tinierme
Hello all!
Back in middle school, I used to frequent this site called Tinierme. It was sort-of a hybrid social form + character customization, a lot like Gaia Online. There were games to play, an overworld for your character to walk around and chat with others in, different chat groups you could join (typically centered around anime and manga) but the biggest draw was the customization and gachas.
The gachas were limited-time events that gave you cool items to dress you character (or selfy) in. Much like an actual gachapon, what item you ended up getting was completely random! There were free gachas, which you paid to play with in-game currency earned from dailies like logging in, posting and playing games. But there were also gachas you paid with real money.
Nowadays, this is pretty standard fare. I'd say there's an oversaturation of mobile gacha games, but at the time this was happening gacha games were few and far between! I think the closest thing I knew of at the time (for a western audience, at least) was TF2 lootboxes XD Either way, I guess it doesn't matter too much.
These gachas were so cool and varied. They'd have different themes or focus on specific fashion styles, such as this early gothic lolita gacha.
There would sometimes also be accompanied campaigns for certain gachas. You'd receive a special item if you fulfilled the campaign requirements which could be as easy as receive x item from the gacha and you immediately get the bonus item...or it could require more work such as sending specific gifts to other players
The coolest gachas though, were the tie-ins. These were gachas for different anime, manga and anime/manga related things. There were quite a few vocaloid gachas as seen here, here, here and here.
You can see the whole list of tie-ins here. Some of my favorites besides the vocaloid ones were FMA, PMMM, Hello kitty (which gave you outfits for different characters/kittylers from Hello Kitty to Issho!) and Durarara!!
And here's an archive for all the different gachas! As you can see, a lot of these gachas had some pretty fun outfits! And I remember there being so much creativity within the community when it came to putting outfits together. There were even specific chat groups for organizing outfit contests and it was so fun seeing what people came up with.
Unfortunately, the gachas would be the reason the site would shut down in 2013. The company that ran Tinierme was Japanese-based and in 2012 Japan placed a ban on something called the complete gacha game monetization model. Rather than comply and remove all it's gacha rules, the company decided to cease operations. It was an incredibly sad time, people were scrambling to add their friends on other socials.
There were some fan-made dress up tools like Dream Selfy and Selfy Lab, but these would eventually shut down or cease to work due to the end of Flash.
Tinierme would live on in a very similar app called cocoppa play, but I don't believe the playerbase (at least in the west) is as active as it once was. The items and outfits are very cut though!
There was also apparently a switch game called SELFY COLLECTION (dream stylist in japan and The dream fashion stylist in english) released in 2020 which I am just now learning about??? Apparently it's got a whole story and loooooots of loading screens.
As much as I loved Tinierme and still think about those memories fondly, things like SELFY COLLECTION and cocoppa play don't interest me much. I love playing dress-up games to this day (I'm currently playing Style Savvy Trendsetters and having fun!) but I'm generally turned off by anything with a gacha in it. The only gacha game I do play is Project Sekai but at this point it's very rare and I don't even glance at the gachas anymore.
I just thought this would be a fun walk down memory lane. And if anyone else used to play Tinierme, maybe they'll enjoy reading this!
To close this out, here are some resources I've gathered over the years.
Here are some old directions on how to use Selfy Lab. It was the premier Tinierme dress-up tool as it was based around the Japanese TinierMe servers (aka Pocketland). Gachas were released earlier there than in the NA/English servers. Being that Flash doesn't work anymore, neither does Selfy Lab, but it's still up!
This is a fan-site site showcasing all the items from the now shutdown Pocketland
I already linked this one, but Gachaholic is another outfit archive
And finally, here are two posts irt the archiving and preserving of some of the Tinierme lost media. Here, here and here. Even if nothing comes of it, it's neat to see people still think about and make an effort to preserve these kinds of things!
If you happen to have anymore working resources related to @games/@item/Tinierme, please send them my way! Nowadays, it's hard to find those sorts of things so I would greatly appreciate it :^)