Modes, Menus and How You Play
This page is deliberately not a keybind list. Keybinds differ by platform, are revised by patches, and are displayed in-game — printing a table of them is how a guide becomes wrong without anyone noticing. What follows is the layer above that: the systems those keys operate.
The two modes you will switch between constantly
Aniimo gives you a single combat system with two ways of standing in it:
Command Mode — you stay on the field as the Pathfinder. You direct your creatures, and you have your own trainer skills, including heals, revives and damage. You are safer at range and you can contribute without exposing a creature.
Twine Mode — you merge into an Aniimo and control its movement, attacks and Ultimate directly. This is where precise dodging lives.
The trade is real, not cosmetic. In Command Mode your creatures do not dodge area attacks for themselves, so a boss fight spent entirely in Command Mode is a boss fight you are taking on the chin. Most experienced play is a swap between the two mid-fight: Command for distance and utility, Twine when a specific attack needs to be dodged or a specific tool is needed right now.
Practice the swap in early encounters rather than picking a favourite. Players who live in one mode hit a wall that has nothing to do with their roster.
The four-slot lock
Your field team is four Aniimo, and it locks when the encounter starts. You are carrying your full storage, but you are not choosing from it mid-fight.
That makes the pre-fight screen the most important screen in the game. Two things to check:
- Role coverage — at least one Break, and some sustain.
- Element coverage — more than one, and ideally one that answers what you expect to meet.
The combat loop
Strip away the effects and the loop is:
- Drain the Break meter. Yellow, on the target. Everything else is waiting.
- Stun window opens. Damage lands properly here and only here.
- Convert it. Ultimates, combos, your damage dealer’s whole kit.
- Manage energy. Skills cost energy. Some creatures restore it through basic attacks, some through cheap actions, some through team effects. Read your creature’s text — there is no shared rotation across the roster.
Note that energy recovery is a different job from healing. A creature that keeps your skills firing and a creature that restores your health solve different problems, and the roster lists them as different roles (Regen and Healer).
Platform notes
- Controller support is first-class on PC, not bolted on — it is listed as full controller support on the store page.
- Mobile and gamepad controls were revised at launch, per the developer’s own launch notes. If you played an earlier test, the layout has changed.
- Xbox Cloud Gaming is a launch platform, so streaming on a supported device is an option rather than a workaround.
The screens worth knowing early
- The collection index. Your progress against the roster, and where you check what you are missing. It is also the source of the numbering used throughout this wiki.
- The in-game effectiveness panel. Shown when you are meeting something unfamiliar. Trust it over any chart from another game, including ours — ours is transcribed from it, but it is transcribed from an earlier build.
- The Homeland assignment screen. Where you put creatures to work. Covered in detail under homeland jobs.
What this page will not do
It will not print a keybind table, and it will not describe a settings menu layout that a patch can move. If a control question is not answered by the systems above, the in-game prompt is the authoritative source — and that is true of every guide, including this one.