I came from OOC.ai, then I tried Lunafic (AI Roleplay Experience)
Roleplay, if you never tried it, is like being one character inside a story. You write what your character says and does, and the AI plays everyone else and tells what happens next. I do it in two ways, sometimes I just jump into a story someone else made, and sometimes I build my own world from zero.
Before Lunafic, most of my roleplay time went to OOC. This is me comparing the two, honest parts included.
OOC hooked me first, I have to admit it
OOC calls itself “The Playable Anime”, and that’s exactly the feeling. You pick a story, you play the main character, and while the story goes the app shows anime scene images that match what’s happening. Creators build these stories and publish them for everyone, and some of them are really good. Honestly the quality was the best I ever used, the AI doesn’t just loop around the same moment, characters make their own plans, and the AI keeps its own notes about the story. My first days felt like playing an anime game that writes itself.
I still think OOC is a phenomenon. The concept is unique and hard to copy, and it started strong because of that.
What’s Great About OOC.ai
Everyone already know, OOC has a very strong community that builds the story for it. So you will find many great libraries of story settings there that you can try. There’s no place like this outside of OOC.ai even the competitors that I talk about below are still far on this.
Of course this is coming from the strong marketing spending they did for the last few months. When you started entering the OOC, it is a pretty great platform until it becomes a bit annoying when you spend money for it.
OOC: Then the AI started forgetting who I am
The problem shows up after a while, and sometimes it felt like only few messages. The AI forgets names, scenes that already happened, who already met who. And it’s not only events, the way characters talk too, a character I set to mix languages and slang slowly turned into generic English.
OOC does have a fix, but you do it yourself. There’s a feature called Memories, the AI summarizes the recent chat, older summaries move into long-term memory, and you can add and edit your own long-term entries. There’s also User Notes, a place where you write the things your character must remember. Their own help page says, when the AI forgets, use these two.
In practice, the auto memories often miss the details you actually care about, so people in the OOC subreddit write two or three memories by hand at the end of every session. The tips going around are to rename memory titles into keywords so the AI can find them, delete the duplicates, merge small memories into one up to the 600 character limit, and put things like abilities or dorm rooms into User Notes. One player was cleaning a backlog of 3,000 long-term memories. Many also believe it only reads 3 long-term memories at a time, so the more you have, the higher the chance it picks the wrong ones.
So I became the memory manager of my own story. “Wait, am I playing or an admin?”
OOC: Sometimes the bot just copies me
Another thing, sometimes the bot just mirrors what I wrote and doesn’t move the story forward, even when I’m asking another character something. It feels like paying credits to read my own message again. The tricks people share are a debug command, which costs credits too, or writing the time skip yourself, “some days passed”, so the story finally moves.
OOC: Publishing on OOC feels like passing an exam
As a world builder, this one hurts more. OOC’s content policy says if your work is based on someone else’s work, you need the original creator’s permission, so most fan worlds are out from the start. The image rules are strict too, which I understand, but it goes to the point where the AI review mistook a creator’s witch image for Harry Potter.
When a title gets blocked, the creator fixes it and resubmits it for another review. The players who were in the middle of that story can’t open their sessions until it’s approved again. That’s stressful when people are playing your world.
OOC: Images are fun, but you can roleplay without them
After a few weeks I noticed the images were not the reason I stayed. They’re fun, I like seeing the scene, but roleplay still works without them. What I need is the AI remembering my story, and a place where I can build my own world.
OOC: Sentences ended with damn repeated formula
LMAOOO. Instead of experiencing the scene alongside your character, the narration jumps into an imaginary future and tells you that this detail will become important. “[Your name] found himself in a stream of other first-year students, all moving towards the various hallways. Their air was thick with the faint smell of old stone and newly polisheed wood, a scene that would soon become familiar”
This kind of thing actually happened in almost many AI roleplay.
Lunafic, found by accident
I found Lunafic by accident. It’s a very new product, and it just released V4, their big redesign. At first it had similar vibes with OOC, worlds to play, characters, scene images. Until it’s not.
In Lunafic a “world” is the place where the story happens. Someone builds it, with its characters, its rules, and a wiki about everything in it, then you enter it and play your own story there. Every player gets their own private story inside the same world.
They brand themselves with long memory, which, to be fair, almost every roleplay app says. Then I saw they have an editor. “An editor? What does that mean, am I supposed to write a novel here?”
So I decided to try. The free plan only gives the Flash model and a small amount of usage, so I started the free trial, seven days of their $20 Plus plan.
Lunafic: The first popup asked me about Japanese
I started with a Playable World, the kind built like a game, with roles to pick, starting choices, and endings to reach. Before the story started, a popup showed up, “How this world talks”, and it said the characters speak Japanese, I’m quite confused on this at first. I clicked Change language and picked English.
That’s when it clicked for me.
In Lunafic every character has their own speech style, and the author sets it per language. So the same character can sound different in English and in Japanese, the author decides how they talk in each one. After my slang character turned into generic English on OOC, this was the first thing I noticed.
Lunafic: The opening, the avatars, and the scene image
Then I picked an opening, the starting choice of my story. While the reply was coming in, the scene image showed up inside it. The dialogue comes with the character’s avatar and name next to each line instead of plain text with quotes, which looks much nicer, it can be customized too. The scene image concept is very similar to OOC, they might be copying it from OOC, but anyway it’s a very good start, everything else is different.
Get Darius’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
You can change how the dialogues and the background look with the Aa button.
The narration was quite long by default. I opened the narrative settings, and in the Writing tab I can set the reply length, from Short up to Epic.
