This may be the most maximalist videogame of all time.
I may be outing myself as a dullard, but I don’t think I have a mind that could combine a bunny girl doing odd delivery jobs for cash, a cute Japanese kei truck, and a sick vampire who barfs streams of rainbows into a single scene. Perhaps no single mind could, but that was the moment in Ananta, which has made headlines as „anime GTA“ since its re-reveal this week, that really won me over.
Ananta is borrowing—or brazenly copying—a lot, but it might have some wild-ass ideas of its own, too.
The main impression I got from playing about half-an-hour of Ananta at this year’s Tokyo Game Show was: Wow it must have taken a lot of people to make this game! China is on the path to dominate the next decade of triple-A games, and there’s no flashier way to do it than to make (or at least appear to be making) the ur-game. Every mechanic from the top 10 or 20 or 50 most popular games in the world, combined, is surely better than any of those games individually, right?
This maximalist approach to big budget game design has never really been great in practice, and a few minutes into Ananta reveal it is indeed doing things that you have done many times in a game before and probably are not foaming at the mouth to do again:
Punching guys with timing-based combos and counters reminiscent of the Batman Arkham games or Sleeping Dogs
Scripted quick-time events that feel right out of an Uncharted or other 2010s action game
On-rails car chases that give you unlimited ammo to shoot out the tires of your pursuers
Web-swinging around a giant city as Spide—er, the anime version of that guy from Prototype
But then there’s the weird stuff—like hopping into the boots of Lykaia, a purple-haired getaway driver slash cop who has a totally different set of play mechanics to the intro protagonist, whose arms get all weird and stretchy to let him swing around.
