This Week in Mobile Games - Anni(versary), Are You OK?

This week's This Week in Mobile Gaming has a sponsor! It's pixel art anime RPG Grand Summoners!

Learn more about Grand Summoners and its latest crossover event
with That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime a little further down in this week's column!
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Has it really been an entire two weeks since the last issue of This Week in Mobile Games? My calendar (and the backlog of news stories) tells me yes! While trying to catch up after a very late start with Fate/Grand Order's Witch on the Holy Night crossover, I've also been spending day job-related time with Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, Nintendo's latest attempt to make Miis happen. And frankly, it's working, as the game's mad-libs powered charm is infectious. There's a dollhouse appeal to creating Mii replicas of celebrities, yourself, your friends, and favorite visual novel characters to populate your island and get up to randomized shenanigans while you watch. It reminds me of the sort of time-wasting relaxation play that was once seemingly the exclusive property of earlier generations of handheld games, and then mobile games, before the accelerating hardware capabilities of smartphones made them seemingly as vulnerable to "triple-A" scale as any other gaming platform.

But enough about a game that's not technically mobile, there's a lot of news to cover!

Honkai Star Rail to Send Fans Running for its 3rd Anniversary

Has it really been three years since HoYoVerse followed up on its Genshin Impact success with a sci-fantasy turn-based RPG? Apparently so, or else I wouldn't be here writing about Honkai Star Rail's third anniversary festivities, set to kick off in a matter of days. HoYoVerse also released a lavish animated music video celebrating the game, animated by studio MAPPA and featuring the ever-popular Stellaron Hunter trio (Kafka, Silver Wolf, and Blade).

The version 4.2 update itself, titled So Laughed the Masses is set to go live on April 22, 2026, and continue the Astral Express crew's adventures in Planarcadia as the planet's ongoing Phantasmoon Games arc reaches another climax that promises to unlock a new playable variant of the Trailblazer as they get even more involved in the sinisterly silly tournament. Where the other Trailblazer paths wielded a bat, a spear, a hat, and a Pokémon, the new one hands her a lightsaber - or rather, a multi-form glowstick that can turn into a variety of light-emitting weapons, in keeping with the party-time vibe of the Path of Elation.

Being an anniversary update, version 4.2 is packed with goodies. Aside from an array of goodies like free gacha tickets and resources, the headline giveaway is the addition of two formerly limited 5-Star characters to the in-game "Stellar Convergence" shop, where players can pick them up in exchange for "Golden Companion Spirit" items (normally obtained after obtaining duplicates of high-rarity characters you've already maxed out). 

For the 3rd anniversary, players who log in after the update launches will be given a Golden Companion Spirit for free. Additionally, Penacony songstress Robin and the scaredy-foxgirl healer Huohuo will be added to the selection. Last time I played Honkai Star Rail, both Huohuo and Robin were particularly desirable support characters, so they'd be a good addition to certain teams.

Honkai Star Rail

© HoYoVerse

The anniversary festivities aren't limited to the digital world, though. Seemingly underlining the obscene amounts of money these companies are making from their games, the Honkai Star Rail 3rd anniversary also includes several in-person events held in multiple countries, including Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the US. 

These "local partner"-type promotions include pop-up merchandise stores and local chain collaborations, but the most notable hookup is the "Run to Elation," a three-kilometer fun run event in keeping with the storyline's Phantasmoon Games theme. Given that the typical fun run event is a five-kilometer run, the announcement kicked off a round of jokes about how HoYoVerse shortened the length of the run to ensure that even Star Rail nerds can participate, but the official reasoning is that it's one kilometer per year of Star Rail's operation. I guess we'll see how things go when the game celebrates its 25th anniversary.

On top of the new Trailblazer path, the Star Rail 3rd anniversary will add two new playable characters to the in-game gacha banner. The first is Silver Wolf LV.999, the freshly ascended version of Silver Wolf, one of the early stand-out characters from Star Rail's launch era. An expert gamer from the cyberpunk planet of Punklorde, Silver Wolf is a super-hacker who can edit reality itself, a skill she's used to insert herself in any number of story events despite being practically across the universe from the Astral Express. This new version of her is even more "leveled up", blending in sci-fi mecha musume design cues and a pair of sunglasses straight from Gurren Lagann. Of course, she wasn't always that way, and HoYoVerse saw fit to launch an animated short detailing more of Silver Wolf's tragic backstory on its YouTube channel.

