Neverness to Everness Is Hotta’s Second Shot At The Gacha Crown

Neverness to Everness is Hotta Studio trying again.

Tower of Fantasy gave the team a foothold in the open‑world gacha race, but it also picked up a reputation for uneven storytelling, technical issues, and a live‑service grind that only really clicked for the committed. With Neverness to Everness (often shortened to NTE), Hotta is clearly aiming higher: a supernatural urban sandbox that wants to compete directly with Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, and Zenless Zone Zero while fixing a lot of what held Tower of Fantasy back.

Launching globally in April on PC, PS5, and mobile with full cross‑play and cross‑progression, NTE already has tens of millions of pre‑registrations. If you have played any big budget gacha RPG, the structure will feel familiar. What is different is what you actually do moment to moment.

An “anime GTA” urban fantasy instead of another pastoral continent

Neverness to Everness trades the pastoral fantasy sprawl of Genshin and the broken sci‑fi plains of Wuthering Waves for a dense modern city called Hethereau. This place is the real star of the game.

You play an Appraiser, an amnesiac protagonist employed at an antique store called Eibon. Hethereau is riddled with anomalies and oddities, supernatural phenomena tied to a cosmic Hypervortex. Your day job is investigating these cases for clients, but in practice that quickly turns into a full urban sandbox.

You can sprint, climb facades, mantle up to rooftops, slip through alleyways, and enter a surprising number of interiors. Instead of feeling like a themed lobby between combat arenas, Hethereau plays like a compact but dense hub stuffed with small stories and strange encounters. The tone is urban weird rather than high fantasy. One early mission builds like a little detective episode set in a photography shop, culminating in a boss fight against a sentient roll of film.

For Genshin and Tower of Fantasy players, the biggest tonal shift is how grounded the city feels. There are cafés, corner stores, apartment blocks, highways, and cramped backstreets lit in neon. It has more in common with the anime noir vibe of Zenless Zone Zero, except here you traverse an open map yourself instead of bouncing between instanced combat stages.

Traversal and vehicles: when “anime GTA” stops being a joke

Traversal in NTE is built around a hybrid of character mobility and vehicles.

On foot, characters move like you would expect from a modern action RPG. You can dash, dodge, and climb almost anything that looks scalable. There is a clear emphasis on verticality, with routes that snake up scaffolding and fire escapes to rooftop shortcuts and hidden stashes. In that sense, Hethereau fills the slot that Wuthering Waves’ chasms and Genshin’s mountain ranges occupy, just compressed into a tighter footprint.

What really separates NTE from its peers is the cars. Vehicles are not a throwaway mount skin. They are fully drivable, upgradeable machines with their own mission types.

You slip into a sports coupe or tuned sedan and immediately feel the difference. Acceleration, drift angle, braking, and handling all carry more weight than you would expect from a gacha RPG, closer to a light driving game than a basic transport system. There are timed delivery jobs that play like traffic‑dodging time trials and multiplayer racing lobbies where you compete against other players rather than just AI ghosts.

A GTA‑style wanted system sits on top of this. Smash into enough public property or get sticky fingers in a shop and your wanted level spikes, summoning police cars that will chase you across the city. It is a simple system mechanically, but combined with the supernatural premise it gives NTE a flavor that neither Genshin nor Wuthering Waves has tried to touch.

Hotta’s own Tower of Fantasy had decent movement tech, with jetpacks and vehicles, but those systems were mostly there to bridge the gaps between objectives. In Neverness to Everness, traversal is a toy in itself. Preview players describe getting sidetracked for hours just drifting through rain‑slick streets and combing rooftops for collectibles, forgetting to advance the main story.

Combat: flashy, responsive, and still looking for its bite

Under the hood, Neverness to Everness is an action RPG where you field a small squad of characters and swap between them in real time. If you are coming from Genshin or Wuthering Waves, the broad strokes are familiar. Normal strings, a couple of character skills, a big ultimate, and dodge or parry based defense.

The new parry system is the combat highlight so far. Many attacks can be turned aside with a well‑timed button press, rewarding you with slow‑motion counter opportunities and big damage spikes. Preview builds suggest parry timing is readable and generous enough to feel empowering without trivializing encounters, which gives NTE a distinct rhythm compared to Genshin’s more dodge‑centric style or Wuthering Waves’ i‑frame dash reliance.

Where the combat is still drawing scrutiny is depth and pacing.

