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Games Like Honkai: Nexus Anima
Short answer
Nothing on this list is all three things at once — and neither is anything else.
Honkai: Nexus Anima combines creature collecting, auto-battler combat and an open world. Almost every other game picks two. So rather than ranking six games against each other, this page scores each one on the three axes separately, and you pick the one that matches the part you care about.
The three things it is trying to be
Worth pinning down before comparing anything, because these are the verified properties everything below is measured against:
- Creature collecting. HoYoverse calls it "a brand-new creature-collector adventure strategy game in the Honkai series". You collect Anima — creatures formed from the residue of broken Nexus links.
- Auto-battler combat. Fights are called Nexus Battles and have been consistently compared to Teamfight Tactics and Auto Chess. The Evolution Test sign-up form asking applicants for their TFT rank is the strongest evidence available that the comparison is the intended one.
- An open world. You play a plane-hopping traveller with a character you create, moving through the world rather than between menus.
One honest caveat about the whole page. Honkai: Nexus Anima has only been playable in two closed tests and has no release date; the comparisons below are against what has been shown and stated, not against a finished game anyone has played to completion. The games it is compared to are described by what kind of game they are — deliberately not by prices, platforms or dates, which change faster than this page can verify them.
Scored on all three axes
| Game | Collecting | Auto battler | Open world |
|---|---|---|---|
| Honkai: Nexus Anima | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Teamfight Tactics | Partly | Yes | No |
| Palworld | Yes | No | Yes |
| Temtem | Yes | No | Partly |
| Cassette Beasts | Yes | No | Yes |
| The mainline Pokémon games | Yes | No | Partly |
| Genshin Impact | No | No | Yes |
Teamfight Tactics
What it shares
This is the auto battler that Nexus Battles keeps getting compared to, and the comparison is not just a reviewer reaching. The sign-up questionnaire for the Evolution Test asked applicants what rank they had reached in Teamfight Tactics. When a studio screens its testers for experience with a specific game, it is telling you what it thinks it has built.
Where it diverges
Everything outside the fight. TFT is a competitive PvP format with rounds, a shop and a ladder — there is no world to walk around, no creature collection that persists between matches, and no story. If the auto-battling is the part you want, start here and accept that it is only that part.
Palworld
What it shares
Catch creatures, build up a roster, take it out into an open world that does not stop at the edge of a battle arena. That combination — collecting plus a world with somewhere to go — is the half of Honkai: Nexus Anima that a pure auto battler cannot give you.
Where it diverges
Combat could hardly be less similar. Palworld is real-time action with survival and base-building systems attached; you are aiming and shooting, not assembling a board and watching it resolve. The tone is a long way from a Honkai-series setting, too.
Temtem
What it shares
A creature collector built as an online game, where the world has other real players in it. If what draws you to Honkai: Nexus Anima is collecting creatures somewhere populated rather than collecting them alone, this is the established version of that idea.
Where it diverges
Combat is deliberate, turn-based and player-controlled — the opposite design instinct to an auto battler, where the point is that you set up and then let go. The world is a structured route through regions rather than open exploration.
Cassette Beasts
What it shares
Collecting with a genuine twist — creatures can be fused into combined forms, which pushes team-building past "pick the six strongest". Nexus Battles are about the shape of a whole team rather than any one unit, and that is the instinct this shares.
Where it diverges
Turn-based combat you control directly, and a single-player open world rather than an online one. It is also a much smaller, more hand-made game than anything with a HoYoverse budget behind it — which some people will read as the point.
The mainline Pokémon games
What it shares
The core loop that Honkai: Nexus Anima is built on top of: find creatures, collect them, build a team, grow it. Every creature collector is answering Pokémon whether it wants to or not, and the ones on this list are all answers to it.
Where it diverges
Turn-based battles you make every decision in, and no auto-battler element at all. Recent entries have opened the world up considerably, but the series overall is structured single-player progression rather than the persistent world this game appears to be aiming at.
Genshin Impact
What it shares
The house style: a large open world, a character you move through it, and the production values HoYoverse puts into presentation. If your question is really "will this feel like a HoYoverse game", this is the honest answer — probably, in look and polish.
Where it diverges
It is an action RPG. You are not collecting creatures and you are not auto-battling; you are controlling characters in real-time combat. Sharing a publisher is the weakest kind of similarity there is, and it is worth saying plainly rather than letting the logo do the work.
What none of them will give you
The setting, for one. The Nexus idea — an invisible link between paired concepts like Love and Hate or Life and Death, whose collapse scatters into the creatures you collect — is doing something none of the games above attempt. Whether it amounts to anything in play is exactly the sort of question two closed tests cannot answer from the outside.
The other thing is the combination itself. Every game on this list picks two of the three axes, which is not an accident: collecting rewards attachment to individual creatures, auto battlers reward treating units as interchangeable pieces, and those pull against each other. Making both work at once is the interesting bet this game is making, and it is the part worth watching when a third test eventually opens.
Comparison FAQ
- What games are similar to Honkai: Nexus Anima?
- No single game covers all of it. Teamfight Tactics is the closest match for the auto-battler combat, Palworld and Cassette Beasts for creature collecting in an open world, Temtem for creature collecting in a shared online world, and Genshin Impact for the HoYoverse open-world feel. Which one you should play depends on which of those three things you actually want.
- Is Honkai: Nexus Anima like Pokémon?
- In its core loop, yes — you find and collect creatures called Anima and build a team from them. In combat, no. Pokémon battles are turn-based and you make every decision; Nexus Battles have been consistently compared to auto battlers, where you assemble a team and the fight resolves on its own.
- Is Honkai: Nexus Anima like Teamfight Tactics?
- In combat, that is the comparison every outlet reached for, and HoYoverse pointed the same way itself: the Evolution Test sign-up questionnaire asked applicants for their highest Teamfight Tactics rank. Outside combat they are not alike at all — TFT has no creature collection between matches and no world to explore.
- Is Honkai: Nexus Anima like Genshin Impact?
- They share a publisher and an open world, and not much else. Genshin Impact is a real-time action RPG; Honkai: Nexus Anima is a creature collector with auto-battler-style combat. Expecting the same kind of game because both are HoYoverse titles will mislead you.
- Is Honkai: Nexus Anima a gacha game?
- Not announced. HoYoverse has published nothing about how the game will be monetised. The Evolution Test took no payments at all, but that is a property of a closed test rather than a signal about launch, and it should not be read as one.
- Is Honkai: Nexus Anima an MMO?
- Unconfirmed. HoYoverse describes it as a creature-collector adventure strategy game, and it has an open world, but nothing has been published about how many players share that world or whether it is multiplayer at all in the way an MMO is. Anyone describing it as an MMO is going beyond what has been said.
Last updated August 8, 2026