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HoYoverse, the people who gave the world Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail (and with them a generation of players who think of “pity” as a game mechanic rather than an emotion), have put a date on their creature-catcher. Honkai: Nexus Anima will launch in spring 2027 on PC, iOS and Android. Before that comes a Final Closed Beta, starting on 25 November. Sign-ups are open now through a questionnaire on the official site and close at 01:59 UTC on 22 November. Places are limited, and everything you catch is wiped when the test ends, which would have caused riots in any school playground in 1999.
If you missed the earlier tests (the Nexus Bond Test in September 2025 and the Evolution Test this July), Nexus Anima is HoYoverse’s go at territory Nintendo has occupied since the days of the Game Boy. You play an Animaster who sets out from the seaside town of Iia, befriends creatures called Anima and fights alongside them in grid-based, auto-chess style battles. So it’s less “I choose you” and more a game of chess in which the pieces have enormous eyes and elemental grudges. The Anima embody paired concepts such as light and dark or life and death, which is rather more philosophy than the average Pidgey ever had to carry.
The final beta promises more story chapters, more characters and new areas to explore, along with Chroma colour variants and juvenile Anima that grow and evolve as you go. HoYoverse has also added new ways to interact with your creatures: you can hold hands with them, hug them and ask them to lift you into the air, which makes the whole thing sound like a cross between a nature documentary and a very short-haul airline. For the competitive crowd there’s the new Nexus Arena, where you build a team, get matched against other players and climb the ranks.
This being HoYoverse, there’s a gacha, and the beta tweaks it. The first five-star Eidos or Anima you pull from a limited-time banner is guaranteed to be the featured one, and landing the limited Eidos also gets you its matching Anima companion for free. By the standards of the genre, that’s practically a consumer rights charter.
Here at SFcrowsnest we’ve seen enough monster-collecting games to know the monsters are rarely the problem. It’s the grind, the menus, and the moment you realise you’ve spent real money chasing a cat with an umbrella (Umpurrella is a real Anima; we checked). The gameplay showcase above is lovely to look at and the battles look properly tactical. Spring 2027 will show whether HoYoverse has made a creature-catcher that feels like an adventure rather than a very pretty spreadsheet.
Sign up: the Final Closed Beta questionnaire is on the Honkai: Nexus Anima official site. The test runs on PC, iOS and Android from 25 November, with a data wipe at the end.
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