You cannot mess up your starter choice. Aniimo opens by making you pick between Helion and Lunara, and both stay usable long-term – guides agree it’s worth leveling up whichever one you pick, not shelving it out of regret. The choice shapes what you start with, not where you end up in Aniimo.
- Both starters are DPS
- The choice isn’t permanent – it’s a starting point, not a ceiling
- One community ranking puts Lunara ahead; others don’t compare them the same way at all
- Pick based on playstyle, not an online chart
Short answer: pick whichever one you enjoy
Helion and Lunara fill the same role in the game – both are DPS, attackers with the highest damage output on your team. According to available guides, both are worth developing regardless of which one you picked at the start, so this isn’t a “strong start versus weak start” decision. It’s about which one you’ll enjoy playing more.
If you’re the type who wants certainty that you “didn’t choose wrong,” relax right now: either pick gets you a working start. The differences that do exist are more shading than chasm, and we break them down below.
Whichever you pick, the first creature you catch is one you’ll be able to fuse with through how Twining works – your starter is about which fighter joins your team, Twining is about how you move and fight with creatures in general. They’re separate systems, and your starter doesn’t limit the second one at all.
Helion
Helion is one of Aniimo’s two starting DPS creatures. Community rankings describe him as a safe, self-sufficient pick with no major weaknesses, but also without a standout defining mechanic – a starter that never lets you down, but also never surprises you.
Helion’s specific element, evolution line and individual abilities haven’t been confirmed reliably enough for us to state them here as fact – until they are, we won’t make them up. What is clear: as a DPS, he’ll perform best against a target already in a BREAK state, the same as any other DPS on your team.
Lunara
Lunara is the second starting DPS. According to one community ranking, she’s the more complete, self-sufficient attacker of the two – dealing damage while also being able to buff and partially sustain herself, an attacker that can look after itself without outside support.
As with Helion, her specific element, evolution line and exact abilities haven’t been confirmed by two independent sources, so you won’t find them stated here as fact. We’re keeping the same structure as Helion’s section deliberately – neither one gets favored here.
What tier lists say, and why they disagree
This is where it’s easy to get lost if you read more than one source at once. One respected community ranking places Lunara a tier above Helion. That sounds like a clear answer – except other rankings use an entirely different scale and a different number of rated roles, so the results don’t compare like for like.
On top of that, there’s a second apparent contradiction: some guides advise “level up whichever one you picked, it’s worth it regardless,” while a ranking still gives one of them a higher grade. Both can be true at once – a tier ranking evaluates a creature’s late-game ceiling, while beginner advice evaluates how useful a starter is in your first few hours. That’s a different question, even if it looks like disagreement at first glance.
| What the ranking measures | Roles it separates | Where it places the starters |
|---|---|---|
| A-through-D-style scale and beyond | five roles rated separately | Lunara one tier above Helion |
| Scale with no role split | doesn’t separate by role | recommends developing both equally |
| A separate scale, three roles only | three roles | doesn’t rate starters on their own |
We’re deliberately leaving out specific creature names, damage numbers, or any other starting heroes here – the only certain pair among starters is Helion and Lunara, and anything beyond that would be a claim without two-source support.
Practically, that means one thing: before you take any ranking you find online at face value, check what scale and how many roles it’s actually using. Without that, you’re comparing two numbers that have nothing to do with each other, and you can easily reach the opposite conclusion from someone looking at a different ranking with the same underlying data.
How this same split in scales plays out across the wider creature roster, not just the starters, is covered in our tier list.
What the choice actually changes (and what it doesn’t)
Your team in Aniimo has four slots and there are five roles, so your starter is just one piece of the puzzle, not the whole game. Even if one starter turned out to be slightly stronger than the other, it would never be the difference that decides your whole playthrough – the other three slots, and how you fill them, carry more weight.
That ties into shared energy (EP) too: the whole team draws from one pool of six orbs, so even a strong starter hits a ceiling if the rest of the team isn’t refilling that energy fast enough. Two DPS side by side (say, Helion plus another attacker) aren’t automatically twice as good a team – for how to build the rest of the roles around your starter, see our article on team building.
Whether you can obtain the other starter later in the game is one of the questions readers ask most, and we haven’t been able to reliably confirm the answer from official sources. Until that’s confirmed, plan on your pick staying the only starter you’ll have.
Already picked and having second thoughts?
If you’ve already chosen and you’re now second-guessing yourself, don’t do anything rash. Your starter stays functional for the entire game and nothing forces you to replace it. Whether and to what extent specific creature upgrades can be reset isn’t something we can confirm reliably yet, so we won’t guess here – but generally speaking, an earlier starter decision isn’t what should worry you most.
If what’s actually bothering you is that your starter isn’t performing the way you expected in combat, look at the rest of your team around it before swapping anything. Your starter is DPS, and DPS performs best against a target already in a BREAK state – a missing BREAK role on the team can make any attacker look disappointing, not just your starter.
Your starter is one of four team slots. The other three, and how you build them, have more impact on your progress than whether you picked Helion or Lunara at the start.
FAQ
Both are DPS and both stay usable long-term. One community ranking gives Lunara a tier advantage, but other rankings use a different scale, so it isn’t a clear-cut fact about the game.
We haven’t been able to reliably confirm an exact answer from available sources. Either way, your starter remains functional for the whole game even if swapping isn’t possible.
This hasn’t been reliably confirmed from official sources. Until it is, plan on sticking with the starter you chose at the beginning.
The choice itself is, but it doesn’t lock you out of anything else. Your starter is one of four team slots, not the whole game, and both remain usable in later stages.
The specific elements of both starters haven’t been confirmed by two independent sources, so we aren’t stating them here as fact – until that’s verified, we’d rather not guess.