Chinese publisher NetEase rolled out a brand-new gameplay trailer for their upcoming “urban open-world RPG” ANANTA just in time for Tokyo Game Show 2025, and visitors of the event got to try out the game for the first time. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the chance to try out the game ourselves due to a tight schedule and the fact that there was a two-hour long queue for playing the demo, but many Japanese fans that managed to get their hands on it shared their impressions of the game on X.
While some have quite high expectations for the game, seeing that it combines a wide variety of genres in a visually appealing open-world package, others, on the other hand, feel uncertain about possible issues that could arise due to its gameplay looking and feeling pretty similar to existing major franchises.
Yanagi, a Japanese YouTuber recently shared their impression of NetEase’s upcoming game:
“Graphics: peak
Exploration: Spiderman
Battles: Yakuza
Story: Yakuza
Vibes: GTA
Conclusion: It’s a SpiderGTAYakuza”
Overall, many users have praised the smooth graphics and level of freedom ANANTA allows in its urban open-world setting. Exploration with Captain, one of the main protagonists, lets you zoom through an open cityscape Spiderman-style, while the story snippet promises crime and intrigue from the perspective of multiple characters, though with a sprinkle of sci-fi here and there. Having beat-em-up sections that look a lot like those from Like a Dragon games, with an overall “anime GTA” feel, it seems that a lot of Japanese gamers have recognized precisely their favorite games in ANANTA. However, while this mixture of genres and ‘references’ may be promising of a GOTY for some gamers, others don’t seem to be too excited by it – for exactly the same reasons.
With plagiarism and patent infringement being a timely topic in the industry, it makes sense that many players would be anxious about ANANTA possibly getting a bad end amidst some ‘references’ being more obvious than others. “I don’t want to say anything about plagiarism, but I feel like they’re going to get sued and change the [Spiderman-like] mechanics midway through,” a user commented. On the flip side, some users just seem genuinely unimpressed with the not-so-original gameplay. Another X user noted: “For real, this game screams ‘All of our characters, environments and mechanics that we don’t have a patent for are just a pastiche of rip-offs.’ I feel like more overseas studios should be patenting their works in order to protect their IPs.”
One thing to keep in mind (which has been brought up as a counterargument to the plagiarism claims) is that NetEase, the developer of ANANTA is also developing and publishing Marvel Rivals in collaboration with Marvel Games. As the developing studio is working hand-in-hand with the licensing brand responsible for all the Spiderman games, it wouldn’t be surprising that Marvel has already been informed about the Spidey-like mechanics that have been attracting attention ever since the gameplay trailer dropped.
On a related note, NetEase also recently revealed that – contrary to what gamers expected – ANANTA will not feature character gacha and will instead base its monetization model mainly on cosmetics – clothes, vehicles, interior design etc. This decision has been met with a lot of praise, and many were surprised that the free-to-play game is seemingly not going to down the gacha or pay-to -in route. However, some are still skeptical about it, fearing that the lack of a stable monetization system could do more damage than good to ANANTA in the long run, as it already seems to have limited its player base (compared to the average free-to-play title) due do its high PC requirements.
“Something I’m personally worried about is whether the game will actually be profitable without any gacha and with such high spec requirements. They’re narrowing down their player base only to people who have high-spec PCs, so if the game doesn’t completely dominate the market, I fear their monetization model is not going to work,” a user commented on X.
