Neverness to Everness Review: A Surprisingly Strong Gacha from the Creators of Tower of Fantasy

Hotta Studio, the creators of Tower of Fantasy, has released a new gacha game set in an open world. Flashy trailers, charismatic characters, and an unusual setting caught people’s attention, but expectations were not especially high — grand promises too often fail to match the final result. And yet Neverness to Everness actually delivers.

The world of Neverness to Everness is a modern metropolis where everyday life exists side by side with anomalous phenomena. Some take the form of monsters born from urban legends and human fears; others appear as mystical locations that emerge under specific conditions. Some anomalies are harmless, while others can trigger full-blown disasters.

In the city of Hethereau, dealing with such phenomena falls to an organization known as the Circle — an umbrella term for all agencies authorized to work with anomalies. Some are state-run, including the official bureau. Others are independent hunters: individuals or groups who investigate and neutralize anomalies on a commercial basis, with the authorities approval.

Our protagonist is an amnesiac esper, which is fairly standard for the genre. But his case is unusual even by the game’s own rules: he is the only esper in history whose activity cannot be detected by the Wertheimer Index — the standard system used to measure esper abilities. At the same time, he has exceptional sensitivity to anomalies and can quickly locate their Nexus — the source whose elimination resolves the incident. For this, he is called the “Appraiser.” The bureau signs a contract with him and assigns him to the hunter group Eibon.

What really wins you over in the story’s presentation is its ability to switch registers without losing pace. One minute the characters are acting out an absurd comedy scene with a Naruto reference right in the middle of the main quest, and a few minutes later you find yourself inside an anomaly where things become genuinely unsettling. Some moments are clearly designed to provoke a reaction — and they land exactly as intended. It’s this alternation that keeps the player engaged.

The countless references the developers have packed into Hethereau also deserve special praise. The Easter eggs here work on two levels. The first is narrative: anime references are built directly into cutscenes and dialogue, and genre fans will recognize them instantly. The second is spatial: the city itself hides more than a hundred nods to anime and gaming culture. A bridge recreating the atmosphere of a scene from Fate; a tofu shop that looks exactly like the one from Initial D; Nobita’s house from Doraemon in a residential district. There is even the staircase from Your Name. These are not random details thrown in for show — there are so many of them that exploring the city becomes its own little game for anime fans. In terms of genre, NTE is a mix of urban comedy, mysticism, and light bursts of horror in just the right places.

Four characters take part in combat at the same time, and you can switch between them at any moment. Switching with a filled gauge triggers elemental reactions: there are six elements in the game, and each interacts with only two others. Otherwise, the combat system is a standard genre package: an active skill, an ultimate, two passive abilities, level and gear progression.

The equipment system stands out: it is designed like “Tetris.” Gear pieces are shaped blocks that you use to fill the cells of a character’s grid, while set bonuses activate when specific combinations of pieces are used. A convenient touch: all of an item’s stats are visible immediately upon acquisition, without any extra steps.

The combat itself feels good, but it cannot be called fundamentally new compared to Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, or Zenless Zone Zero. It is a solid genre standard — no more and no less. A similar mix of free-to-play progression, online structure, and long-term grind can be found in our Lost Ark review, where we take a closer look at how another large-scale online RPG holds up today.

The system for obtaining characters and weapons through banners is presented as a board game: every pull is a move across the board. It looks fun, but it does not improve your luck. What matters far more are the banner rules themselves.

The event banner does not have the 50/50 system familiar to many gacha players, where the rare character you get might not be the one you saved your pulls for. Here, everything is simpler: if an S-rank character drops, it will immediately be the hero from the current banner. The base rate is 1.88%. After roughly 70 attempts, the game begins to noticeably increase the drop chance, and on the 90th attempt, an S-rank is guaranteed. Accumulated progress carries over to future banners. In addition to the character, the banner offers cosmetics — a glider, a car skin, and an outfit, guaranteed on the 50th, 100th, and 200th pull respectively.

In the standard banner, the developers give you a one-time opportunity to choose an S-rank character yourself — after the first 50 pulls.

Another such character selector arrives in the mail shortly after the start of the game.

A separate system applies to the Arc banner — that is what the game calls its local weapons. The base chance of receiving an S-class Arc is 3%, but until the hard pity kicks in, there is no certainty that you will get the limited Arc from the current banner: the chance for that is only 25%.

The limited Arc is guaranteed on the 80th attempt. At the same time, the first copy of most standard S-class Arcs can be obtained without banners — through world exploration and early boss victories.

At launch, the game gives out a lot of in-game currency simply for playing through content. The first two standard characters can be chosen manually. All of this noticeably lowers the entry barrier by genre standards. Those who want to compare NTE with other anime-style projects may find our 11 Genshin Impact clones useful — it includes both major hits and newer releases in a similar visual style.

The only worrying thing is that this kind of generosity at launch often turns into aggressive power creep in future patches, when new characters are deliberately made stronger than old ones to encourage spending. Whether the game can avoid this remains to be seen.

The main thing that makes Neverness to Everness stand out from its competitors is its open city. Hethereau offers property purchases, driving, street racing, fishing, bank robberies, hangouts with characters, and anomaly hunting. Formally, all of this is side content, but it is precisely what creates the feeling of a living place rather than a backdrop for gacha banners.

Usually, exploration in gacha games feels more like a chore: run through a location, collect resources, clear activities, and move on. Here, simply driving around the city and stumbling upon another anomaly turned out to be something I did not want to tear myself away from — a feeling I, the author of these lines, have not experienced in the genre for a long time.

Crimson Desert gave roughly the same sense of freedom — though in a completely different setting. You can read more about that in our Crimson Desert review.

In terms of scale and depth, it is still far from Grand Theft Auto, but it convincingly captures the spirit of “anime GTA.” By the way, if you are interested in mobile games with urban action, we recommend checking out our selection of the best mobile games like GTA.

Graphically, the game looks good, though it does not claim to be a benchmark — which is perfectly logical for a project aimed at a broad audience, including mobile device owners. Unreal Engine 5 is known for games with disastrous optimization, so NTE’s stable performance on this engine is a pleasant surprise. Occasional stutters do happen, but there are no serious drops on PC.

On mobile devices, the situation is uneven: some phones run the game confidently, while others with similar specifications show noticeable drops. The developers still have work to do.

The character voice acting is of a high standard, and the environmental sounds are atmospheric and well placed — whether it is the bustle of the city or the space inside an anomaly. The soundtrack is varied: the game includes a built-in player, available both in the car and as a wearable equipment item. Some tracks stick in your memory for a long time.

The controversy surrounding neural networks, which flared up immediately after launch, deserves a separate mention. I noticed traces of generative AI in several places. The most well-known example is a billboard in Hethereau that is strikingly similar in composition to a frame from Makoto Shinkai’s anime Weathering with You, presumably processed through a neural network. In addition, the TV scene at the beginning of the “Pink Paws Heist” mode and one of the combat cutscenes near the end of the current story also raise suspicions. Character art and the main game assets are not part of the complaints — and that is important. Still, it leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.

Neverness to Everness is not for those expecting a deep combat system or a serious epic narrative. But if you enjoy urban fantasy with the spirit of slice-of-life anime and mysticism, charismatic characters, an open world, and one of the friendliest gacha systems in the genre, you should not skip it.