Ananta is a bit of an alarming game to look at. The open world game is so clearly an anime-esque riff on GTA, with some Spider-Man style web swinging thrown in for reasons I’m not entirely sure of. All of that’s been obviously more or less since its announcement. But the game just received its first gameplay trailer at Tokyo Game Show, and it looks scarily… expensive.
Through the roughly seven minutes of gameplay, set to a song I can only describe as “song you let play on the radio while driving just because you want to fill the silence,” more and more Things just kept happening. One minute the main character is driving a motorbike, the next they’re taking a selfie through different scenes, one of which shows a mostly naked man escaping police on a robotic, walking toilet, and then the next they’re fighting goons Yakuza-style in the street.
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And more things keep happening after that! There’s the aforementioned Spider-Man swinging, a giant city-destroying robot, and just so many fictitious shops with such well realised branding you could convince me I could actually visit them.
This isn’t even mentioning the fact that Ananta just wholesale rips off GTA 5’s character transition, letting you hop into another, presumably gacha rolled, character’s body, continuing on whatever they’re doing. There’s even quite an interesting use of this where you can do so while you’re being held at gunpoint, with the switch to another character allowing you to snipe enemies from afar.
It really has that GTA ethos of “you can do everything,” an ethos I don’t necessarily feel great about considering the amount of labour likely required to achieve it, which raises questions of how ethical that labour was achieved. There’s a chance it’s teetering on the edge of having too much to do the do, to the point it becomes overwhelming.
Ananta isn’t just alarming because of how much of an “everything” game it presents itself as, but because I have some reservations about its narrative framing. The main character is the new captain of a special task force, essentially what seems to be the police. There’s even a moment about halfway through where, as a different character, you can just handcuff and arrest an NPC.
Of course you can have games where you play as the police, there are good and interesting stories about police too, but I can’t help but feel a bit concerned by such a, potentially small, gameplay feature. There’s no amount of cute half-animal anime women that can make it easy to breeze past such a thing.
Perhaps a game to be curious but cautious about, whenever it comes out.
