# I Tested Different AI Roleplay Apps, Here Is What I Found Source: https://lunafic.ai/blog/i-tested-different-ai-roleplay-apps | Published: 2026-09-03T14:25:15.042Z | Updated: 2026-10-17T05:10:48.141Z | Author: Lunafic Team | Tags: Roleplay, Review > A year testing Character.AI, Janitor, Chub, and SillyTavern, then two years managing the AI manually, and the app that came out of it. The founder's own story. > **Update, October 13, 2026.** Character.AI filed for bankruptcy on October 12, and the company is being sold. The app still works for now, and it will close if no buyer keeps it running. We are honestly sad about this. Character.AI introduced millions of people to AI characters, many of us included. I am an otaku. I have watched and read this stuff for twenty years, and what I always wanted from AI was simple to say and, it turned out, nearly impossible to get. I wanted to enter a world as a character, hear the characters speak the way they actually speak, Japanese with the sound and the meaning both visible, and build a long story with my own hands. So for about a year I tested the platforms as a normal daily user. Not as a founder, there was no product yet, there was just me and my free evenings. This is what I found, written the way I would tell a friend. ## Character.AI, the best first hour in the business I started where everyone starts. The first night was honestly magic, a character I knew, answering me, in character. Then the week happened. The bot started speaking as me, deciding my feelings, sometimes writing entire paragraphs of my own character that I never typed. When I tried to fix a bad reply, I found there was nothing to fix, in a chat you accept or you regenerate, and these days the edit button is gone entirely. By message two hundred, the story had forgotten its own promises. > The moment I realized I was re-explaining my own story to the AI for the third time, I understood the problem was not the model. The problem was what the app let the model see. ## The freedom apps, closer to the content, same walls I moved to the less filtered places people recommend, Janitor, Chub, SpicyChat, the usual route. The content freedom was real and I will not pretend it was not a relief. But the walls were the same walls with different paint. One character at a time, a chat history instead of a story, memory that fades exactly when the plot gets good, reviewers of these apps report the thread dropping after fifteen to twenty messages, and my experience matched. On Chub I found amazing character cards, then spent a whole evening fighting with model proxies just to talk to one of them. ## SillyTavern, respect, and a month of my life Then I did what every serious person does, I installed SillyTavern. I respect it deeply, it is the most powerful tool in this entire space and the community around it is brilliant. I also watched a Reddit thread later titled [It took me 1 month to fully set up SillyTavern as a total beginner](https://www.reddit.com/r/SillyTavernAI/comments/1pkhbxq/it_took_me_1_month_to_fully_set_up_sillytavern_as/) and laughed with recognition, providers, presets, lorebooks, memory extensions. I got it working. I got good results. And I realized I was spending my evenings being a system administrator instead of a writer. ## So I went manual, for more than two years After the apps failed me, I did the thing almost nobody does, I dropped the apps and used the Large Language Model directly, and managed everything manually. Copying the story into the prompt by hand, trimming it by hand, keeping the character notes updated by hand, deciding what the AI needed to see this turn, by hand, literally manually for more than two years. It was exhausting and it worked, and those two years are the reason Lunafic exists, because a person doing everything by hand learns exactly which context needs to be prioritized. ## The four things I actually wanted Somewhere in those years the list crystallized, and I have never needed to change it since I play my character, and the AI plays everyone else and never touches my lines. The characters speak their real language, romanized so I can hear how it sounds, with the English right underneath. My story saves as chapters I can edit, search, and export, like writing, because it is writing. And the AI reads my whole story before every reply, so chapter 40 still knows what happened in chapter 4. ## So I built it That list became Lunafic, my manual method turned into a product. You pick a world, you play one character, the AI plays the rest of the characters in their own voices. You play it like a chat, every reply shows as avatar dialogue beside the speaking character's portrait and name, and the whole story is an editor, so you can fix any line, and it saves as chapters. Every reply the AI reads your whole story so far plus the world's notes, and it only knows what your character has earned the right to know, so secrets hold. The best lines of my tests, the ones that sank into forgotten chat histories on other apps, are the reason the export button exists. In October 2026 we released V4. Now you can also play other people's worlds like co-op in a game, choose who you are and how the story opens, and the world shows its own pictures when the big moments come. The same month we tested the memory on a real player's story of 1,600 long turns, more than 1.2 million words, about a dozen novels. We hid ten facts in chapter 1, and at turn 1,600 the AI still answered all 22 direct questions about them right. Questions that only hinted were harder, 63%, and we are still working on that. [The whole test is here](https://lunafic.ai/blog/claude-in-lunafic-character-status-memory-improvements). I will not claim it is perfect, it is younger than the giants, anime-first, and it still needs more testing from real players. Building your own world here is the easiest I have seen anywhere, and most of our users prefer building their own. If you are the person I was, [come open a world tonight](https://lunafic.ai/), it is free to start, no card needed. ## The longer versions of each scar If one specific pain brought you here, there is a deeper article for it. [The AI playing your character and how it ends](https://lunafic.ai/blog/character-ai-alternative-where-the-ai-doesnt-play-your-character), [memory across a long story](https://lunafic.ai/blog/ai-roleplay-long-term-memory), and [Japanese dialogue with translation, the founding feature](https://lunafic.ai/blog/ai-roleplay-japanese-dialogue-translation). ## Two questions people always ask me ### Which app did you enjoy the most before building Lunafic? Character.AI, honestly, the first hour of it. The problem was never that the apps were bad, they were all good at the thing they were shaped like. The problem was that they all handed the AI only the recent messages, and a long story needs the whole thing. ### Would you still use SillyTavern today? If I wanted to run my own models and configure everything, yes, it remains the ceiling of what is possible. I wanted to write, so I built the writing-shaped option instead. Go test everything yourself, most of them are free while AI god still pays their GPU bills. :D --- Read this on Lunafic: https://lunafic.ai/blog/i-tested-different-ai-roleplay-apps More from Lunafic: https://lunafic.ai/blog What is Lunafic: https://lunafic.ai/ai-roleplay AI characters you build stories with over long memories. You play as your character, the AI plays everyone else, and stories stay private by default.