From 2026 to 2027 will undoubtedly be a period of explosive growth for high-spec domestic anime-style games. However, for the creators of these products, what lies ahead is the most severe test in history—when people are fed too much good stuff, their tastes inevitably become more refined. As players are repeatedly exposed to products with high industrial standards and massive resource investments, their demands for gameplay naturally expand, dragging traditional players, developers, and capital markets into this "battle royale" like a bottomless pit.
Not long ago, a wilderness-themed open world allowing free movement and exploration was enough to keep players running and jumping around all day. But today, people are no longer satisfied with a single game framework. They evaluate every detail and design in the game, even bringing up "revenue" issues that only industry insiders used to pay attention to. Keep in mind, this change happened in just five or six years, shorter than the average lifecycle of a generation of game consoles.
This also precisely proves the importance of "time" in the anime-style game and live-service game markets. From the initial reveal, to closed beta tests, and finally to official launch, managing the relationship between each exposure and product upgrade involves considerable nuance. More importantly, how do you prove that this "time" was truly spent on worthwhile endeavors?
So, whenever I meet product developers, I can't help but ask them questions related to "time," such as: How do you control the rate at which players consume content in the game, and how do you fill the gameplay drought after launch?
And when I once again arrived at Manjuu Network's office and faced the "Azur Promilia" project team, the question I asked surprised even myself—so, when exactly are you planning to launch publicly?
Honestly, this is a question I've wanted to ask for a long time.
Just a few days ago, Manjuu Network's "Azur Promilia" welcomed its third internal beta test after half a year. Why am I so anxious? Because, based on past experience, when a live-service game has undergone more than three beta tests, its key gameplay and business models should have long been finalized, and it won't be too far from final launch.
Once again, we were invited by Manjuu to get an early look at the key updates in this test.
Unfortunately, I didn't get any specific answers from the project team regarding the launch date. On the other hand, some of the "new things" shown by "Azur Promilia" in the third beta test seem to once again indirectly confirm the traditions and industry laws of live-service games—perhaps this really will be its "last beta test."
Actually, just like many players felt about "Azur Promilia" during the second beta test—after a long development cycle and repeated polishing, the game's gameplay framework and systems are now very clear and complete. The remaining minor issues can basically be resolved gradually by investing time. At this stage, the game is essentially ready for launch.
Because of this, we didn't see any major systemic changes targeting exploration or combat in this test. The main focus was placed on optimizing existing gameplay, introducing new characters, and showcasing the business model.
This already explains a lot.
The foundation of "Azur Promilia" remains traditional large-world exploration, with action combat and exploration interspersed throughout still occupying the core position of the game. From this perspective, it is an open-world game that is conceptually traditional, even somewhat "outdated." However, after merging with "creature capturing" and its derivative gameplay, this familiar worldview structure still brings a considerable amount of freshness.
If we were to mention what "new things" were surprising in the third beta test of "Azur Promilia," the first thing to mention is still Manjuu's optimization and changes to the "Chibo" gameplay.
As always, the gameplay framework related to "creature capturing" in "Azur Promilia" was already established in previous versions, but many details remained unsatisfactory—such as the "Chibo Duel" in the second beta test, which felt awkward no matter how you played it.
Manjuu listens to advice, so in the test version, they completely redesigned the duel gameplay, canceling the previous setting where player characters needed to move within the field. At the same time, they limited the battle range to a small arena, allowed players to freely rotate the camera during combat, and changed the victory condition from destroying buildings to directly deducting player HP.
These changes directly reshaped the game rhythm of the entire duel gameplay while retaining the depth of the original system. The main character no longer enters the field, and the moderately sized arena ensures players have complete access to information within the field, which directly impacts the arrangement and execution of strategies.
Under the Chibo Duel framework of this version, players can intuitively see changes in the battlefield situation, including ability differences and counter relationships between enemies and allies, and react quickly. The clearer and more intuitive win/loss conditions also greatly accelerate the pace of matches, making the Chibo Duels in this test much smoother and giving me more patience to actively seek out those "Chibo Trainers" on the map for a showdown.
To be honest, when the game was first revealed, I once worried that "creature capturing" was an additional gameplay feature stitched onto the open-world prototype later to cater to market demands. The reason is simple: Manjuu's greatest advantage has never been in monster or gameplay design, but rather in art and performance choreography.
I know this might not sound pleasant, but personally, I find the beautiful girl character design quality in "Azur Promilia" far more attractive than its "Chibo" designs. This isn't just about saying the female characters in the game look good, but rather about the characters' self-consistency within the worldview.
As a game whose overall style leans more towards the "sword and magic" fantasy genre, "Azur Promilia" is actually at a "disadvantage" in character design channels. Not to mention that visual elements of "sword and magic" have long been overused by similar games, it also needs to avoid overly modern elements in costume design.
