Remember the teasers for the gorgeous anime-style open-world game Project Mugen? The game, now known as Ananta, already looked heavily influenced by GTA, and on the one-year anniversary of the GTA 6 trailer, the devs just dropped a new trailer that clearly takes a lot of cues from Rockstar’s own marketing.
You might be able to dismiss some of the similarities between the Ananta and GTA 6 trailers as simple coincidences, since they’re both advertising big open-world games in urban environments. But then there’s the shot of the male and female protagonists bursting into scene with gun in hand. The rooftop pool party. The frequent cutaways to TikTok-style social media. The tracking shot down the crowded beach. The disaster report on the news. The part where we get a first-person view from a moving vehicle looking to the right and seeing something weird and ass-related happening on the road.
Some of those shots are a little brazen, but here’s the thing – the Ananta trailer is great. Maybe I’m just taken by the idea of an open-world game set in a modern city with a less drearily realistic aesthetic, but getting up to various shenanigans in an anime city that looks this good seems like a great time. And hey, Genshin Impact looked like a pretty brazen Breath of the Wild clone in its own pre-release marketing, but it still managed to eke out its own identity. Perhaps another anime-style open-world game playing the greatest hits of the genre can do the same.
Ananta is a free-to-play title in development at Naked Rain, a new subsidiary of Marvel Rivals and Diablo Immortal publisher NetEase. There’s no word on when it’s projected to launch, but pre-registrations are live on the official site.
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