Ridiculous, pointless and hilarious. What more can you ask for?

Capsule toy vending machines, or gacha gacha (sometimes gachapon) as they are called in Japanese, are a common feature of just about any Japanese arcade or toy store. For anywhere from 100 yen to usually 500 yen, these fun little vending machines will sell you a small plastic “capsule” containing some kind of collectible. These collectibles tend to take the form of figures, cell phone straps, key chains and other interesting little trinkets based on characters from popular anime, video game and movie franchises. However, there’s also plenty of completely original gacha gacha toys not based on licensed characters and a lot of times these tend to be the most interesting and creative ones. In fact, sometimes they’re so creative that these “original” gacha gacha toys leave you wondering “Who the hell came up with this?” Today we’re going to take a look at two totally real examples of what happens when gacha gacha toy designers are given complete freedom to do whatever they want.

hacotisshford (Cats in tissue boxes)

This interesting series of figures is called hacotisshford (a made up name for a fake tissue brand, which combines the Japanese word for box, hako, and “tissue”) and seems to be inspired by Maru the cat, who was named the animal with the most views on YouTube by Guinness World Records this past spring. The hacotisshford series consists of five little figures of cats stuck in tissue boxes. Each figure costs 300 yen and features a different cat/tissue box color combination. Here’s a look at one of the figures in this peculiar series (a striped gray cat stuck in a white box). 9 out of 10 cats prefer hacotisshford over Kleenex. Wait… where’s the tissues? Check out that adorable cat face. And that cute cat butt! So, what are these little cat tissue box figures good for? Not much. Apparently you can stack them on top of each other but that’s about it. At least they’re kind of cute though… unlike the next figure we’ll be looking at today.

Gorilla Face (Animals with gorilla faces)