Neverness to Everness Preview: The Anime GTA We’ve Actually Been Waiting For

30 hours in the closed beta. Here’s what to expect.

‘Anime-style GTA’ is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot lately, but Neverness to Everness — NTE for short — might actually earn it. Developed for a global audience and already sitting at over 20 million pre-registrations, it’s one of the most anticipated gacha titles in years. Set in a sprawling Asian metropolis full of anomalies, supernatural threats, and an absurd amount of things to do, it blends open-world exploration with stylish action combat and a surprisingly deep side-activity suite. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys games that reward curiosity and keep pulling you in different directions — much like browsing Hidden Jack for something new to try — NTE is likely to feel right at home.

I spent 30 hours in the closed beta, which offers a surprising amount of content for a pre-release build. Enough, in fact, to get a clear sense of what NTE is, what it does well, and where it still has work to do. The short version: it’s impressive, occasionally rough around the edges, and very close to ready.

New Helios: A City Worth Getting Lost In

The game drops you into New Helios, a dense Asian metropolis regularly disrupted by anomalies — supernatural rifts that spill monsters into the streets and terrorize ordinary citizens. You play as an esper, a person with abilities strong enough to fight them. The Anomaly Control Bureau notices, recruits you, and points you toward the Ebon jewellery shop — a front for a team of anomaly hunters who become your base of operations. Standard setup, confidently executed.

The city itself is the real draw. After a few introductory missions, you’re handed a scooter and set loose. The map is large, layered, and dense with things to find — fishing spots with unique catches to fill a dedicated guide, side quests that rival the main story in quality, anomalies offering passive bonuses, races, arenas, and collectibles tucked into buildings you’d never enter if you weren’t paying attention. Characters can run on walls and scale skyscrapers freely, and a glider lets you float between rooftops. Exploring New Helios rarely gets old.

Cars are available from a dealership, with multiple brands offering different handling, speed, and price points. The physics won’t challenge Gran Turismo, but there’s a damage system, an interior camera view, and enough responsiveness to make driving around the city genuinely enjoyable. The radio helps — some tracks are good enough that you’ll circle the block rather than park.

Story and Characters: Style Over Substance

The main narrative is familiar ground: amnesiac protagonist, city under threat, supernatural bureau, escalating danger. NTE doesn’t reinvent anything here, and it doesn’t try to. What it does instead is dress the story in some of the most visually extravagant cutscenes in the genre. Think Zenless Zone Zero’s animated sequences, then add more effects, more color, more transitions. The screen splits into panels, 3D characters flip into 2D hand-drawn versions mid-scene, and individual moments shift style almost every second. It’s genuinely dazzling — the kind of presentation that makes you sit up and pay attention.

When those sequences give way to standard dialogue, the drop in energy is noticeable. The supporting cast hits familiar notes — the languid shop owner, the sensible straight-man, hyperactive kids, and the inevitable mascot character (an otter with a TV for a head, displaying a pixelated otter). Conversations can be entertaining, but they run long, especially in the second story chapter. Tightening the dialogue pacing before release would do the game a significant favor.

Side Activities: The GTA Comparison Earns Its Keep

This is where NTE genuinely surprises. The city tycoon system ties progression to completing tasks across New Helios, unlocking activities familiar from open-world action games but recontextualized through the gacha lens. Taxi work with customer ratings. Delivery missions in a truck you’re strongly incentivized not to damage. Street races against AI and other players. Fishing. Slot machines. Mahjong. The breadth is remarkable.

Real estate is a particular highlight. Buying apartments unlocks fast travel points and passive bonuses, but the real appeal is decoration. Hundreds of purchasable interior items — plants, posters, figurines, sofas, wardrobes, bedside tables — can be arranged freely in your flats. You can invite characters to visit. In the beta, currency flows generously via daily reward letters, but the release version may make this a more considered investment. Either way, it’s easy to imagine players spending hours here.

There’s also a coffee shop management chain: buy premises, hire unlocked characters as staff, design menus, restock ingredients, and serve customers in a speed-based mini-game. It’s more involved than it sounds and feeds into the broader economy in satisfying ways.

The Police System: Ambitious but Skippable

NTE includes a wanted system — cause enough trouble and stars accumulate, bringing police pursuit. At higher levels, specialized units join the chase. Getting caught lands you in prison, where you can pay a fine to leave immediately, serve in-game days doing chores (the floor-washing section is essentially PowerWash Simulator), or attempt an escape involving item collection and prison yard walks.

