A World Built Around Bonds, Not Just Creatures
Going into my meeting with HoYoverse during Gamescom 2026, Honkai: Nexus Anima was one of those games I thought I understood before I actually spent enough time looking at it. On the surface, the description is simple enough: this is a creature-collecting adventure strategy game set within the Honkai universe, where you meet creatures called Anima, build a team around them and use their abilities in battle and exploration. The obvious comparison is Pokémon, and visually there are moments where your brain naturally goes there, but after seeing the game in more detail I think reducing Nexus Anima to another creature collector would be unfair. What immediately caught my attention was how much effort HoYoverse is putting into making the creatures feel like part of the world rather than collectibles waiting to be added to a menu. The environments I saw felt broad, colorful and deliberately inviting, with enough visual variety to make exploration feel like something I would actually want to do without constantly being pushed toward the next objective. I liked that feeling. There was no sense that the world existed only as empty space between missions. It felt designed for wandering, discovering things and simply spending time with the Anima accompanying you.
The foundation for all of this is the Nexus, a system of invisible connections between paired concepts called Aspects, including Love and Hate, Light and Dark, and Reality and Illusion. Following an event called the Sundering, those connections were broken and their remaining power became scattered throughout the world as Anima. That concept sounds complicated when explained on paper, but it gives HoYoverse an interesting excuse to make creatures radically different from one another, both visually and mechanically. This was one of my favorite parts of what I saw. The Anima did not feel like slight variations built from the same design template. They have different shapes, personalities and abilities, and those abilities matter beyond combat because different companions can influence how you interact with the surrounding world. The starting town of Iia is a good example. Its New Quarter, commercial areas, architecture, Nexus Hall and True Nexus Building give the location a stronger sense of identity than I expected from an opening area. I personally enjoy games that let me explore at my own pace, and Nexus Anima seems to understand that exploration becomes far more interesting when the creatures traveling beside you are involved in it instead of disappearing into an inventory the second a battle ends.