Under the industrialized model of modern anime-style games, this is actually a significant disadvantage. If decorative elements that adhere to polygon aesthetics are not appropriately added, characters easily appear flat after 3D processing due to insufficient three-dimensionality, looking visually "plain." This is also the main reason why fundamentalist "sword and magic" styles are increasingly less favored by high-spec domestic anime-style games today.
I wouldn't dare say that "Azur Promilia" has completely overcome this inherent disadvantage, but... Huangji (Manjuu) is indeed an old-hand in the ACG industry thanks to "Azur Lane." This gives them a natural stubbornness in character塑造, knowing how to start with details to hit players' fetishes.
Some character designs in "Azur Promilia" are indeed quite traditional and plain, such as "Jisebelu," whom Manjuu heavily promoted in the previous test. She basically wears a very standard maid outfit, incorporating some "cold-faced" and "violent" elements to highlight the contrast in her identity and personality. Interestingly, you rarely hear people say this character design lacks distinctiveness. This is precisely because Manjuu leveraged the "plainness" of the maid outfit in reverse, using large blocks of white to showcase the character's body curves and different fabric materials to amplify certain attractive attributes.
At this point, the lack of excessive decorative elements actually becomes the biggest advantage—I'm saying Jisebelu's biggest selling point is actually her armpits, wonder if anyone gets it.
Interestingly, sometimes "Azur Promilia" seems to want to create purely "cute" type characters, and for such characters, Manjuu seems to have a different angle of design thinking.
The two new characters appearing in this third beta test—"Maple Sugar" and "Peipei"—seem to be products of this approach. Rather than highlighting fetishes through costumes, their performances in actions and behavioral animations are more eye-catching.
Let's start with "Maple Sugar." As another cute "catgirl" character in "Azur Promilia," she takes a completely different route from the previous "Luluka." You can see this very clearly from her idle and combat animations. Maple Sugar is obviously more energetic and vibrant in personality. Therefore, all her action styles consciously recreate the "stereotypes" of traditional catgirls in existing ACG works, carrying a sense of casualness and appeasement.
The fundamental reason why "Azur Promilia" is harder to make than "Azur Lane" is that you not only need to reflect this in character illustrations but also give characters a dynamic image from start to finish, avoiding any sense of fragmentation. "Maple Sugar's" attack module is really well done, incorporating some idol-style spinning and swaying movements that maximize the advantages of cat ears and short skirts. Although she is a four-star character in this test, she still leaves a very deep impression.
The other new five-star character added in this test, "Peipei," is also my favorite and most frequently used character in this test... Here, let's step away from various household appliances for a moment and look at the character herself.
Peipei's design concept is actually very simple: a typical Chinese chef combined with a kung fu girl. She belongs to the Pami race and incorporates many panda elements, corresponding to the "Chen Dynasty," a Chinese-style region likely to be implemented later in the game. Both her character setup and costumes follow a cute route.
It seems that besides the character concept full of cultural attributes, Peipei doesn't have anything particularly noteworthy. But if you actually try playing with her, you might understand why I use her so frequently.
Simply put, Peipei has a special combat mechanism. After entering the "Yin-Yang Qi Gathering" state, players can trigger special attack combos by holding the attack button and releasing it at specific timings. Visually, it looks like playing Tai Chi, while gameplay-wise, it feels a bit like rhythm-based blacksmithing. When using a game controller, the physical input feedback is excellent, adding extra fun to the combat.
Although Manjuu had already attempted to broaden the combat experience of "Azur Promilia" as an anime-style game by starting with its mechanics, ensuring that most characters have unique combat mechanisms and attack styles. Peipei's punching mechanism aligns with the traditional Tai Chi logic of "retracting and releasing" in terms of operational logic, and visually adheres to the Tai Chi concept of "harmonizing Yin and Yang." When combined, it even allows players to appreciate the charm of traditional Chinese culture through Peipei, making it a surprisingly clever design in the current version.
Actually, speaking of "Chinese style," there is another character that must be mentioned in this test: the pink-haired fox spirit who appeared in the previous test—"Tushan Xiaoyu." She occupies a considerable portion of content in this test. One could even say that through her content presentation in this test, we can glimpse some of the future content production direction of "Azur Promilia."
In this test, the game officially released most of its "paid content."
Yes, this also means that most of the content in "Azur Promilia" is already transparent and public, including a "gacha" system that modern anime-style game players are all too familiar with. Like all similar products, this test also offers multiple card pools for players to choose from. Besides characters, another important element of the game's progression system was revealed—"Reishi" (Spirit Particles), which basically corresponds to the "signature weapon" system in similar games and also requires gacha pulls to obtain.
It is worth noting that the visual effects of Reishi have been significantly enhanced in this test. In addition to the "gyroscope" effect that all Reishi come with, some Reishi have added dynamic effects and dedicated scene performances. It seems this is basically the regular state of the game after launch.
But if we were to talk about the real "highlight" of this test, it would naturally be the design of the character gacha pool and the selection of the "limited character" UP pool.