The second playable character set for the Honkai Star Rail 3rd anniversary is Evanescia, a pink-haired, rabbit-eared, gyaru-coded fighter with a mysterious background. Though she's appeared in previous portions of the Planarcadia storyline and HoYoVerse hasn't quite spun up her promotional cycle yet, fans of developer miHoYo's other games (i.e., Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3rd) have already marked Evanescia as the Star Rail version of Yae Sakura. 

Seeing both Silver Wolf and Evanescia on the banner brings to mind one of HoYoVerse's most enduring storytelling and characterization quirks: A staunch dedication to launching new characters that seem, for all the world like alternative versions of characters from their other games, particularly Honkai Impact 3rd and its constellation of associated titles. 

For example, Silver Wolf LV.999 isn't just another version of Silver Wolf - many fans theorize she's a version of Bronie, a Honkai Impact 3rd character who is herself an alternative version of that game's Bronya Zaichik. Silver Wolf isn't even the only version of Bronya in Honkai Star Rail, where the taller, more mature Bronya Rand is, herself, an even more explicit callback to Honkai Impact's Bronya, making her the third playable "Bronya-like" in the game. Heck, depending on how you interpret the choice to cast Hana Kanazawa as Yao Guang's Japanese voice, there might even be four Bronyas in Star Rail's roster.

© HoYoVerse

Of course, all this self-reference is hardly new if you're familiar with miHoYo games. Honkai Impact 3rd's plot is heavy on multiversal shenanigans, folded in with cross-generational reincarnation and a business model literally oriented around selling alternative versions of the core cast over expanding the cast. Star Rail and Honkai Impact 3rd are also more directly related, with Honkai Star Rail's Welt Yang being confirmed early on to be the same character as the Honkai Impact 3rd version, just somehow manifested in another universe.

In any case, it'll be interesting to see how things play out as Honkai Star Rail continues its cross-universal journey, particularly as the "triple-A free-to-play" competition space heats up. Anniversaries are also the best time to pick a game back up for a lapsed player (like yours truly), as the freebies alone are worth claiming if you still have any desire to see what the fuss is all about.

Neverness to Everness Prepares to Launch 'Anime GTA'

And speaking of things heating up in the triple-A free-to-play space, Perfect World and Hotta Studio have put their foot on the floor to rev up the promotional engine for their open-world urban romp Neverness to Everness (NTE), which launches on Android, iOS, PS5, and PC on April 29, 2026. The game's launch trailer casts the impression of a full-3D Unreal Engine 5-powered super game, blending anime-inspired character visuals and flashy combat with the massive scale typical of headline open-world crime games like Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto.

The preview stream hosted by Hotta Studio on Saturday gets into a bit more concrete detail about what players can actually expect from NTE: A blending of urban open-world exploration and traversal with a main story, structure, and combat system that will be more familiar to veterans of the current wave of high-production Asian free-to-play games. In the massive fictional city of Hethereaul, supernatural "Anomalies" make various weird, dangerous things happen in an otherwise mundane cityscape. Players play a freelance "Anomaly Hunter" that combines fighting anomalies and working alongside other hunter organizations (including the state-run Bureau of Anomaly Control) to make ends meet.

So far, so Zenless Zone Zero, but the star of NTE appears to be Herthereau itself, which seems to represent one of the largest and most lavishly detailed representations of an urban environment to appear in a game of this sort. Put plain, it looks really fancy, and there's no denying the appeal of being able to get into a fancy car or hop on a motorcycle and drive around a big, fancy in-game space that looks like a mash-up of all the idealized representations of East Asian and coastal American cityscapes. The preview shows players driving, commandeering NPC cars, getting in trouble with the police, and playing minigames for money to buy clothes, condo decorations, and vehicles. 

GTA-esque activities aside, NTE's gacha system (here named the "Scarborough Fair" and represented as a board game of sorts) revolves around rolling for new characters and cosmetics like vehicle skins and outfits. In a notable change from the system outlined in the closed betas, the current system appears to eschew the "50/50" system normalized by leading gachas, instead establishing a hard guarantee of getting a featured character within 90 rolls on a given limited banner, with the rate of nabbing an S-rank character going up with every roll past 70. 

