How you catch Anima, and what Rapport does

There are two ways a creature joins your team, and the difference between them is the most important thing to understand about this game’s economy.

Catching one in the world

Anima roam the world. You challenge one to a battle, and once the fight goes your way you attempt to recruit it with a Nexus Skein, an item you feed the creature to earn its trust.

Two things follow from that, both reported consistently in hands-on coverage of the Evolution Test:

• The fight comes first. You cannot skip to the recruitment step, so catching depends on having a team that can actually beat the creature you want.
• The attempt can fail. It is a recruitment attempt, not a purchase, which is why Skeins matter as a resource.

This is the part that looks like a traditional creature collector, and it is the part that costs nothing but time.

Pulling on a banner

The game also runs gacha banners, and there are two of them: one for Eidos (the human characters, who fight alongside your creatures) and one for Anima.

Details observed in the test build: a ten-pull cost 1,600 Aspect Gems, and HoYoverse’s usual guarantee applied, at least one 4-star or better every ten. Those are beta figures, exactly like the system requirements, and prices are among the most commonly adjusted numbers between a test and a launch.

What happens to duplicates

This is the mechanic worth knowing, because it decides whether pulling repeatedly is a trap.

A duplicate Anima does not sit in your inventory doing nothing. It converts into Anima Energy, which raises Rapport with that creature. Higher Rapport unlocks passive skills for it.

So a duplicate is a power increase on a creature you already own, not a consolation prize. It also means the ceiling on a favourite creature is not reached the moment you get it, which is the same structure HoYoverse uses elsewhere in its games.

For the Eidos side, coverage describes the equivalent systems under different names: levelling their skills, and extra copies feeding passive bonuses.

What this says about the money question

We looked at this in is Nexus Anima pay to win, and the catching system is the strongest argument in the game’s favour: the creatures you can catch for free are real creatures, not a starter set.

The honest counterweight is that Rapport gives paying players a way to keep improving a creature after they own it. Whether that gap matters depends on numbers nobody outside HoYoverse has, and on how demanding the hardest content turns out to be.

What is not known

• Where Nexus Skeins come from at launch, and whether they are limited.
• The real cost of a pull outside a test build.
• How many Rapport levels exist, and what the passives actually do.
• Whether any creature is banner-only, which would change the answer to the pay to win question completely.

What to do now

Nothing, and that is the point. Pre-launch there is no account to build and no reroll strategy worth learning, because the rates in front of you today came from a client that no longer exists. The useful preparation is knowing how the systems fit together, which is what this page is for.