Project Mugen, now renamed Ananta, came across as an anime spin on Grand Theft Auto when it was revealed in 2023. After seeing its new and extended gameplay trailer, I don't think anime GTA is really doing it justice. This looks like every big open-world game from the past decade was thrown in a blender, poured onto a sheet tray, dehydrated in an oven, and then worn as a leathery mask.
In seven heady minutes of pop music, street brawls, shootouts, vehicular violence, and social media parodies, Ananta peels back layer after layer to reveal bits and pieces of countless open-world games that have been slipped into it like spliced DNA. Publisher NetEase calls it an open-world RPG, and I guess that's technically accurate, but only in the sense that an entire pot roast with two pieces of bread on opposite sides is technically a sandwich.
GTA is still probably the biggest touchstone. Our hero – one of many characters who apparently will not be distributed by a long-presumed gacha system, according to Famitsu, which reports microtransactions for customization items only – skulks through air vents, spies on operation targets, and tears through a city on sports cars and motorbikes.
At one point, he pulls out his phone to have the game jump over to other agents – the most obvious GTA overlap outside the clothes shop – which include a bunny girl named Taffy and a dragon girl named Richie. The dragon girl arrests a woman on the street, and in another shot chases some apparent hoodlums through a park alongside another cop. One perspective shift takes us to a helicopter sniper's nest as she picks off the agents threatening our main hero.
In several connecting shots, our boy, a captain "from the ACD task force," swings through the city on black tentacles that are barely remarked on, as if it's the most normal thing in the world to have Spider-Man or Venom powers. In combat, he pummels dudes Yakuza style with a mix of fists and props, dishing out tennis racket justice. Sometimes he pulls out an RPG, a machine gun, a grenade, or a flamethrower.
There's a first-person driving section, an extended web-swinging bit complete with the same sort of diving and zipline animations seen in Marvel's Spider-Man, and then an enormous robot monster appears and suddenly we're driving a firetruck from third-person. It is a whirlwind of a trailer, and somehow I feel like I've learned a lot about the gameplay while still having no idea how it will feel to play this game or if all these features actually come together, like trying to drink from a firehose.
In October 2023, we spoke to the devs of Ananta to ask how the heck this game plays, because far-reaching, promising, yet unclear features have been a recurring theme with its trailers. We got some useful answers at the time, but at this point I would like to ask a few more questions.
Here's one: why is this normal-looking guy just Spider-Man? And why would I play as anyone who isn't Spider-Man when Spider-Man is an option? Because they're a dragon girl? I mean, maybe?
Here's one question I can answer: Ananta is coming to PC, PS5, and mobile. Pre-registration is open here.
