to pick a precise shade.
- Head Shape (or face shape)
- Ears / Right ear
On the second page of the body section, you can select from a variety of poses for your character.
There’s also the option to make fine adjustments to specific body parts (e.g, change the position of the hands or arms). This is useful as sometimes using certain poses can make different joints look janky.
Hair
There are two pages of hair parts that you can customize.
- Rear hair – hair on the crown of the head
- Front hair – the hairline/fringe
- Side hair – sections of the hair that fall down the side of the face
- Ponytail – two pigtails, one on either side of the head
- Back hair – hair worn down (i.e. not up in pigtails)
- Hair tip – a small cowlick near your hairline
- Rear/front highlights – the shape of the “hair shine” that you typically see in anime-style drawings
All of the hair parts are optional and can be removed. Simply tap on the box for that particular hair part and tap on the “Remove” button.
Face
The face section has 12 customizable items, in two pages.
- Eye shape / right eye shape
- Eyes / right eye – the color pattern of the iris
- Pupils / right pupil
- Eye highlights / right eye highlights – the shape of the catch lights in the eyes
- Eyebrows / right eyebrow
- Mouth
- Nose
Head
The head section contains the different head and face accessories your character can wear.
- Hats
- Glasses
- Neck accessories (necklaces, scarves)
- Face accessories (blushies and little face stickers)
- Other (headphones, hair clips, headbands etc.) – you get four slots of these
Hats, glasses, neck accessories, and face accessories all have an additional option called “behind”. This is because you can layer two items in each of these categories (e.g., if you want to wear two necklaces). ‘Behind’ refers to the layer that’s underneath.
Upper (garments)
- Shirt
- Shirt length – the bottom part of the shirt
- Jacket
- Jacket length – the bottom part of the jacket
- Sleeves / right sleeve
- Gloves / right glove
- Wrists / right wrists (bracelets and wristbands)
- Shoulder accessory / right shoulder accessory
Lower (garments)
- Pants
- Socks
- Shoes
- Belt/skirt / Belt/skirt behind
- Thigh accessory
- Foot accessory
Extra
- Prop
- Cape
- Tail
- Wing
- Hat logo
- Shirt logo
- Face accessories
- Special FX – additional graphic elements around your character like sparkles, stars, smoke, etc.
Custom colors
You can fully customize the colors for pretty much all of the character’s body parts and wearable items.
Most of the items will have two or more of the following color options:
- Base – the main color
- Trim – the highlight color
- Shade – the lowlight/shadow color
- Outline – the lineart color
You can choose from one of the many shades in the swatch sets provided, or use the sliders to pick a specific one.
Using the color sliders
Here’s how to use the three color sliders to pick a specific color.
The top slider changes the hue, which means where on the color spectrum it is (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet).
The second slider changes the saturation, or how intense the color is; from zero color on the left, to the most intense on the right.
The third slider changes the lightness, from darkest to lightest.
Adjusting positions
You can adjust the size and position of the different body and garment parts, by tapping on the “Adjust” button. There you’ll get the following options.
- The arrows let you move the position of the part.
- Flip (X for horizontal, Y for vertical)
- X.Scale adjusts the width of the part
- Y. Scale adjusts the height of the part
- Rotation
Profile
Once you’ve got your character looking the way you want, it’s time to give it a personality!
Go to the profile section to indicate things like your character’s name, age, date of birth, pronouns and a small blurb describing them. (Note, it’s advised NOT to use real-life information for this!)
You can also pick a cute little icon to represent that character in your menus.
Studio
Now that your character is complete, you can take them to the Studio to place them in different scenarios.
The Studio section gives you several pages of background options that you can put your characters in (with the option to upload your own ones apparently coming in the future).
You can have multiple characters appearing in a scene at the same time, and place each one anywhere in the scene. You can also change the pose and facial expression of each character.
Basically the Studio section is great for creating different frames, if you’re trying to make an animated video with your character/s.
Gacha
The Gacha section, as the name suggests, is where you can obtain random characters made by other creators, and add them to your collection. Each character has a star rating—the higher, the more valuable and rare.
You summon new gacha by spending the game’s currency, called Gems (which the game periodically rewards you with just for playing).
Life
The Life section’s features are still marked “Coming Soon” at the time of writing, but there you’ll find the social aspect of the game, where you can visit other players to see their gacha creations.
Conclusion
If at this point you’re still unsure what the point of Gacha Life 2 (or its predecessor) even is, you may want to poke around YouTube or Reddit to see the things that people have made using their Gacha Life avatars.
Have you tried Gacha Life 2 or its predecessor and made your own OC avatar? Tell us about it in the comments!
Of course, if you find that this game isn’t really your style, you can always head over to our Gaming News section to find some other new releases that might pique your interest!