Aniimo Removed Its Gacha and Its Entire Rune System

Pawprint Studio published its pre-launch dev letter on 3 September, and it goes further than the usual pre-launch tuning notes. Two whole systems from the betas are not being adjusted for launch: they are gone.

The first is the Legendary Aniimo catch, the one that had you throwing Aniipod after Aniipod at Irisalis, which drew plenty of honest criticism during the tests and has been rebuilt from the ground up. The second surprised me more: the rune system has been removed entirely, along with the random rune slots that came with it, and that is not a change I remember many people asking for.

I played every test, so here is what actually changed, what it means for how you build an Aniimo, and the one question the letter does not answer.

The Legendary catch is not a slot machine any more

In the tests, meeting Irisalis meant paying an entry cost, throwing balls, failing, and repeating. The studio's own description of the problem is unusually blunt: they had hoped randomness would make a Legendary feel like a challenge, and instead the repetition made the encounter less immersive than what they set out to build.

The replacement has three parts. You collect legendary tokens through world exploration and story progress. You use them to craft your own Legendary Aniipod, which unlocks Irisalis's exclusive story. Then a unique encounter appears on the map: you enter the battle, follow the story, defeat the Legendary, and throw the Aniipod you built to seal the bond.

Two details matter more than the rest. The token collection is folded into ordinary exploring and catching, so you are not grinding a separate track. And the encounter happens once. There is no farming it, no resetting it, no second attempt if you fumble.

The letter also says this design is the template for every Legendary Aniimo to come, which makes it a structural decision rather than a patch to one boss. This is how I thought it should have worked from the start.

The question the letter does not answer

Here is where I have to be careful before calling it a complete win.

During the beta, when players raised this, the response indicated the studio still intended to offer paid options for people who wanted a Legendary faster. The launch letter says nothing about that either way. It describes the new acquisition path in detail and simply does not mention monetisation.

So there are two readings. Either the paid route was dropped along with the random catching, or you obtain one copy through story and exploration and additional copies remain purchasable. I lean toward the second, because it is the version that is consistent with both statements, but that is my inference, not an announcement. Until the store is live, nobody outside the studio knows.

What is certain is that the part people disliked, paying an entry cost to roll the dice on a creature you might not get, is not in the launch build.

Prismana got simpler, and Umbral Aniimo arrived

The Prismana acquisition pass is mostly a de-frustration exercise. The base chance of triggering Prismana through nurturing is now flat, which removes the early-game penalty where low Prismatic Energy quietly suppressed your odds. The pity guarantee stays. Offering quality no longer affects Wild Surge quality, and ecosystem nurturing now grants a fixed amount of Prismatic Energy, so you can stop optimising an input that was never explained well. Season-exclusive Prismana got clearer spawn conditions too.

Catching also gains a lucky strike mechanic: it hands out items, raises the area's Prismatic Energy, and can directly trigger Prismana Flow.

The genuinely new thing is Umbral Aniimo. Wild Surges, which you trigger through ecosystem nurturing, now have a chance to produce them, and they can also turn up by chance in the open world. They carry a distinctive darker coloration and guaranteed Perfect Potential.

Worth noting for anyone who tested earlier builds: Umbral is the closest thing the launch game has to the old Darkler concept, which matters to the people holding Promise Eggs from the second beta. Nothing official connects the two. It is just hard to look at them and not wonder.

Sparkling Cubes now guarantee Perfect Potential

This one cuts both ways, so it is worth looking at honestly.

An Aniimo caught with a Sparkling Cube now has guaranteed Perfect Potential. Combined with the cube's existing guaranteed Sparkling effect, that is a single item producing the best possible version of a target. Cubes can be bought with real money, so the most desirable outcome in the game is, to a degree, purchasable. It does trivialise shiny hunting for anyone willing to spend.

