The most unhinged anime character creator of all time is back with even more eyebrows, color gradients, and hair layers in Code Vein 2

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"Down to the last detail"

Code Vein 2
(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

For anyone like me, who could spend hours inside a character creator just determining which set of 20 eyelashes are the most elegantly arranged, stand back. Keep your guard up, find a shield…or just clear your calendar. Once Code Vein 2 comes out on January 30th, 2026, a monstrous new character creator will be unleashed according to a new gameplay presentation from Bandai Namco.

I know I shouldn't be so eager to hand over even more afternoons of my life to yet another pretty lady machine, but I can't help myself. The PlayStation State of Play September 2025 yesterday showed how luxuriously gothic Code Vein 2 looks in a release date trailer, and I got to see even more of its vampiric world up-close at this year's Summer Game Fest, so can you blame a girl for being excited?

CODE VEIN II - Gameplay Presentation - YouTube CODE VEIN II - Gameplay Presentation - YouTube
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"I think there's something that really attracts us to this idea of a vampire as a motif or backdrop for character and storytelling," series producer Keita Iizuka told me through an interpreter at Summer Game Fest, "because they're extremely powerful and very strong. Yet, they have very clear weaknesses. I think everyone kind of universally understands they're not invincible."

It's fitting, then, that Bandai Namco's video shows off character creator presets that look rigorously ill, but also deadly. Bandai consumer insights analyst Dan Tack demonstrates how you can choose any one of these pale, siren-eyed templates or dive into an ocean of fiddly edits.

"You can create your character down to the last detail," Tack says. "Eyes, hair, scars – all kinds of different things that you can tweak and design to your exact specifications." There's a range of skin tones from the iciest white to the most velvety brown. There's a slider for where a curl begins in your hair. There's even an advanced editing option for the glossiness of your eyeballs, God help us.

Flanked by The Duskbloods and The Blood of Dawnwalker, Code Vein 2 swoops into the vampire game renaissance by "improving" the lovably janky Soulslike RPG we got 6 years ago.

Ashley Bardhan
Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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