Dev Crams a Decade of Open-World Hits Into One Wild Game: Anime GTA Meets Spider-Man and Yakuza—with a Bunny Girl
Ananta doesn’t launch so much as detonate, flooding streams, hijacking group chats, and staking its claim as the year’s must-play.
I went into the new Ananta trailer expecting anime GTA. I came out feeling like someone fed every big open-world game from the last decade into a wood chipper and then wore whatever came out as a hat. Not mad about it, just… overwhelmed.
Quick refresher: Project Mugen is now Ananta
Revealed back in 2023 as Project Mugen, the game is now called Ananta. Publisher NetEase is still labeling it an open-world RPG, which is technically true in the way that stacking a full roast between two slices of bread is technically a sandwich.
The seven-minute trailer is a lot (and then some)
The new, extended gameplay reel is seven dense minutes of pop music, street fights, shootouts, social media parodies, and vehicular chaos. GTA is still the clearest touchstone, but it keeps mutating into other games mid-scene.
- Character roster: You can swap between agents on the fly by pulling up your phone. The trailer shows a 'bunny girl' named Taffy and a 'dragon girl' named Richie. At one point Richie arrests a woman on the street; in another, she chases a couple of hoodlums through a park with another cop.
- No gacha characters: Despite long-running assumptions, Famitsu reports the agents will not be distributed via a gacha system. Microtransactions are aimed at customization items only.
- Main guy: The lead is introduced as a captain from the ACD task force. He sneaks through vents, spies on targets, and blitzes across the city in sports cars and motorbikes. He also swings around on these inky-black tentacles like it is perfectly normal to have Spider-Man/Venom powers.
- Combat buffet: Fistfights land with Yakuza-style swagger, complete with improvised weapon beats like turning a tennis racket into law-and-order. When subtlety fails, he whips out a rocket launcher, machine gun, grenades, or even a flamethrower.
- POV roulette: There is first-person driving, then a full-on web-swinging sequence with familiar-looking dives and ziplines, and then a cut to a sniper perched in a helicopter surgically removing the enemies threatening our main guy. The camera is constantly jumping perspectives.
- Big toy moment: An enormous robot monster shows up, and suddenly you are third-person-driving a firetruck. Sure, why not.
- GTA DNA: Outside of the phone-based character switching, the clothes shop gag is the most obvious nod.
Cool, but how does it actually play?
That is the lingering question. Back in October 2023, the team fielded interviews to explain how all these systems connect, and some answers helped. After this trailer, I have even more questions. The montage is a firehose; I feel like I learned a lot about what you can do, and almost nothing about what it feels like to do it.
'Why is this normal-looking guy basically Spider-Man? And if Spider-Man is on the menu, why would I pick anyone else? Unless… dragon girl.'
Platforms, timing, the basics
Ananta is coming to PC, PS5, and mobile. Pre-registration is open.
Inside baseball, adjacent but too wild not to mention
In other GTA-adjacent weirdness: GTA 5's Trevor actor says he feels 'nothing inside' for GTA 6 and tells gamers to go read Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' while Franklin's actor fires back with 'f*** that book.' Not directly related to Ananta, just the kind of industry sidebar that makes you blink twice.