Last updated on January 17th, 2026 at 03:08 pm
Pocket Academy – Entertainment Game Review
Pocket Academy is a Entertainment/Strategy/Simulation game from Kairosoft Co.,Ltd, first launched in 29th June 2011.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 138+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Pocket Academy Stand Out
School got you down? Wish you could change a few things? Well, now's your chance to create the ultimate dream school in this simulation smash-hit!
Tailor your personal academy as you see fit, erecting classrooms, making clubs–even deciding this week's hot couple!
How will you expand your hallowed halls of learning? Sponsor athletic meets, art shows, and other events to attract as many students as you can and elevate your school's prestige!
Will your students make it college or land their dream job? Find out with Pocket Academy!
Turn your device to rotate the screen, touch to scroll, and pinch to zoom in and out.
Supports iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
Note: Screen rotation and zoom are only available on iPhone 3GS and later, iPod touch 2nd generation and later, and iPad.
The game now lets you switch between English and Japanese.
Try searching for "Kairosoft" to see all of our games, or visit us at https://kairopark.jp. Be sure to check out both our free-to-play and our paid games!
This Entertainment game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Pocket Academy is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 22nd May 2025
Recent improvements include:
Fixed minor issues.
Download & Availability
Pocket Academy is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Pocket Academy on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We take a break, but we always come back to this game. Its really fun and you can play with no Internet.
We remember playing this & all the sequels during our middle school days 10 years ago and they're still so good! Most of the Kairosoft games used to be completely free with no ads but days have changed so we get it… Most apps now require purchases and subscriptions. We are just glad that they're still arnd for us to play <3.
We couldnt unlock the lab and the art room for some reasons… We are already a prestigious school and we have music room and one of the students has intellect over 90 but the buildings are not unlocked… We believe the game is bugged.
Why is everyone blonde now? What happened to the original hairstyles? Seemed a lot better with the brown and black hairstyles.
This is an amazing game. But with all the classics being remade, we are hoping for a pocket academy 2. Any chance of that happening.
This is the first game we played from Kairosoft that made us love it! Its been many years since its release. We would love to see another installment of this game.
This game was one of our first Kairosoft games ever. It is absolutely so much fun and a great time killer if youre ever bored. There is so much to do and once you get a hang of the strategy it becomes a piece of cake. Each map is super unique, with their own challenges and layouts to overcome. One thing we do hope that happens is an updated sequel. Mega Malls sequel looks super promising and Im excited to play it this game is a tad old and it would be very refreshing to see a modern version of this game. Please not F2P though those games are typically not our favorite. More character options, make the personality traits actually matter, more class events, etc. Would really give this game more depth and personalization. We grew up playing this and Kairosoft has always been a part of our video game history. Please continue to put out great titles!! <3.
So we have been playing the free version some time and we enjoy it, and then we see this one that has a bit more in depth things, like more decorations and student to student interaction, etc. But with Zero, they actually go home and then come back, class starts, etc. And at the bottom it shows that time is moving forward, when tests are, graduation, break, etc., and they actually take the tests and you see the results the one we actually paid for, doesnt have that. Is there some kind of bug? Time is going by, months, and they are still at school and the teachers have only taught once. And it said it was test day, but nothing happened.
We played this game around 5 years ago and started playing again. Its refreshing but the mechanics are confusing and it seems like things happen randomly. Ive only had one couple this play through and it seems like the factors to have a couple make little to no sense. Our students have decent popularity, but dont want to date. The Cupid item is pretty much useless and a waste of points. We dont think couples boost or improve your school much anyways, so we feel like the couple mechanics are pointless. We wish there was a way to rotate facilities or even an option to move them because you have to plan way ahead of time. We also wish there was a way to get smarter transfer students and 1st year students, because we have to grind 1st semester (which should be named trimester, as there are 3 terms. Semester is 2 terms.) special classes so our scores and rank dont tank. There isnt a lot of class rooms and the Max, regardless of map size is three, which is a bummer. Since this game is originally from Japan, there are translation errors to the max. Im not to bothered by it, but the text flow breaks up words which makes it harder to read. A lot of words are awkwardly abbreviated too. Its a good game, we wish this was updated but we highly doubt it will be. Some mechanics are wonky which you will have to figure out on your own. We used the Kairosoft wiki to help, but other than that you are 100% blind in the dark with little to no guidence.
We were surprised to see this game get an update, but let us cut to the chase. On iPad the buttons are now smaller in portrait mode and the auto rotate is completely broken not full screen anymore! Im curious what the bug fixes were, but we will update our review till this is fixed.
We couldnt play a school and we just feel.
We cannot start the app. Gives us an error message in Japanese.
Great game but there should be more to the admissions side, like being able to pick and choose kids based on potential. Also maybe add future stories for the graduates as like an alumni type deal. All in all, quite solid game.
Im Never Playing This Game Agian! Please Give us A Refund.
Very happy to see same-sex couples are possible! We love this game.
We played the lite version for the longest time. We had no idea there was a full version. There is so much more in this and Im happy. The only thing we miss between the two is the fact that the students go home at the end of each month instead of at the end of the year. Its just weird to see them there all the time but you get used to it. Love Kairosoft games and cant wait for their next masterpiece.
We love this this game! Fun graphics, almost no ads! Completely appropriate for all ages! This game is so fudging cute! This is our favorite game we have! We would like it if you had more options of the students that attend the school though, and more uniforms and maybe some more hair styles. We would also like if you could try and set up blind dates for the characters! We love this game, definitely worth downloading! There is one thing though, every time someonr gets asked out they get rejected. Only one person has said yes.
We really like these types of games you guys make! Your new games arent bad but we liked the kind of games like Dream House Days :).
