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Roco Kingdom has been a massive franchise in China for over a decade now. Originally a browser game, it expanded into film and TV adaptation before receiving a full 3D game earlier in 2026. Now, for the first time, it’s heading westward and a localized English version of the most recent game is currently in closed beta.
Set in the magical world of Carosia, Roco Kingdom places you in the shoes of a rookie magic student whose goal is to capture and train up creatures known as jinies. Meanwhile, a looming windstorm appears to be bringing a dark shadow to the land and causing jinies to become aggressive. It’s a sprawling open world game full of adorable creatures to capture and secrets to uncover.
After writing possibly the most negative review of Aniimo on Metacritic (and I stand by it), I found jumping into Roco Kingdom an interesting experience. The two games are similar in many ways, both being creature collector open worlds from Chinese developers with similar gameplay structures, but Roco Kingdom is simply better in almost every aspect.
At the risk of turning this into an article comparing the two, I’ll keep the big stuff brief. Roco Kingdom seems to make better use of its magical academy premise to give the player staggered objectives in between story episodes. The creature designs are scrappier and more appealing. Best of all, despite this being a closed beta and Aniimo being a full release, the worst bugs I encountered in Roco Kingdom were the ones I could capture and train. Aniimo attempted to cook my CPU, Roco Kingdom did not. It’s not hard to see which I prefer here, even with this early build.
To progress through the game, you are given assignments by your instructors, which take the form of objectives to fulfil in the open world. These can include finding specific landmarks, activating specific checkpoints or fighting powerful Alpha Jinies. These objectives typically fan out from the academy outpost that acts as the game’s hub area, allowing you to gradually discover more of the world and find creatures of increasingly higher levels.
Occasionally, a resident Archmage will appear, and these masters of jini magic will need your help with a more complex mission. These missions typically advance the main story, as they contribute to the investigation into the mystery windstorm and the corrupted jinis it creates. These take place between batches of assignments so as the game flips between the two you gradually learn more about the world in two separate ways in a structure that feels a lot more natural than whatever Aniimo thought it was doing.
Gameplay within this open world is relatively simple. As you wander around, you’ll find jinis running around the place. You use pods to capture them, whether it’s through weakening them in battle or simply sneaking up on them. Battles are turn-based, so bumping into jinis transfers you to a battle screen where fights play out much like an average Pokemon game, with a squad of creatures to switch between. Battles are largely about targeting weaknesses and using the right jinis for different opponents, with elemental types that are largely just the list from Pokemon fed through a thesaurus (no Normal types here, we only have Common, etc.).
It’s nothing particularly complex on the surface, although there is certainly a bunch of hidden and passive abilities that suggest a hidden complexity (again, much like Pokemon before it). I didn’t really get to dive into it too much in my relatively short time with the beta, but I feel genre obsessives will be all over it. There is also some additional magic abilities you have in the field, but these mostly come into play when fighting the corrupted jinis.
The jini designs are pretty adorable too. In typical monster catcher fashion, you’re initially presented with three choices of partner (in the standard grass-fire-water trifecta, of course) and all of them were cuties. I went with Meevy, a little grass cat, as my starter, as he had scrappy Meowth energy, but the first catch after this was a delightfully goofy duck. It’s a whole parade of weird lil guys and I loved basically every single one. Also, this world has magical owls that seemingly aren’t jinis but wise instructor types, with your guide through much of the game being Mr Hoolu, whose pompous faux-British accent is endlessly charming.
That’s really my early impression of Roco Kingdom: charming. It’s fairly simple in its structure and presentation, but that’s all it really needs. The world is vast and full of wonder, the creatures are adorable and the gameplay mechanics are simple with hidden depths. Even in its current form, it’s gearing up to be a game that looks set to take over your life.
Roco Kingdom is currently in development for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and mobile platforms.
