We went hands-on with Ananta at Gamescom, and spoke to some of the team at NetEase, and got an early look at the game's wild variety.
Ananta is a wild experience. While it might look like a particularly gorgeous anime gacha game at first glance, it's much more than that. I went hands-on with it at Gamescom, and I did so many different things during my 45 minutes with it.
I asked Link, Ananta's Global Publishing Lead, and Rain, Ananta's International Marketing Lead, about what exactly the game's title means. "It's named from Sanskrit. It means unlimited possibilities," they told me. And having played it, that name makes a lot of sense.
I visited two of the game's locations. One was a massive New York-inspired city, and the other was a small country town. The visual style was completely different, as was how you get around and what you do. The small town featured NPCs going about their quiet daily lives, and I was able to zip about on a motorbike to take on some tasks for the locals. It was slower, more traditional anime RPG stuff.
In the city, though, things went at breakneck speed. Intense hand-to-hand combat, impressively fluid traversal that I'll get to in more detail later, and cinematic quick time events.
At one point, I was in a car with a couple of the protagonist's friends, hurtling through the huge modern city while being chased by bad guys. Between short cutscenes and quick time events, I used my assault rifle to shoot the pursuers from their cars. Within minutes, I was back on my feet, fighting a group of enemies with my Venom-style extendable arms.
That wasn't my only means of attack, though; this isn't a Devil May Cry game. While jumping around and punching people felt great, I could still pull out my guns and blast them away that way. Netease hasn't taken this unlimited possibilities attitude lightly.
The single most impressive part of Ananta is the traversal in the city. You can swing between buildings, climb up walls, and launch yourself off grapple points. There's no way to downplay it, it feels just like getting around New York and Queens in Insomniac's Spider-Man games. It's fast, fluid, satisfying, and even features a lot of the quirks of the PlayStation games. The way your character twists and turns as you reach the apex of a swing, or rolls as they hit the ground, feels very alter-ego Peter Parker, and the developers have done an incredible job of making it work in their world.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pcgamesn.com/ananta/unlimited-possibilities-gamescom