We keep getting an error message when we try and open the game and im not sure how to fix it. We tried reseting our phone and closing the game but idk what to do.
The free version has been updated recently but the version we paid for has only had languages added within the last 3 years. Kinda made us feel like we wasted our money. Gameplay is nice though.
The game is so addicting and fun butthe stupid money runs out way to quickly! We had to start over the games like 5 times! Im so mad! We like the game but Im mad because of the money. Plz fix.
We really love this game we usually play it for hours on end we highly recommend it.
This game is amazing we are sure of it since it is a usual 4.6 out of 5 but we think that sandbox would be an interesting addition.
Unlocking buildings is way too complicated. We are currently on year 14 on the first map and we have not yet unlocked the soccer field, pool, gym, art room computer rooms etc.
We love love love this game! Ive been playing it on and off for the past 8 years. We have some suggestions, increase the map sizes and make it to where the students are there longer than 3 years at a time and possibly make it to where we can choose the classes they take based on what year they are.
The price is too low for how much Ive played this. We love building schools, we love the silly mental images we create out of our students lives, we love that we can hire a duck, a bear, a monkey, and a ghost to be teachers! Plus the New Game Plus and the alternate maps, good lord this has value! Big tip though – expand slow and be smart about your hiring. Teachers can have great stats but cost way too much given that their stats only come into play the first of every semester.
HUGE EDIT!! Our bad for the bad comment! If any of you are having trouble, DO THE CHALLENGES AND DONT SPEND MONEY EARLY ON! We went from being DEEP in debt to having $1,000,000. The higher the tuition, the more money you make.
If you try to use a devil arrow on someone currently not in a relationship, it says some random Japanese stuff.
Yo update this game man its been a while.
It's really good, too bad it's not popular.
We have gotten a crazy addiction to this game! Its such a fun game with such a great aesthetic.
No ads, the best simulation game on the App Store. Worth the 4.99.
Best strategy-simulation game, even if you dont like strategy games.
Every time we click on Empty Slot to start a game, the school selection is blank and we cant do anything from there.
This game is awesome, but there is one thing that kinda bothers us. It's that there's no time schedule for the students and teachers or at least have like all the classes have class at the same time, so like have a bell ring then all the students go to there classrooms and the teachers teach stuff or something like that.
Ryan: we swear to god, if you don't add skin color to all your games(we mean it..), we will no longer download it because of no skin color Non-sense of your games..we love it..we couldn't have rated it 5 if skin color was added..You unthoughtful Company about skin color.
We like the game and it was fun but we gave to three stares because by year three we had 100k in the bank two students with over 450 grade average (that CLASS finish with a 475 grade average) and we kinda felt like we could keep going until we're the number one school but what's the point? We already did pretty much everything we played with clubs academics and oh wait that's it and the clubs btw don't do much we just wish there was a little more to do for 5 dollars if it was 1 dollar or free we could understand but it's five dollars.
It's great but our teachers are never teaching!!! Plz fix.
We're a huge Kairosoft fan and have most of their games. Unfortunately, this one is a disappointment. The game premise itself is a lot of fun but it's way too difficult to accrue money. We will be drowning in research points but we can't afford to research anything. It's very frustrating. A decent update could help this game a lot.
We really enjoy the company's games and we had faith that this would be good but unfortunately it could definitely use a full upgrade. Maybe a relocation option for buildings, directives for just your original character or even just a way to collect a few research points from student events because the entire game becomes just waiting on those to build up because money isn't an issue at all or maybe just an upgrade to graphics, anything to make it feel like we didn't just waste five bucks.
The game is amazing. The sad thing is that we wasted $5.99! We beat the game in 2 days and now it's nothing to do on the game. This game was NOT worth the money.
What pisses us off is that when we need our students to have classrooms they can't and that's because we're broke and we can't do anything about that and it keep taking away money that we don't have ….FIX DAT.
This game is so fun Please make a pocket academy 2 . It is worth the money . We have suggestions : bigger map , more faculties , more classrooms(students) . We enjoy this game it gets our brain running trying to unlock all the buildings. We dislike the money going to negative . We also dislike that every year you don't research something the price goes up for research until you buy it . We have been playing this game for 3 to 2 years . Thanks.
We really love this app,and we'd like to give it five stars,but there's something wrong with the downloading of the app.You see,we just entered our password for it,but when we did it,when it was loading,it went back to the download symbol.we tried it two more times,but still,the same thing happened.What can we do to fix this?!Can someone please tell us if they have the same problem or how to fix it?Thanks.
This is the best game we have ever played,but one problem,the money can go to negative numbers and it's hard to get that money,so please fix it,we will always play this game if you fix it,please.
We love playing all of these games and u think they are so under rated.
Well thought out. Lots to do. Well put together.
Love the game to pieces but there's one thing within the game that bothers us deeply about it and hopefully Karisoft Staff has noticed this issue as its damaging towards gameplay. When we build a structure and decide that we want to cut back on our expenses though the problem with this game is that once you place down a structure it can not be deleted nor sold which means you have to be cautious on what you are placing down as this can potentially harm school income indefinitely and eventually your expenses will exceed student tuition. That's not a joke.
This game is also another solid title. Not as addicting as some of the other games like Game Dev Story but it's still fun because it's a new environment. There is a more steep learning curve to this one tho, we're still on our first play through and still trying to figure everything out.
Don't know the reason, but why ours is in Japanese.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.31
- Size: 73.35 MB
- iOS: 12.0 or later
- Languages: EN, JA, KO, ZH, TH, ZH
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Kairosoft Co.,Ltd
Last updated: 22nd May 2025 | Genre: Entertainment, Strategy | Developer: Kairosoft Co.,Ltd