BODY: Some crossovers fade after a season or two. Then there's "Knives Out" and "Evangelion," now on their eighth round together — a partnership durable enough to have its own institutional memory.
NetEase Games launched the latest event on July 4, 2026, in its long-running battle royale "Knives Out" (known in Japan as Kōya Kōdō). The centerpiece is a "Hall of Fame"-class collaboration item built around the berserk, awakened Evangelion Unit-01 — the terrifying, feral form the mecha takes in Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, the second film in the Rebuild tetralogy.
That choice of source material is telling. The awakened Unit-01 is one of the most iconic images in the entire franchise: the moment the machine sheds its restraints, roars, and stops looking like a weapon and starts looking like a god. Anchoring a premium in-game item to that scene signals NetEase is aiming squarely at hardcore fans, not casual dabblers.
Alongside the flagship item, the event dishes out a spread of additional rewards — cosmetics, in-game currency, and login bonuses typical of these limited-time tie-ins. Details on acquisition rates and event duration are laid out in the original 4Gamer coverage.
The insider take
From Tokyo, the striking thing isn't the collaboration itself — it's the number eight. Evangelion tie-ins are a genre unto themselves here, plastered across everything from bullet trains to convenience-store coffee. But eight rounds with a single mobile title reflects how reliably "Knives Out" monetizes in Japan, where it remains a quietly massive earner years after Western attention drifted elsewhere. NetEase has effectively turned Eva nostalgia into recurring revenue, and the fanbase keeps showing up. Expect a ninth.
Originally reported by 4Gamer.net − 最新記事 (Japanese).