And something I didn’t expect, right there is “Story feel”, three cards, Slow and rich, Balanced, Fast and tense, with the world’s cover art split across the three, and the one you pick turns into color. The guy who designed this has good taste. There’s also “Characters take the lead”, from Follow me to Surprise me, for how much the characters push the story by themselves.
The world has endings to reach. There’s an Endings list with a one line hint for each locked one, and still I had no idea how to get there. Same problem as OOC. But honestly, it’s fun trying to get there.
Everything is an editor
This is where it stops being similar. In Lunafic the whole story is an editor. It doesn’t look like an editor, it looks like a normal roleplay, but you can click anywhere and change the words. Roleplay only needs editing when the AI does something wrong, a wrong name, a line my character would never say. OOC lets you edit messages too, but I ended up hitting retry most of the time and paying again until the words came out right. Here I fix the one word and move on.
Sometimes the bot just copies me (Solved by Lunafic) plus we can control which characters inside the scene
The AI seems pretty well on moving forward the story. The promise for narrative pacing, and stories that continue developing rather than abruptly stopping is one of the hidden gem.
In scene control
Think again, I guess that makes sense sometimes AI showing up characters out of nowhere because it is multi-character, so Lunafic solved this by giving control to you who is inside the scene. It is actually also detected from the prompt so I guess this can be controlled by AI. Though I found my MC not checked there, I had reported this bug to the Lunafic and it is in progress.
I played until the trial ran out of messages. It lasts quite long, and it’s addicting, similar to how I did in OOC. I was using mostly the Flash model. The Pro model, the strongest one, runs out your messages faster, after all it costs more.
Lunafic folds the older part of the story into memory, a recap written by the system, while the newest messages still exists. My story kept going for hundreds of messages without stopping. And a small thing I love, the dots on the right side of the story, each dot is one of my messages in the chapter, you tap one and it scrolls you there. Scrolling on mobile is tiring after all.
Wiki
I was curious about the wiki, so I opened it. It’s like a fandom wiki for the world, characters, places, rules, all written by the author. That turned out very interesting. I couldn’t edit the world’s pages though, because it’s not my world.
This pretty straightforward editor compared to typing form, and you can control how many tokens you are using, so instead of limiting how many characters, they let the user decide their own usage.
No formulatic ending guys!
The character stopped when it need to stop instead of continuing, look at the image above as an example. I tested this and the result is very consistent. It just ends on an action that carries the emotion without explaining it.
$20, and a different ladder
When the trial ran out, I decided to pay $20 a month to continue on the Plus plan. The ladder is quite different from OOC. OOC sells credit packs, and every reply costs credits depending on the mode, from 30 for Basic up to 90 for Superb, and a longer output costs extra. On the subreddit, one player wrote they bought a million credits and felt half of it went to overcharging, and players say some stories change your output length the first time you start them. Many people now just log in for the daily 300 free credits and play somewhere else, some even keep multiple accounts to collect more.
Lunafic is a monthly plan, from $7 up to $100, and the plans only differ by how much you can use each month, basically same thing.
Lunafic Long Term Memories
It’s not easy to measure if memory is truly strong or not because you need to run it for a long time until notice degradation. So far Lunafic is doing pretty well on character consistency far above OOC.ai and character.ai that I had used in the past. It can remember new character names that were made up during the time, events, places, and some of details. And the good thing I don’t always need to use memory notes myself too often, because Lunafic seems to have already taken a note on important points.
In OOC.ai you were very often needed to put something like that in memory notes, for example your relationship has developed, but somehow the characters act like that never happened before. In Lunafic there’s no such feeling like that. Not sure how they did that.
One thing I noticed, because you can create places or any wiki data on the Wiki, the AI always knows if there are like that mentioned.
Building my own world
You can connect Lunafic to ChatGPT and Claude, there’s a “Build with Claude or ChatGPT” button right on the create. I made a Private world. The setup is simple, create a character, then pick the MC, the main character you play.
In my own world I found something called Author mode. In Author mode you don’t need to roleplay, you direct the story and the AI writes it, and I can pick any other character as the MC too. You can’t do this in someone else’s Playable World, so owning the world is what unlocks this kind of feature.
Then I built my own wiki, and connected Claude to help me build it, which turned out quite fun. I reported it is very hassle to connect Lunafic to ChatGPT, they are currently processing my ticket, again they are listening to the user.
One more small thing that I noticed when using Lunafic
Enter to Lunafic.ai, it is automatically redirecting the page to the last chat you are playing with. That’s damn useful, again, this is how the private user experience roleplay looks like.
Lunafic is not perfect
1. Playable worlds are still few. But it seems the team is very active, every single time I played, a new feature showed up.
2. Same as OOC, publishing has a learning curve. Since you can connect Claude to build with you, it’s easier to work with. And the wiki is an editor instead of a form, which I like a lot more.
3. There are still bugs sometimes. The support is very fast though, maybe because there are not that many users yet, mine got resolved in less than 30 minutes while the team was online.
4. The model gets slower if you switch thinking to high, thinking is the setting where the AI thinks before it writes. I guess it depends on what you want, a better response or a quick one. You don’t have this thing with others.
OOC started strong, Lunafic still needs a few more weeks
Anyway, that’s the point, I wrote this simply to compare two similar products competing. OOC is a phenomenon that started strong because of its unique concept, hard to copy by others. Lunafic giving competition with strong differentiation.
But AI is always like that, the more you roleplay, the worse the experience gets. Meanwhile Lunafic is doing great so far, it may take another few weeks to tell if it’s going to degrade, but when that happens I’ll probably have already changed to another story.
