// PC GAMER — GAMING
Is Aniimo a gacha game?
The creature catcher says Anii-no to typical gacha banner pulls.
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Aniimo smooshes cute creature capturing and open world exploration together to serve us a meal with notes of Genshin Impact, Infinity Nikki, and the grandaddy of trapping critters in balls: Pokemon. But although it may look like developer Pawprint Studio has included a side of gacha with that meal, it's actually a little more complicated than that.
No, Aniimo is not a gacha game. Despite having all the bells and whistles a gacha usually throws at us—including about a thousand currencies and menus to stress over—Aniimo doesn't have any banner systems that gacha games like Genshin Impact or Infinity Nikki do.
All Aniimo, their equipment, Aniimo eggs, and anything related to cute critter combat and fashion is not linked to random odds, or reaching an arbitrary "pity" number that eventually guarantees something after enough pulls. You get Aniimo (and most other items) just by playing the game, seriously, and instead most (but not all) cosmetics are linked to coughing up a fixed amount of cash in the store.
That's because Aniimo did have a gacha system, but only during its final beta. The Rift Exploration event—AKA a banner—was a very sneaky inclusion, because these rifts involved spending a premium currency for the chance to catch a Legendary Aniimo by filling up a bar, not pulling on a banner with a button press.
It didn't look like your regular banner system, but the capture rate for the Legendary Aniimo was so miniscule that unless you got very lucky, you probably had to rely on reaching "pity" to finally guarantee catching it—just like a banner in any other gacha.
Rift Exploration was very poorly received by beta testers and future players alike. The rifts reportedly got stale and repetitive real quick, plus, lots of people pointed out the developers had promised many times that Aniimo wouldn't be locked behind gacha. For Aniimo's full launch, Rift Exploration has been replaced with a token collection system.
Developer Pawprint Studio never mentioned Rift Explorations were changed because of the gacha backlash in the official blog post, but I'm willing to gamble (one last time) that it sure contributed to the change.
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