Every big studio eventually gets bored of the thing that made it rich. HoYoverse made a fortune on anime gacha RPGs with open worlds you sprint through between banner pulls. Nodusfall, shown hands-on at Gamescom, is being pitched as “Elden Ring meets Monster Hunter,” which is the kind of comparison a marketing deck writes and a preview writer then spends 1,500 words dismantling.
That’s roughly what happened. Polygon’s takeaway was that the closest reference point is Final Fantasy 16: big cinematic boss fights, spectacle over survival, the camera doing a lot of work. PC Gamer went further and said it isn’t really any of the three games in the pitch, and isn’t a typical HoYoverse game either. Two outlets, two different negative comparisons, converging on the same shape.
The elevator pitch is doing damage
When a game gets sold on borrowed nouns, the nouns set expectations the game then has to fight. “Monster Hunter” implies preparation, gear crunch, a slow economy of parts and upgrades. “Elden Ring” implies punishment and an open world that doesn’t care about you. If the actual game is a boss-rush action title where fights are set-piece encounters and the pleasure is in the choreography, then both comparisons hand players the wrong controller before they’ve touched it.
FF16 is the more useful pointer, and it’s an interesting one to land on, because FF16 was itself divisive for exactly this trade. It swapped party-based RPG systems for a single character and enormous scripted spectacle. Some people loved it. Some people found it thin under the fireworks.
Free-to-play is the part worth watching
Nodusfall is free-to-play, and that’s where the design pressure actually lives. Boss-rush games run on repetition. You fight the thing, you learn the thing, you kill the thing faster. Monster Hunter monetizes that loop with expansions. Elden Ring monetizes it once, at the till. A free-to-play boss hunter has to decide what it sells you in between the fights, and every answer to that question bends the combat around it.
HoYoverse knows how to build that machinery better than almost anyone. It also has a strong house style, and both previews are describing a game that doesn’t feel like it. No large open world to wander. A tone that reads less anime-adjacent than the studio’s usual output. Whether that’s a genuine pivot or just the part of the game that shows well in a 40-minute demo is not something a Gamescom booth can answer.
What a demo can’t tell you
Preview builds are curated to show the best fight. The stuff that decides whether an action game has legs, the moveset depth at hour 30, whether the difficulty curve holds, whether the monetization pinches, none of it is visible yet.
What we do know: HoYoverse is shipping an action game with no open world, no party swapping, and a comparison set its own previewers keep rejecting. That’s already the most interesting thing the studio has done since Genshin.