There’s a specific kind of anime that hits differently. Not the fantasy kingdoms with magic schools. Not the post-apocalyptic wastelands. The one set in a city you almost recognize — neon-lit, rain-soaked, filled with ordinary people who carry extraordinary things underneath ordinary lives. Durarara!! had it. Bungo Stray Dogs has it. So does Chainsaw Man, in its way.
This is the genre Neverness to Everness is built on. And understanding its creative DNA means understanding why this game feels like something genuinely new in open-world gaming — and why it’s taken this long for someone to try it.
The Genre: Supernatural Modern City
Before we talk about Neverness to Everness, we need to talk about the genre it inhabits — because that genre has a very specific feel that has defined a generation of anime fans.
The “supernatural modern city” story works on a specific premise: the mundane world and the extraordinary world coexist, layered on top of each other, and most people never see the seam. In Durarara!!, a headless motorcyclist rides through Ikebukuro while office workers walk past. In Bungo Stray Dogs, an organization of ability users operates out of Yokohama while the city’s normal population lives on, oblivious. In Tokyo Ghoul, ghouls eat at the café table next to yours.
The urban setting isn’t just backdrop. It’s the point. The city amplifies the contrast between the hidden world and the visible one. The neon signs and convenience stores and rain-soaked alleys make the supernatural stranger, not less strange — because the ordinariness of the context makes the extraordinary things feel genuinely alien by contrast.
These stories share a structural DNA: an ensemble cast, a city with distinct districts that each have their own culture, factions that operate beneath the surface of polite society, and protagonists who are positioned between the visible world and the hidden one.
This is exactly the DNA Neverness to Everness is built from.
Hotta Studio: The Studio Behind Tower of Fantasy
To understand what Neverness to Everness is, you need to understand who made it and what they learned making Tower of Fantasy.
Hotta Studio, based in China and operating under Perfect World, launched Tower of Fantasy in 2022 as a direct competitor to Genshin Impact. It was an open-world action RPG with gacha mechanics, multiple playable characters, and a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting.
Tower of Fantasy was technically ambitious — large open world, anime-style characters, aggressive content schedule. It was also critically uneven, caught between two audiences it was never quite sure how to serve. That tension between spectacle and substance was visible in the design.
- Post-apocalyptic sci-fi open world
- Genshin Impact-adjacent positioning
- Anime character design, Western game structure
- Multiple servers, live-service content cycle
- Mixed reception — technically impressive, narratively thin
- Urban supernatural open world — a single dense city
- Distinct aesthetic identity from day one
- Anime-native storytelling structure
- Faction system and ensemble cast
- Character-driven narrative at the center
NTE is Hotta Studio applying what they learned. Instead of a sprawling world with thin narrative threads holding it together, they built a city — dense, layered, architecturally specific — and put story at the center.
Hethereau: A City Designed to Hold Secrets
The city at the center of Neverness to Everness is called Hethereau. It’s a fictional metropolis, but it’s unmistakably East Asian in its visual vocabulary: neon signage in mixed scripts, elevated rail lines cutting through residential blocks, wet markets beside glass-facade towers, back alleys beside grand boulevards.
This is a deliberate design choice. Cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, and Tokyo have a specific visual quality — density, layering, the coexistence of old and new in the same block — that makes them perfect settings for stories about hidden worlds. There’s already so much happening on the surface that something happening beneath it feels plausible.
A city is the only setting where extraordinary things can hide in plain sight. That’s been anime’s secret weapon for thirty years. NTE finally built one you can walk around in.
On Hethereau’s design conceptIn most open-world games, the city is backdrop. Buildings are facades. Districts are texture packs. Hethereau is designed to be a world you can read — where the districts have distinct social identities, where the architecture tells you something about who lives there and what they’re hiding.
The Power System: Where Anime Logic Meets Game Design
Every supernatural anime needs a power system, and power systems are where the genre either becomes interesting or collapses into generic spectacle.
The best ones are specific. Fullmetal Alchemist’s equivalent exchange. My Hero Academia’s Quirks and their inherited limitations. Jujutsu Kaisen’s cursed energy and domain expansion.
In Neverness to Everness, the supernatural abilities are tied to what the game calls Resonance — a power that players accumulate through exploration and story events. The mechanic exists in the space where RPG progression systems meet anime power-awakening arcs. You’re not just leveling up; you’re unlocking something that was always there.
This mirrors the narrative structure of the best supernatural anime: the protagonist doesn’t acquire power from outside, they uncover it from within. The power was always present; the story is the process of understanding it. In game terms, this aligns character growth with story progression in a way that feels motivated rather than arbitrary.
The Ensemble Approach: Anime Storytelling in Game Form
One of the structural choices that most distinguishes NTE from its contemporaries is the ensemble cast model.
In Genshin Impact, you collect characters. They have personalities and backstories, but they’re fundamentally resources. In NTE, the playable characters are designed as cast members — each with their own arc, their own stake in the city’s hidden conflict, their own perspective on what’s happening and why.
This is anime storytelling logic applied to game structure. Durarara!! doesn’t have a protagonist; it has a city and a cast of people whose stories intersect. Bungo Stray Dogs uses its ability users as a way to explore character psychology as much as power fantasy. NTE is attempting the same thing: the city is the protagonist, and the playable characters are the lenses through which you read it.
Why This Genre is Having a Moment
Neverness to Everness isn’t arriving in a vacuum. The last five years of anime have seen an enormous resurgence in urban supernatural storytelling. Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, the ongoing popularity of Bungo Stray Dogs and Demon Slayer — these are global phenomena with audiences that skew younger and more international than the anime audience of ten years ago.
The global gaming audience has grown up on this visual language. For a significant percentage of players in their teens and twenties, anime aesthetics aren’t niche — they’re the default visual culture. A game that commits fully to this aesthetic and its storytelling logic isn’t targeting a subculture; it’s targeting the mainstream.
This is what makes NTE’s timing significant. It’s not imitating anime. It’s been built by people who grew up on it, for people who grew up on it — and it shows in every design decision from the city layout to the cast structure.
What Sets It Apart from the Genre
Being anime-inspired isn’t enough. Every third mobile game launches with anime aesthetics and doesn’t have anything to say.
What Neverness to Everness has that most don’t is specificity of place. Hethereau isn’t a generic anime city. It’s a city with an identity, with districts that mean something, with a history that shapes how the supernatural elements feel.
The supernatural city genre works when the city feels real enough that the supernatural elements feel genuinely strange within it. Ikebukuro in Durarara!! works because Ikebukuro is a real place with a real social identity in Tokyo — the series captures something true about how that district feels, and then puts impossible things in it.
Hethereau is fictional, but it has the texture of a real place. That specificity is what separates it from the dozens of other urban fantasy games that use city aesthetics as wallpaper.
The supernatural city genre has been anime’s most reliable engine for the last decade. NTE is the first open-world game that understands why it works — and builds from there.
The Origin Story, Condensed
Neverness to Everness exists because:
- ▸A genre of anime spent thirty years proving that cities make the best supernatural settings
- ▸Hotta Studio spent three years proving they could build technically ambitious open worlds
- ▸A generation of players grew up on this visual language and is now the core gaming demographic
- ▸Nobody had yet built the game this genre deserved
That last point is what makes NTE significant. Not that it exists — but that it took this long, and that when it finally arrived, it arrived with enough commitment to the genre’s logic to actually work.
The question isn’t whether Neverness to Everness is an anime game. It obviously is, in all the ways that matter. The question is whether it’s a good one. The answer to that is still being written — but the blueprint it’s building from is as solid as any in the genre.