Early tests report a lack of complex combo routes or strong synergy loops between characters, at least in the current builds. You can certainly rotate through your party and string skills together, but you are not getting the same intricate elemental reaction webs that define Genshin, nor the tightly tuned Resonance combos and coordination skills that make Wuthering Waves feel mechanical and expressive.

Enemy durability is another concern. Multiple previewers mention mid‑30 level characters struggling to chew through level 18 mobs, leading to fights that last longer than their mechanics justify. When health bars are bloated, the parry system stops feeling like a test of skill and instead becomes a way to survive attrition. This was one of Tower of Fantasy’s chronic frustrations at launch, and Neverness to Everness looks like it is still tuning those numbers.

Visually, combat is comfortably in line with top tier gachas. Effects are punchy, ultimates have weight, and the game’s Unreal Engine 5 foundation gives particles and lighting a premium sheen. If Hotta can speed up time to kill and flesh out synergies, the underlying feel is already there.

A denser, more lived‑in world than Tower of Fantasy

Where Tower of Fantasy struggled to make its world feel cohesive beyond scattered puzzle nodes and boss events, Neverness to Everness doubles down on density.

Hethereau is packed with City Commissions, side stories, collectibles, and life‑sim style distractions. You can buy properties, including large mansions, and decorate them with furniture and knick‑knacks found in alleyways or earned through missions. You can sit down for a game of mahjong, go fishing, join street races, or simply shop for cosmetics.

Hotta has been vocal after recent co‑op stress tests that it is targeting smoother social systems too. Things like public activities, social hubs, and co‑op entry points are being refined following feedback that Tower of Fantasy often made actually playing together more effort than it should have been. In NTE you can expect shared exploration, racing, and dungeon‑like co‑op combat content that all feed into the same character progression instead of feeling like side modes.

From a technical standpoint, early betas already look more stable and optimized than Tower of Fantasy was at launch. Players still report rough edges in driving controls and social UX, but frame pacing, load times, and basic stability are being singled out as surprisingly solid for an open‑world Unreal Engine 5 title targeting phones and low‑end PCs.

Gacha structure: familiar, but early signs are promising

Mechanically, Neverness to Everness is absolutely a gacha game. You roll banners for characters, earn and buy a premium currency, and grind materials to upgrade your roster. Hotta and Perfect World rarely lead with that language, but the loop is the same one that propels Genshin, Wuthering Waves, and Tower of Fantasy.

The differences are in the details.

Recent breakdowns of NTE’s banners during tests paint a picture that is, at least early on, a little more generous than some competitors. Pity systems exist, soft pity curves kick in, and early progression showers you with pulls at a similar or slightly higher rate than genre norms. One of the big community talking points out of the Containment Test was how quickly free players could assemble a functional roster without hitting a hard content wall.

Another interesting wrinkle is how much of the game’s gratification is decoupled from raw combat power. Decorating property, unlocking vehicles, participating in social minigames, and poking at collectible sets all engage parts of the brain that do not depend on chasing the next five‑star. For players burned out on pure damage meta optimization, NTE’s city life may be as important as its drop rates.

That said, key questions remain unanswered until launch. Test builds and preview access rarely show the true end of the progression curve. Rates can be tweaked, new banners can introduce stronger characters that squeeze older ones out of relevance, and resource bottlenecks can be added once the game has a captive audience. If you watched Tower of Fantasy’s power creep unfold, you know why veteran gacha players are cautious here.

Co‑op and multiplayer: more than just world bosses

Co‑op is a confirmed pillar for Neverness to Everness. Hotta has repeatedly described NTE as a multiplayer gacha RPG rather than a purely single‑player experience with a co‑op toggle.

In practice, that means several layers of shared play.

At the lightest touch, you have free‑roam co‑op. Friends can drop into your instance of Hethereau, explore, help with commissions, and join you for casual activities like fishing or minigames. This addresses a long‑standing criticism of Genshin’s co‑op, which is functional but largely bolted onto content crafted for solo runs.

On the structured end, NTE folds in dungeon runs, anomaly hunts, and high‑end combat challenges designed around multiple players coordinating abilities. How tightly these encounters will be tuned remains to be seen, but the intent is closer to Tower of Fantasy’s group dungeons and joint operations, hopefully with smoother matchmaking and better rewards.

The surprise wildcard is vehicle content. Multiplayer racing lobbies and drift challenges are baked into the game rather than being a seasonal event. That gives Neverness to Everness a social hook outside combat that neither Genshin nor Wuthering Waves really tries to match.

