Ahead of its April 29 launch, we dive into Neverness to Everness’ neon‑haunted city of Hethereau, its flashy combat and traversal, gacha structure, and how Hotta Studio is repositioning itself after Tower of Fantasy.
Neverness to Everness is Hotta Studio’s second swing at a global live‑service hit, and it could not look more different from Tower of Fantasy on the surface. Gone is the fractured sci‑fi wilderness; in its place is Hethereau, a dense supernatural metropolis where cursed antiques, spectral traffic jams, and reality‑bending anomalies coexist with convenience stores and high‑rise apartments. With launch locked for April 29 on PS5, PC and mobile, the pre‑release betas and recent previews paint a much clearer picture of how this new open‑world gacha RPG actually plays.
A supernatural city that behaves like a character
Hethereau is not just a backdrop for daily commissions. Built in Unreal Engine 5, it is a contiguous urban map of alleys, overpasses and neon‑lit districts, with barely any loading once you are out on the streets. Hotta leans hard into the idea that this is a modern city that has learned to live with the inexplicable. Billboards flicker with occult warnings, subway entrances double as anomaly hotspots, and small stories play out as you investigate the way people have normalized the paranormal.
You work as the first “unlicensed” Anomaly Hunter, operating out of the Eibon antique shop. That premise does more than justify monster hunting. Eibon exists as a hub where requests from citizens, corporations and shadier clients come in, and every job is framed around a piece of urban folklore or a cursed object. The structure is closer to an episodic TV series than a traditional chaptered campaign, with self‑contained cases that still feed back into a broader mystery about Hethereau’s strange ring of otherworldly energy.
Where Tower of Fantasy scattered activities across wide, empty terrain, Neverness to Everness compresses everything into a city block density. The result, judging from test footage, is that simply walking around tends to surface something to do, whether it is a spontaneous anomaly encounter, a street race dragging you into a different district, or a side story that sends you climbing a high‑rise to reach a possessed billboard.
Traversal that treats the city like a playground
Urban traversal is a major point of differentiation from Hotta’s last project. Instead of gliding over hills and spamming mounts, you are constantly weaving through traffic, chaining parkour moves and using supernatural gadgets to keep moving. Characters can wall‑run, slide under barriers, mantle ledges and use short bursts of teleportation or gravity‑defying dashes depending on their kits.
Vehicles matter much more than in most gacha RPGs. Previews highlight high‑speed bikes and cars that can be customized, but they are not just cosmetic. Vehicular chases, delivery challenges and even multi‑phase boss encounters that begin on the freeway show that Hotta wants you to think of Hethereau as both a combat arena and a racing circuit. It is closer in spirit to an anime take on Grand Theft Auto than another fantasy roam.
Verticality is baked into the city design. Rooftop gardens cling to corporate towers, abandoned skybridges hide anomalies, and certain districts reward learning the fastest routes across billboards, fire escapes and construction cranes. In the betas, players could string together grapples and double jumps to cross entire neighborhoods without touching the ground, which gives traversal a light movement‑tech ceiling that fans of skillful exploration should appreciate.
Combat: stylish, snappy and built around anomalies
Combat in Neverness to Everness follows the familiar action gacha template of small party teams, cooldown‑driven abilities and reactive dodges, but with a few twists. Your squad is constructed from distinct Anomaly Hunters, each with signature weapons and supernatural quirks. Switching between them mid‑fight is fast and heavily encouraged, almost like tag combos in a fighting game.
Enemy types lean into the urban horror concept. You are not just cutting through bandits. Anomalies manifest as warped traffic cones, living signage, corrupted drones or towering specters stitched from city debris. Many fights take place directly in the streets or on building tops, and the arenas often include interactive elements that can be destroyed, hacked or weaponized. One early showcase featured a boss that warped the geometry of an overpass, turning safe lanes into instant‑death rifts unless players used a character’s blink ability to hop between intact platforms.
Perfect dodges and parries feed a shared energy meter that unlocks big team skills and cinematic finishers. The pacing looks snappier than Tower of Fantasy’s sometimes floaty combat, with a clear focus on impact and readability. Hotta also seems to have taken feedback about hit feel to heart. Weapons bite into enemies with chunky sound design and screen shake that stops just short of being overwhelming, while elemental effects like electricity or gravity distortions deform the environment around you.
Boss design is where the combat loop really flexes. Instead of stationary sponges, major anomalies move through different phases that can spill out across an entire block. You might begin on a highway chase, transition into a vertical climb up a skyscraper, then finish inside a twisted pocket dimension that overlays itself on part of the city. These sequences use traversal skills and character‑specific tools, which suggests that owning a diverse roster will matter for more than just raw DPS.
