Position in the Honkai Series
Honkai: Nexus Anima is the fifth game in the Honkai series, following Honkai Impact 3rd (2016), its PC version (2019), Honkai: Star Rail (2023), and earlier entries. It represents HoYoverse's most explicit attempt to connect the Honkai games through shared characters and lore rather than keeping them as separate experiences that merely share a brand name.
Shared Characters
Kiana Kaslana (from Honkai Impact 3rd)
Kiana appears in Nexus Anima as a Planestrider: a dimensional traveler who addresses collapsed Aspects across the Planes. The Chinese-language description suggests this is the same Kiana from Honkai Impact 3rd, not a variant. She has crossed into the dimension where Nexus Anima takes place, possibly as a continuation of the interdimensional direction her character took in HI3's later chapters. She works on behalf of the Committee for a Joyful Iia, dealing with an Aspect Fracture near the town.
Blade (From Honkai: Star Rail)
Blade appears as the 22nd Novarch of Strength, ruling the Plane called The Peak, and is searching for the missing 11th Sovereign, whose sworn guardian he was before the Sundering. He is a Phoenixbreaker Novarch. The official character summary gives his title, his Plane, and the search; it does not describe him as a variant or an alternate version, and this wiki does not assume either way.
The Missing 11th Sovereign
Blade's search is for the 11th Sovereign, who held the paired Aspects of Strength and Weakness in the Old World and vanished during the the Sundering. Her disappearance collapsed the faction he belonged to, and finding her is what drives him. The official character summary states only that he is searching for the whereabouts of the missing 11th Sovereign; it does not name her.
Community references that track in-game text from the closed-beta builds give her name as Kafka and note that the name is shared with a character from another title in the series. HoYoverse has published no statement confirming that identification, so this wiki records it as reported rather than confirmed, and does not carry over anything about that character from the other game. Whether the two are the same person, or share only a name, is unresolved.
Shared Lore Concepts
The multiverse structure in Nexus Anima shares DNA with both Honkai Impact 3rd and Honkai: Star Rail. HI3 explored alternate timelines and dimensional travel extensively. Star Rail is built around universe-hopping via the Astral Express. Nexus Anima's 81 Planes are another expression of the same multiversal framework.
The word "Honkai" itself appears in Nexus Anima as an alternate name for the Sundering. In HI3, Honkai is a destructive force threatening civilization. In Star Rail, Stellaron (related to Honkai energy) causes chaos across worlds. In Nexus Anima, "the Honkai" is the event that shattered the Nexus and created the current world.
The Nexus Point
The word "Nexus" in the title refers to the energy network destroyed in the Sundering. Both Kiana and Blade were shown together in the first teaser in May 2025, and both appear here in their established forms rather than as alternate versions, which is what makes the crossover explicit rather than cosmetic. How far the shared continuity extends has not been stated, and this wiki treats anything not confirmed for this game as belonging to the other titles.