Unreleased Open-World RPG ANANTA Earns TGS Future Award, Showcasing Next-Gen Vision

This afternoon (September 28), after undergoing both user voting and review by a professional jury, ANANTA won the Japan Game Awards “Future Division”. This award is dedicated to titles that appear at TGS but have not yet been released, recognizing games with the greatest future potential and innovative value. Alongside ANANTA, a slate of heavyweight titles took home the same honor, including Resident Evil: Requiem, Soul of Mount Yōtei, Nioh 3, Like a Dragon: Kiwami 3, Hyrule Warriors: Chronicle of the Sealed War, and Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twin Dragons of Fate. In this star-studded list, ANANTA stands out as the sole title from China among the winners; being placed on equal footing with Japan’s homegrown hits shows just how highly the Japanese industry and on-site players regard its quality.

Thinking back to my earlier hands-on with ANANTA, I can’t help but smile. I remember standing at the demo station, staring at a still-unfamiliar map that filled most of the screen and spacing out. In just thirty minutes, this virtual city etched several indelible impressions in my mind.

While playing, I was constantly faced with choices: should I dig deeper into my current class’s special abilities, or explore more neighborhoods? Is it more important to finish the side quest I’ve got, or help a random NPC on the street first? The tug-of-war between curiosity and decision paralysis kept pulling me along. When staff signaled that my time was up and I took off my headset, the delight and thrills that had been building throughout the session seemed, at that moment, to be veiled by a faint mist of loss.

Honestly, thirty minutes on the show floor is nowhere near enough to grasp ANANTA in full. Sure, time limits are part of expo logistics, and a tight slice can keep players laser-focused—but it inevitably hides many of the game’s highlights and possible shortcomings. Looking back, I also felt a little sheepish about my own stubbornness. Trying to ferret out every single idea the developers tucked away leaves too little room for imagination.

After sorting out my thoughts, I’m still comfortable giving the current build of ANANTA a strong score. Even if it’s not perfect, its overall creative vision feels solid and reliable. The demo was incomplete, but seeing the quality and detail of its open-world framework firsthand was enough to convey the team’s passion and sense of responsibility—and to make me believe, “they can take this further.”

01 A good story to start with

The first half of the ANANTA demo mirrors the latest mission gameplay showcase, and it’s plenty satisfying. The high-freedom combat feels like stepping into a Jackie Chan action flick; the nuanced facial animation makes every emotional beat vivid.
“Chasing that hard—do you get overtime for this?” the protagonist snaps, half-joking, at the Black Gold gang. “At least follow traffic rules,” quips police officer Rikaya, whose well-timed joke fits her job to a tee. Banter woven into the brawls and chases, partners who keep their humor under pressure, and small-time punks who kick up trouble “so the boss can open at New Qi’s debut concert”—all of it lends this world a sitcom-ish levity.

Even with the opening and ending chopped off, the duo’s fight-back sequence holds pace through slick cinematics and dense, punchy dialogue. Frequent QTE prompts heighten involvement; nods to classic action-movie shots draw knowing smiles. It balances drama and spectacle, making the experience easygoing and fun.

Combat presentation also sets ANANTA apart from most action-centric anime titles. Rather than flashy beam-spam and over-tuned superpowers, it emphasizes physical interaction and feedback. Many “weapons” are scavenged from the environment, each with its own combo set and contextual interactions—practical and playful at once.

That said, perfecting a ten-odd-minute story slice isn’t hard for NetEase—a veteran studio—or for ANANTA, a long-gestating project with a team of 700+. The real test is carrying that high-quality storytelling and direction through dozens, hundreds, even thousands of hours of live operations. From a production standpoint, NetEase has the pipelines and QA discipline. The trickier challenge is keeping players engaged once they step off the linear story rails—helping them find ongoing fun and goals within the city. There’s no definitive answer yet, but ANANTA’s current trajectory feels like it’s closing in on one.

02 Everyday life, thoughtfully magnified

In the second half’s open-map portion, everyone’s demo naturally diverges. The flood of hands-on videos online—and their strong view counts—shows just how curious players are about ANANTA’s world structure and endgame. For me, two things stood out: the everyday interludes that play when switching characters, and the distinct flavor of each profession. Both point to the same strength—ANANTA knows how to shape characters.

In an anime-style game, characters are the non-negotiable foundation. Within a short session, without leaning on long cutscenes (Taffy has a side mission), ANANTA sketched three personalities mainly through abilities and environmental interaction.

Take the protagonist, who also moonlights as an influencer. Switch to his perspective and the camera cuts to him posing with enthusiastic fans—an easy read on his popularity in New Qi City. If you pull out the phone for a selfie, passersby who recognize him eagerly crowd the frame.

The laid-back Taffy embodies “go with the flow.” Swap to her and, unsurprisingly, she’s not working—she’s crouched curbside, teasing a dog with pebbles, mumbling “Guess I should do something proper,” before control passes to you.