Life in Hethereau: heists, housing and side hustles
Neverness to Everness is not just combat and story missions. Hotta is clearly looking to capture some of the emergent appeal of open‑world crime sandboxes without leaning into their grim tone. Co‑op heists see teams of players tackling multi‑stage jobs that mix stealth, puzzle solving and big final set‑piece fights. Street races cut across districts with shortcuts that reward players who have mastered its traversal. Live events pop up around anomalies, asking passersby to pitch in before the situation escalates.
There is also a light life‑sim layer. Through the Eibon shop and other unlockable locations, players can run small businesses that generate currency or rare materials over time. Housing lets you buy and decorate apartments, which double as social spaces to show off cosmetics, trophies and even certain anomaly artifacts you have contained. It is not a full city builder, but it pushes further into slice‑of‑life territory than Tower of Fantasy’s base systems ever did.
That tone shift matters. Tower of Fantasy often felt like it was at war with itself, splitting attention between a heavy sci‑fi story, MMO‑style progression and a casual hangout experience. Neverness to Everness tries to integrate those pieces into a single urban fantasy pitch: a city where clocking out of a heist might mean going home to rearrange furniture while a cursed billboard screams outside.
Gacha structure and monetization: adjustments after Tower of Fantasy
With a cross‑platform, free‑to‑play gacha RPG, the obvious question is how Hotta is handling monetization this time. Full details will not be clear until launch, but the tests and official materials outline a structure that already feels more transparent than Tower of Fantasy’s messy early systems.
The core gacha focus is on playable characters and their signature W‑Gears, which function like a mix of weapons and unique gadgets. Banners are split so that spending for cosmetic vehicles and fashion is separated from the main combat meta, which should reduce the pressure to chase every limited skin just to stay viable. Early impressions suggest pity and duplication mechanics that lean closer to contemporary genre standards, with guaranteed pulls at defined thresholds and alternative uses for dupes rather than pure waste.
What stands out most is how much high‑impact traversal and exploration power is present in the base kits. Grapples, dashes and core mobility upgrades are tied to story progression instead of gacha exclusives, which is a critical change if Hotta wants the city to feel fair to explore for free players. Optional refinements exist on the premium side, like faster energy recharge for certain vehicles or more extravagant ultimate skills, but the ceiling appears to be about efficiency rather than raw access.
Generous pre‑registration rewards, including a free 5‑star character and currency, echo the opening strategy of many gacha launches. The difference is that Hotta cannot afford another perception hit. Tower of Fantasy’s long‑term reputation was dragged down as much by its monetization missteps as by technical and content issues. Neverness to Everness is being sold as a cleaner, more player‑friendly package from day one, and the structure on paper does look more disciplined.
Hotta’s second impression after Tower of Fantasy
The shadow of Tower of Fantasy is impossible to ignore. That game arrived as a visually ambitious alternative in the anime open‑world space, but bugs, wobbly combat balance, storytelling that struggled to land and a confusing monetization web blunted its momentum. Hotta has spent the years since iterating on live updates, but Neverness to Everness represents a more fundamental reset.
Positioning NTE as a supernatural urban RPG does a lot of work by itself. It steps out of the direct comparison with outdoor adventure juggernauts and into a lane that more closely resembles an anime‑infused Grand Theft Auto or urban Persona spin‑off. The choice to build Hethereau as a single, deeply layered city gives Hotta a canvas for ongoing live content that feels more organic than dropping new islands into the ocean.
From a systems perspective, the studio appears to be targeting three big corrections. First is refinement of combat feel, with faster swaps and more dramatic enemy design. Second is giving traversal and vehicles a central role so that simply existing in the world is enjoyable, not just a commute between objectives. Third is monetization clarity, with cleaner banner separation and better baselines for free players.
Of course, all of this still hinges on execution over months and years. Live‑service anime RPGs live or die on cadence, technical stability and how generous or stingy they feel once the honeymoon period ends. Hotta’s challenge is to prove that it has learned not only from Tower of Fantasy’s launch but from its entire live‑service lifespan.
How Neverness to Everness is shaping up before launch
Taken together, the pre‑launch picture of Neverness to Everness is surprisingly cohesive. It is an unabashed gacha game wrapped around a stylish supernatural city, but it is also more than a re‑skinned Tower of Fantasy. Hethereau has the potential to become one of the more distinct settings in the genre, a place where you remember specific intersections and alleyways because they were the site of your favorite heist or the first time you barely escaped a city‑scale anomaly.
If Hotta can deliver on three promises a lively, reactive city, combat that feels crisp across platforms and monetization that respects players’ time then Neverness to Everness could mark a genuine second act for the studio. With April 29 fast approaching, it will not be long before we find out whether Hethereau is somewhere players want to live in daily, or just another flashy stopover on the gacha tour.