Umbral Aniimo are not an ideal counterweight, but they are a real one. They are rare, they are found rather than bought, and they come with Perfect Potential built in. If Sparkling is now the form you can pay for, Umbral is the form you have to actually go and find.

Practically, this raises the value of the advice that already applied: bank your cube. It was worth holding when it only guaranteed Sparkling. It is worth holding more now.

The rune system is gone, and builds are the open question

The one that genuinely surprised me: the Carried Item system has been simplified, random rune slots are gone, and the rune system has been removed entirely.

Unlike the Irisalis rework, I do not think this one was driven by complaints, because runes barely came up in beta discussion. My guess is the usage data did the talking: most players hardly touched the system during the tests, probably because the UI around it was confusing and not very intuitive, so the training rework simplified it away, and something else may well take its place later.

Whatever the reason, I am glad to see it go, and Genshin Impact or Wuthering Waves players will understand why. Farming Artifacts or Echoes can take over a month per character, and it is the part of those games people burn out on. Aniimo looked like it was heading the same way, and removing the system before launch is far easier than removing it two years in, once an economy has grown around it.

I like it. I also do not yet know what it means for building an Aniimo, because runes were the main route to Crit Rate and Cooldown Reduction, and both are very low by default.

A handful of Aniimo do not care, because the stat is written into their kit. Blazen has two skills that each grant 50% additional critical rate, and a trait that turns on after six critical hits. Thornblade buffs its own crit rate by 30% on a well-timed counter and 15% on a thrust. Those two build themselves. Everything else in the roster needed the stat from somewhere.

My guess is that the reworked capability systems absorb it. The same section of the letter says Capability Awakening below level 60 can now be reset at any time with the training items returned, that capability caps unlock gradually with Aniimo level and Resonance star rank, and that Capafruit effects transfer automatically during inheritance so switching your investment no longer costs you everything. That is a lot of restructuring around progression stats. It would be strange if crit were not part of it.

Until the launch build is in our hands, treat every rune guide on the internet, this site included, as documentation of a system that no longer exists.

Home, dispatches and a long quality-of-life list

The Home section is the longest in the letter and the least discussed. The Home is now a multi-area map with house building and a large furniture catalogue, with interior decorating flagged for continued work. Furniture groups can be shared through codes, some pieces can be placed out in the open world, and unused furniture sells back through the Co-op Store. Home Aniimo get new idle behaviours, better work logic and a petting interaction.

The line I would not skip past: RV dispatches now have a chance to produce Aniimo eggs with the Prismana trait. You can send dispatches every day. A daily, zero-cost chance at a Prismana egg is a serious addition dressed up as a housing note.

Change	Why it matters
Pathfinder Challenge rematches	A repeatable, real opponent to test a new team against
9/9 and 10/10 spawn rates increased	Perfect-Potential wild catches are meaningfully more common
Egg Heist reworked	More obtainable egg types, plus a high-difficulty Chaos Mode
Journey quest guidance rebuilt	Vague objectives and progression blockers fixed
Multi-language voiceover	Main story is voiced, with translation quality passes across all languages
Controls pass	Mobile and controller handling improved ahead of the 23 September mobile launch

The rematches are the one I am personally happiest about. Building a team and having nowhere to test it against a real opponent was a genuine gap.

What this actually says about the studio

Set the individual changes aside for a second. A studio deleting two systems it had already built, weeks before launch, is rare, whether the push came from player feedback, as with Irisalis, or from watching what players actually did with them, as I suspect with runes. Either way it means throwing away finished, functional work, and I am surprised they managed all of this in the couple of months since the last test.

The letter frames the changes as proof that feedback did not just sit in forums and feedback forms, and on the Irisalis evidence that is fair. It is also a reason to keep the conversation going: the paid-Legendary question is still open, and Sparkling Cubes being purchasable is still a monetisation lever pointed at the rarest outcome in the game.

So keep voicing your concerns and helping make this game the best version of itself for everyone. On this record, the devs are listening.