How that translates to the player experience will, of course, be determined after launch, when players get a taste of how many rolls they can earn without having to open their wallets. But as a statement of intent, it looks like Perfect World and Hotta seem to be aware of how cutthroat the competition is in the space right now, with many players already committed to their "main" games and simply looking at new releases as a change of pace rather than a new siphon for their increasingly limited entertainment budgets.

NTE's also launching with a somewhat amusing array of crossovers, with several musical tracks from Persona 5 The Phantom X (the gacha-based spin-off of Persona 5) and Hotta's previous tower, Tower of Fantasy, available in-game. Already, the announcement has prompted jokes about Persona 5's slightly humorous reputation as a "kiss of death" for live service games, based on the incidence of several high-profile titles shutting down some time after hosting a Persona 5 crossover. 

Less humorous are persistent rumors of generative AI assets in the game, the evidence mostly pointing back to game files from earlier playtests that bear some of the hallmarks of LLM-involved asset creation. While there hasn't been any specific statement on the extent of generated asset presence in the launch version of Neverness to Everness, Perfect World isn't shy about its AI use ambitions. The company has made public statements as far back as before NTE's reveal, trumpeting plans to involve such tools in things like concept design, modeling, and even story generation.

Wuthering Waves Brings Back Flying, adds Branded Bike Skins for its 2nd Anniversary

And speaking of odd collaborations, Kurogame previewed the 3.3 update for Wuthering Waves, its 2nd anniversary, which goes live on April 30th. The update, "Reverbs from the End of Galaxies", adds new main story quests and two playable Resonators: Hiyuki, a sword-wielding icy samurai woman, and Denia, who hails from the Startorch Academy and has Fusion-element attacks. 

Alongside the new characters, players will be able to explore an expansive new area, the Dimmr plains, with enhanced traveling in the form of a flight-capable upgrade to the Rover's Expedition Motorbike, alongside graphical enhancements on PC and storage optimizations for the game's mobile editions.

Wuthering Waves

© Kurogame

The motorbike upgrade also comes with an array of slightly branded crossover skins covering subjects ranging from Kaiju No. 8 to Rider's Republic, CAPCOM's PRAGMATA, and Resident Evil, and even volleyball anime Haikyu!! and the mobile classic Angry Birds. It's a bit silly, but I honestly can't be too mad at it, seeing as I look back with fondness on such things as the goofy Pizza Hut gear from Phantasy Star Portable 2. Where's the skin that'll make my Rover look like Colonel Sanders, Kurogame?

Google Play Expels Doki Doki Literature Club Over Sensitive Themes

Publisher Serenity Forge has announced that the Android edition of Doki Doki Literature Club has been pulled from the Google Play Store. According to the statement, Google claims that DDLC violated Google's Terms of Service regarding the portrayal of "sensitive themes."

© Serenity Forge and Dan Salvato

The game was originally released for free on PC in 2017, and then made its way to consoles, iOS, and, until April 10th, Android. If you're familiar with Doki Doki Literature Club, you should know what sorts of "sensitive themes" might have piqued Google's ire. Without spoiling the game, I can pretty much describe it as an adventure game that initially presents a story couched in well-worn tropes about the stereotypical Japanese high school setting seen in many romantic visual novels and bishoujo games. As the game goes on, though, things take a darker turn, overturning the mood with one more akin to psychological horror and dealing with themes of mental illness, depression, self-harm, and suicide. 

Given that Google does have published policies against the "promotion" of suicide and self-harm, the abrupt removal from the Google Play store after four months on the market doesn't really square with the fact that the game's been out for more than 5 years. Additionally, DDLC's own age rating on the Google Play store was Mature (17+), and the game itself had fairly clear warnings and links to detailed content warnings. All in all, an appropriate amount of advance notice for a horror game that employs shock value, arguably.