It’s a creative idea that loses its appeal quickly. The fine to exit immediately is small enough that the alternative feels pointless. And since causing trouble offers little reward that the city’s legitimate activities don’t provide more efficiently, the whole system ends up as a curiosity rather than a feature. One playthrough satisfied my interest completely.

Combat: Spectacular and Smartly Designed

The combat system draws obvious comparisons to Zenless Zone Zero — squads of four characters, switching between them mid-fight for bonuses — but NTE adds its own layer through the Esper Cycle. While you’re dealing damage with one fighter, a partner’s portrait may light up, prompting you to tag them in for a powerful combination move. The specific effect depends on the elemental pairing: space plus anima creates ground-based explosive strains, charms combined with chaos apply burns, lakshana and space together slow enemy movement and attack speed.

The fundamentals are clean. Basic attacks, skills, and ultimate moves with full special animations. A critical dodge system tied to red flash warnings. A stamina bar on enemies that, once depleted, leaves them briefly immobilized. The character roster in the beta leans toward melee — hammers, swords, clawed fists — but ranged characters with dedicated aiming exist too. Whatever you play, the animations are smooth and the effects are vivid enough to make every fight feel worth watching.

The environments elevate everything. Anomalies frequently shift the battlefield into other dimensions, swapping the setting mid-fight in ways that feel designed rather than random. One encounter has you facing a giant painting that floods the floor with paint and dives into it. Another drops you in a corridor of moving walls with a massive leaping dog firing shells. An open-world boss runs his operation on a dance floor and triggers a rhythm game mid-fight. The variety is impressive, and the creativity rarely lets up.

The Gacha System: More Player-Friendly Than Most

NTE is a free-to-play gacha, which means characters beyond the story-provided roster require pulling from loot boxes. The mechanic is presented unusually — you roll dice on a board, moving between spaces and collecting prizes based on where you land. The underlying system is familiar, but the presentation adds a layer of personality.

What’s notable is how the rates are structured. There’s no 50/50 system on the special banner — you can’t lose a guaranteed pull to an unwanted character. The soft pity threshold starts at the 70th pull, which is early by genre standards, and progress carries over to subsequent banners. Character passive skills unlock with a single copy rather than requiring six duplicates, and the specific effect can be freely changed afterward. These are meaningful concessions to players who don’t spend money, and they suggest a developer aware of the competitive pressure from upcoming titles like Ananta, which reportedly won’t gate new characters behind gacha at all.

Monetization extends to cosmetics — character skins, planner and vehicle colorways, weapons with passive bonuses. The prices lean high, which is standard for the genre. Whether the in-game currency taps prove generous enough post-launch is impossible to judge from a beta that showers players with resources. The structure, at least, is fair.

Final Thoughts: One of the Most Promising Gacha Launches in Years

Neverness to Everness has no release date yet, but the beta suggests it doesn’t need much more time. The open world is rich and genuinely fun to explore. The combat is spectacular and mechanically interesting. The side activity suite is wider than most full-price games manage. The gacha structure is more considerate than the genre norm.

The story dialogue needs trimming. The police system is more novelty than feature. Car physics won’t impress anyone coming from a dedicated driving game. These are real criticisms, but they’re easily outweighed by what the game gets right.

Twenty million pre-registrations is a number that invites skepticism. Having spent 30 hours in New Helios, it’s a number that’s hard to argue with. NTE looks the part, plays the part, and — if the launch version delivers on the beta’s promise — could be the open-world gacha that finally crosses over to a mainstream audience.

Quick Breakdown

What Works

• A large, dense open world that rewards exploration at every level
• Spectacular combat with creative enemy and arena design
• One of the widest side-activity suites in the gacha genre
• Apartment decoration and real estate system with genuine depth
• Cutscenes with some of the most inventive visual presentation in mobile gaming
• Gacha structure that is meaningfully more player-friendly than most competitors
• Smooth animations and vivid effects across all character types
• Radio soundtrack that makes driving genuinely enjoyable

What Doesn’t Work

• The dialogue runs too long, especially in chapter two
• Supporting cast hits familiar genre archetypes without much subversion
• Police and prison system is creative but quickly loses its appeal
• Car physics are functional but not impressive
• Cosmetic pricing leans high
• Post-launch currency generosity is impossible to assess from beta alone
• Some open-world traversal mechanics feel redundant given fast travel options