Tower of Fantasy dev's new GTA style anime game ditches divisive gacha feature

Hotta Studio's upcoming GTA-meets-anime gacha game, Neverness to Everness, revealed during a recent livestream that the much maligned but ubiquitous 50/50 system won't be included in its limited-time character banners. This means that once you pull an S-Class character from a banner - the highest rank in the game - you are guaranteed to get the character featured on that banner. With the additional guarantee of getting an S-Class character within 90 pulls, this overhaul basically means your savings, and spending, are halved when compared to other popular gachas like Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves.

Weapon banners are another unpopular inclusion in gacha games, but it seems like Neverness to Everness won't feature them. Instead, as sourced from the livestream's English subtitles, "S-Class and most A-Class Arcs will be obtained directly through various game modes, or purchased with special currency. This currency is also abundantly produced through gameplay so everyone can easily get it." A developer on the livestream further clarifies that "You can obtain most of high-rarity Arcs just by playing."

No more getting jump-scared by standard rank characters who wouldn't know meta if it slapped them in the face? No more agonising on whether you should spend your currency on character or weapon pulls? Sounds too good to be true. But perhaps developer Hotta Studio is chucking the villainous 50/50 and streamlining how you get weapons to win back some good faith after their previous game, Tower of Fantasy, released in 2021 to an almost universal panning.

Tower of Fantasy was bigged up by some in the gacha community as the first real "Genshin Impact killer," but instead, it turned out to be more of a janky MMORPG take on Genshin's anime open-world, with pay-to-win woes, lots of technical issues, and cheap visuals. But despite having priors in the overhyped department, Hotta Studio's Neverness to Everness looks (dare I say it?) actually quite good.

While it's obviously taken more inspiration from Genshin Impact's formula this time around, Neverness to Everness features a huge upgrade to its anime visuals when compared to Tower of Fantasy, and its fresh city setting also allows for gameplay that you're more likely to see in GTA than gachas: carjacking, a wanted system, and owning property, to name a few.

If you're interested in checking out Neverness to Everness to see how 'anime GTA' works for yourself, then you can sign-up for its first global beta test right now. This test runs from Thursday July 3 to Wednesday July 16, and is the first time Neverness to Everness will be playable in English.

However, if you want to satisfy that gacha craving while waiting to get in to Neverness to Everness' beta, then take a look through our picks for the best anime games on PC right now, or maybe pivot to something a little kinder to your wallet and give one of the best RPGs a try instead.

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