It also doesn't help that the move seems of a piece with the recent censorious crackdown on mature content online, enacted by payment processors and networks like Visa and Mastercard, and in some cases more broadly by governments seeking to erode individual privacy in the name of "age verification" and effectively shutting minors out of the broader internet. The trend has affected not just for-adults places like adult manga publisher FAKKU! or platforms used by artists that produce adult content like SubscribeStar and Fanza, but even fairly mainstream digital retailers like Steam, Itch.io, and others have been pressured into taking down otherwise legal (if controversial) games and creative works, up to and including artistic games with difficult themes like Santa Ragione's Horses. Even before DDLC was hit, Google and Apple were notorious for disallowing even the potential for adult content, with various manga apps like Viz Media's Shonen Jump and Viz Manga apps often forced to leave gaps in their selection due to some chapters of certain series being deemed "too mature" to be offered for reading in the app. 

The moves are often prompted by pressure campaigns from organizations pushing an anti-porn legislative agenda, with responding payment networks using a "reputation risk" loophole for denying service to otherwise legal businesses. It's gotten to the point that even the US Federal Reserve has stepped in, proposing a rule that prohibits banks and payment networks from using reputational risk as a motivator for applying such strict scrutiny. Though it should be said that that particular move is more rooted in the Trump administration's desire to protect conservatives from being dropped by financial institutions for their behavior, there's a hope that such a prohibition will indirectly benefit creators of adult content, seeing as the reputation risk angle is one of the main loopholes to effectively debank creators that are making otherwise legal material.

The run of news won't stop, but this column is overlong as it is, so...

We'll close things out with a few news bits:

• Goddess of Victory: NIKKE celebrates its 3.5 anniversary on April 23rd, adding upgraded versions of Anis and Neon, who were once rather unimpressive low-rarity characters when they first launched. Anis: Star and Neon: Vision Eye join the roster alongside a limited-time idol-themed event, two more main story campaign chapters, and a host of costumes for characters like Rapi: Red Hood, Liberalio, and more. Additionally, the character Cinderella will receive a new skin, since she won the game's 4th global popularity contest.
• Square Enix opened pre-registration for Dragon Quest Smash/Grow, a new mobile roguelite RPG squarely ensconced in the "pick three things" school of quick run design. Players will pilot their party through battles and dispose of monster swarms with attacks that they upgrade as they progress through runs. The game will also support four-player co-op.
• Level-5 announced it will release iOS and Android ports of Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. Part of the developer's long-running Fantasy Life series and already available on Pc and the major consoles, Fantasy Life i blends RPG stat and job-crunching with the whimsy and freeform appeal of games like Animal Crossing, condensing the essential elements of RPGs (MMORPGs in particular) into an easy-to-approach package. Expect the ports to drop in the summer of 2026.
• Mongil: Star Dive officially launched globally on April 16th, hitting iOS, Android, and PC (via the Epic Game Store), adding a monster-collection twist to the otherwise familiar gacha RPG structure. Besides rolling for party members on the gacha as usual, Mongil players can capture monsterlings to aid them in battle, whether by boosting their stats or appearing to aid directly in combat.
• Yostar's online mahjong game Mahjong Soul launches a crossover with Sword Art Online on April 21st, adding Asuna, Kirito, Leafa, and Sinon to the selection of player skins. Of course, this is a mahjong game, so it'll all be in service of playing mahjong, though the event itself has some SAO-inspired RPG-style twists.
• Utawarerumono: Lost Frag is set to shut down on April 23, 2026, but developer AQUAPLUS has announced that the game will continue to exist in the form of Lost Frag Story Archive, an offline version of the app that's focused on keeping the story around for posterity. Other details were scarce, but AQUAPLUS noted that it's considering adding full voice acting and even possibly new stories, turning it into a sort of Utawarerumono library.
• KLab Games and Gumi have announced My Hero Academia: United Survival, a free-to-play survival-focused mobile game originally rumored as far back as 2022. It's set for a 2026 launch, but details about how it'll actually play are basically absent outside an uninformative teaser.
• Arknights: Endfield launched its version 1.2 update on April 17, titled "At the Wake of Spring." The update added Operator Zhuang Fangyi and added new areas to the Wuling and Jingyu Valley locations.
• Ultra-popular gacha city-builder Cookierun: Kingdom debuted a crossover with also-ultra-popular animated film KPop Demon Hunterson on April 8th. Players can add the members of HUNTR/X (or rather, cookie versions of Rumi, Mira, and Zoey) to their teams and participate in themed battles and minigames for cosmetics, resources, and other goodies. The event runs through May 8, 2026.

And that'll be it for me. Everything just happens so much these days! Stay safe, and I'll see you soon.