For someone who has long been immersed in various anime-style game gacha pools, I can fully understand their reasoning. In this test, "Azur Promilia" adopts a relatively conventional but more easily accepted targeted gacha pool mode, commonly known as "no off-banner pity." For the pity system, it uses the probability increase mechanism common in recent years, where the drop rate gradually increases after a certain number of pulls, guaranteeing a drop at 90 pulls.
The "Tushan Xiaoyu" in this test is precisely the best example to explore the truth behind this gacha system. It not only needs to stimulate players' desire to pull through performance, design, and settings but also needs to accumulate enough character fandom before the official public release.
Regarding Tushan Xiaoyu's performance, we already got a general idea during the second beta test, so there's no need to discuss it in detail here. What I want to talk about instead is "Azur Promilia's" "content experiment" with limited characters.
It can be seen that Tushan Xiaoyu occupies a significant portion of content in this test. Although she appears relatively late in the main story, her novel setting as a "pink-haired Chinese-style fox spirit" who "forms bonds through cultivation" makes her stand out considerably among the fantasy-themed characters.
In this test, Tushan Xiaoyu is not only the first UP limited character but also the first character in "Azur Promilia" to have independent event storylines and gameplay—and this gameplay directly stems from her background setting of "forming bonds through cultivation," executed quite impressively.
In the setting, Tushan Xiaoyu is a trainee fox spirit who accumulates cultivation by forming bonds for others. Thus, Manjuu created a set of "simulation raising" gameplay specifically for her, requiring players to train Xiaoyu's various abilities within a fixed period. This includes numerous optional events related to bond-forming and features with a "trial" attribute. Finally, depending on the character abilities cultivated by the player, the story ending will branch differently.
From the perspective of the game industry, this simulation raising gameplay is not novel at all. It's essentially the same system passed down from "Uma Musume Pretty Derby," involving increasing and decreasing several attributes in cycles within a script framework. But placed in a high-spec anime-style game mode like "Azur Promilia," these elements can provide a mode of "emotional connection" different from similar products.
This emotional connection comes not only from the protagonist meeting Xiaoyu under the story background but also from the "face-to-face" interaction between the player and Xiaoyu. In each round, players need to personally arrange Xiaoyu's cultivation schedule, advise on her growth direction, and even decide the direction of the story's ending.
More importantly, in the game, this interaction is entirely handled through 3D animations. Manjuu has designed specific performances for each different type of cultivation training. Regardless of whether the cultivation results in success or failure, you can see expressions and actions that fit Xiaoyu's personality. As always: the people creating these things really know what they're doing; they understand how to shape characters to evoke empathy and identification from players.
Then the next step is simple—so, are you pulling for this character or not? If she has other more attractive content, would players be willing to spend extra money on her?
Of course, considering that Tushan Xiaoyu might be the game's first limited character and the first character with a time-limited event, this level of content experimentation seems reasonable. Moreover, simulation raising gameplay isn't something that can be applied to every character. If every limited character required a new gameplay mode, Manjuu's event planners would probably collapse within a few versions.
But even so, the implementation of Tushan Xiaoyu's event gameplay and limited gacha pool in this test is enough for us to make a rough guess about the game's future operations and profit direction. I dislike calling those "no off-banner pity" gacha pools "concessions," because it feels more like a reasonable trade-off aligned with future market trends. After lowering the threshold for obtaining characters, "Azur Promilia" will inevitably need to ensure commercial profitability from other aspects. After all, under the game specifications we see now, the cost of developing a character is really not low.
The most common methods are costumes and battle passes, or more interaction options between players and characters. To make players willingly invest further in characters, you naturally need to spend more effort on shaping and polishing them, whether in terms of personality, actions, expressions, or stories.
And this is actually what Manjuu has always been best at, and what a pure and clean "anime-style game" should do most.
When evaluating "Azur Lane," we often mention that Manjuu is the domestic anime-style game developer that best understands its own advantages and the native "ACG" community. This conclusion seems equally convincing when applied to "Azur Promilia." Through repeated tests, I can clearly see how this game gradually finds its product positioning that fits its characteristics amidst increasingly fierce market competition.
Some might compare it to open-world games like "Palworld," which focus on "creature capturing," while others might feel it remains a more traditional wilderness-themed large-world anime-style game, with "creature capturing" merely as an add-on. But in my opinion, both views are correct yet somewhat one-sided. Because after stripping away all modern frameworks and forms of expression, what Manjuu is doing hasn't changed much compared to the past, or even the entire era of 2D anime-style games. Rather than repeatedly纠结 (struggling with) so-called gameplay details and originality, which ultimately increases the burden on players, it's better to spend more energy from the start on providing emotional value.
As an adult wrapped up in the pace of modern life, I may not have much time to play several games simultaneously, but I don't mind being surrounded by cute beautiful girls in games for some healing.