With a successful wrap-up of this year’s Tokyo Game Show, Naked Rain Studio and NetEase’s chaotic open-world urban RPG ANANTA was crowned a winner of the Japan Game Awards 2025 Future Division – a category dedicated to gamers’ most anticipated releases. And it’s not that big of a surprise – the game built up quite the hype ever since its gameplay trailer was released, and it sounds like those who played the demo during TGS were pretty impressed overall (save for some concerned voices).
For many, the most surprising detail about ANANTA is the fact that it won’t be featuring character gacha – contrary to what was expected given that it’s a free-to-play title with anime visuals on par with gacha giants like Genshin Impact. In an interview with Denfaminicogamer, Ash, the producer of ANANTA, talked about his team’s decision to forgo a gacha monetization model.
“We developed this game with the core gameplay in mind being experiencing the life of a character. In the real world, you can experience only one life, but in ANANTA, you get to experience as many different lives as there are characters,” Ash explained. “(…) We want the player to be able to choose between characters freely and have fun experiencing many different lives. That’s why we decided to make the characters obtainable through means that are not gacha.”
As implied, ANANTA will have story-based segments, with each of the characters having a unique role and life in the city to be experienced. Even outside of the “main stories,” the player will get to freely hang out around the city and enjoy its chaos at their own pace, switching between different characters POVs as they like. It seems the developers anticipated that a gacha system would stand in the way of the playstyle they envisioned.
But does no character gacha mean all other content will be paywalled? – Well, not exactly. The producer emphasizes that “the base gameplay of ANANTA will be free-to-play,” and that the team’s current plans for monetization include only paid skins for characters and special limited-time content. “Aside from character skins, other customizable elements include house makeovers and vehicles – but basically, those will be purchasable using in-game currency. However, we are planning to release limited-time event outfits and other special stuff as paid content,” Ash detailed.
On a related topic, the demo showcased at Tokyo Game Show allowed players to experience the lives of only three characters – Captain, Taffy and Richie. However, Ash confirms that ANANTA will almost certainly be welcoming more new characters in the future. So far, we only know about Seymour from his profile on the game’s official website, but it still might take some time until we get to know additional members of the cast. As Ash explains: “We’re still haven’t fleshed out the specifics of how we’re going to expand the character roster, but we’re thinking of adding more characters based on the existing professions in the city.” He suggests that the development team will be listening to player feedback, as their goal is to create “characters that bring a fresh experience for the players.”
ANANTA is currently in development for PC (Steam), PS5, iOS and Android. Pre-registrations are open via the official homepage.