Rishi, the patrol officer, is shown most often in her role as law-enforcer—handing off suspects to colleagues on the street or pulling out her baton to break up trouble while grabbing a burger.

Curious whether every switch triggers a different entrance vignette, I watched other players’ uploads. It really seems that way: personality- and context-driven variations appear richly. Taffy genuinely loves to slack—napping on benches or holing up at home with snacks. Notably, moving Taffy from her front door to the elevator and down to the lobby involved no loads. That seamlessness adds a lot to the sense of living space.

These glimpses of daily life are like puzzle pieces scattered around the city; as players stumble into them and piece them together, a vivid urban tableau emerges. And it’s not just the switch vignettes—there’s plenty of downtime fun: shopping, workouts, basketball, surfing the web, karaoke and dance battles… ANANTA doesn’t force purposeful tasks in its open world. It encourages you to pick an identity and a mode of living, to be present, and to feel your ties—to other characters and to the city. Right now, each pastime is still a sketch, but the team’s ambition for micro-scale storytelling already delivers a low-friction sense of relaxation and freedom.

03 Living a “second life”

To make play genuinely fun—and to bring out character differences and the city’s dimensionality—ANANTA casts each character as a person with a social identity. Profession-based content forms the core of the latter half of the demo.

I’ll admit, I once worried about the job system. Art imitates life, and copying real jobs isn’t hard—but that can veer into two pitfalls: too realistic, and the fun evaporates; too simplified, and players are just “quest doers” in disguise. In an open world, designing professions so they naturally mesh with the city’s logic—becoming an organic, necessary part of this virtual society—demands deeper thought and planning.

On that, producer Ash said something recently that reassured me: he hopes players can do things in the virtual city that they can’t experience in a real one. In other words, ANANTA isn’t trying to be The Sims; it aims to be a space where you can live a second life.

The demo only made Taffy (courier) and Rishi (patrol officer) playable beyond the Free Captain, but that was enough to glimpse ANANTA’s ideas. In Taffy’s side quest, the “vampire in the delivery coffin” spins a courier’s daydream out of special cargo. Recall the teaser showing puffer-balloon cargo that lets cars fly—there’s room for wildly creative takes on an ordinary job.

Rishi’s patrol life didn’t show side content and felt less expressive, but the patrol–arrest–booking loop was complete and—again—load-free. One more promising hint from previews: some NPCs respond differently to regular citizens versus patrol officers, a nice hook for deeper role-play.

As the producer said, freely diving into different characters’ stories and lives is part of the game. That’s the point of a modern urban open world: to own a second life and dream beyond reality. Finding new possibilities within familiar structures is a challenge—and an exciting opportunity.

04 Twenty years of craft

Looking at the buzz ANANTA stirred at this year’s TGS, I feel many people treated it too much like a standalone “anime game.” By category, sure—it is. But ANANTA’s place in NetEase’s strategy may matter more than chasing a “new ceiling” for the genre.

On NetEase’s Q3 earnings call last year, VP Hu Zhipeng said ANANTA isn’t a traditional anime title, but “packs many elements about the future of open-world anime games—along with a lot of our thinking about their future.” More tellingly, he voiced strong confidence in the game—“based on NetEase’s understanding of the market and observations of players over the last twenty years.”

So rather than viewing ANANTA as a one-off that rides the “anime + open world” wave, I see it as a natural extension of NetEase’s creative DNA—a small microcosm of two decades of game-making.

What NetEase-like traits show up in ANANTA, the title that lit up TGS 2025?

First, both ANANTA and NetEase share disruptive potential. NetEase’s Justice Mobile upended monetization in MMOs; ANANTA rejects the gacha/character-draw paradigm in the anime space. NetEase has left disruptive fingerprints across genres.

Second, ANANTA carries NetEase’s hallmark consistency of quality. One day they bring premium single-player polish to a wuxia open world; the next they nudge the quality ceiling for anime titles higher. Running ahead on quality across multiple genres reflects years of R&D depth.

Lastly, ANANTA follows NetEase’s versatility in game design. Across MMOs, asymmetrical PvP, UGC, turn-based tactics, and card battlers, NetEase has first-tier representatives in most popular genres. That multi-track gene permeates ANANTA, blending diverse mechanics into multi-layered play.

To be fair, ANANTA’s current “versatility” hasn’t fully reached NetEase’s ideal. There isn’t yet a single, sturdy endgame pillar to carry live operations, and some plug-in activities need polish. But that’s understandable. Despite its daunting content breadth, the project—judging by its cadence—still looks early. I’m optimistic that as the team refines it, bottling those strengths—disruption, consistency, versatility—ANANTA will become a truer culmination of NetEase’s 20 years of experience.

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Note: The Japan Game Awards’ Future Division recognizes unreleased titles exhibited at TGS, selected through on-site voting and jury review—a fit for the award described above. 

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