One big open question is PvP. Hotta has not outlined any head‑to‑head modes for launch, and given the studio’s history and the power curve concerns in gachas in general, many players are wary of any competitive mode that leans on owned characters. If PvP does appear, how normalized its stats are will matter a lot for how pay to win the game feels.

Cross‑platform and performance: trying to beat its own reputation

Neverness to Everness is launching simultaneously on PC, PS5, and mobile, with a Mac version also listed and full cross‑progression across platforms. That already sets it apart from Genshin’s staggered console rollouts and gives it parity with Tower of Fantasy’s eventual multi‑platform support from day one.

Technical tests suggest Hotta has taken Tower of Fantasy’s early backlash to heart. Unreal Engine 5 gives NTE advanced bells and whistles like ray‑traced reflections for those who can use them, but there are also aggressive scalability options for lower‑end devices. Beta impressions repeatedly mention that the game looks far above average for a gacha but still runs acceptably on mid‑range phones and laptops, even if full max settings remain the domain of high‑end hardware.

Stability during the recent co‑ex test was not perfect, but issues tended to be minor bugs or localization quirks rather than hard crashes. That is a notable contrast to Tower of Fantasy’s early client woes and gives some hope that Hotta’s second outing will be less of a technical rollercoaster.

How it stacks up against Genshin, Wuthering Waves, and Tower of Fantasy

Lining Neverness to Everness up against the rest of the field makes its intent very clear.

Compared to Genshin Impact, NTE trades breadth for density. Teyvat is vast, but a lot of its daily loop has settled into a familiar pattern of boss runs and resin timers. Hethereau is smaller but layered with driving, housing, mini‑games, and a crime system that encourage you to linger in the same slice of city and still find new things to do. Genshin still looks like the king of polished elemental combat and puzzle‑driven exploration, but Neverness to Everness is trying to make simply existing in its world more varied.

Against Wuthering Waves, the contrast is about feel. Kuro’s game is a movement and combat showcase: fast, expressive, and mechanically demanding once you are deep into rotations and parry windows. Neverness to Everness is currently behind that curve in complexity, but it wins on urban atmosphere and lifestyle features. If you want smoother combos and execution tests, Wuthering Waves remains the go to. If you want to drift between story beats in a supernatural city, NTE is deliberately targeting that itch.

Standing next to Tower of Fantasy, Neverness to Everness looks like a sequel in everything but name. The sci‑fi frontier is replaced with an urban sprawl, the jetpacks traded for sports cars, and the scattered world bosses consolidated into more curated anomaly hunts and social content. Early feedback suggests major improvements in translation, UI polish, performance, and narrative pacing. At the same time, familiar pitfalls around tanky enemies and the specter of later power creep are still lurking.

Zenless Zone Zero is the closest competitor stylistically, with its own urban weird aesthetic and focus on street‑level stories. The key difference is scope. ZZZ is built around instanced runs and hub‑based life sim, while Neverness to Everness is an actual open city you drive through. Which approach you prefer will likely come down to how much you value tight, replayable combat stages versus freeform sandbox roaming.

The big questions to watch at launch

On paper and in beta, Neverness to Everness looks like one of the most ambitious gacha projects to date. It is built to fix specific pain points gacha veterans know too well.

Story pacing appears tighter than early Tower of Fantasy, with higher cutscene quality and more engaging case‑of‑the‑week style missions to break up exposition. Endgame is being seeded with a wider mix of activities than just combat gauntlets. Performance on a range of hardware is already better than many expected from a UE5 open world.

What we do not know yet is just as important.

We do not know how aggressive the long‑term monetization will be. Beta rates can change, banner scheduling can get predatory, and late‑game materials can bottleneck progression. We do not know how hard late anomalies and endgame dungeons will lean on specific five‑stars or vehicle upgrades. We do not know whether PvP will exist in a meaningful form, and if it does, how normalized stats will be or how much money can buy an advantage.

We also do not know whether combat depth will catch up to its peers. If enemy health pools come down and party synergies are expanded before or shortly after launch, Neverness to Everness could feel much sharper. If not, it risks becoming a gorgeous city with combat that most players tolerate instead of love.

Heading into April, that is the real story. Hotta Studio has built a striking supernatural city that feels different to live in than anything else in the gacha space. Whether Neverness to Everness can turn that promise into a sustainable, fair live service is the question every Appraiser will be judging as soon as the gates to Hethereau open.