I’m Insanely Excited For Ananta, But Not For The Reason You Think

It’s been a good week for those interested in the upcoming free-to-play open-world anime action RPG Ananta. Twice, this week, NetEase has dropped sizeable videos showing off gameplay. We hadn’t seen a lot of this game yet. But we had seen enough for people to make comparisons to other games, particularly GTA. You know, with the cars, and the gangs, and all. And, they’re apt comparisons. But after watching this new video, I realized that I’m looking at the replacement for the Saints Row games that will never happen. It’s just that silly.

If you didn’t know, the Saints Row franchise is one of my all-time favorites. Well… at least everything before whatever that last one was, anyway. While I obviously love a good, serious story-based game, Saints Row was something that was just fun. I’m not saying it didn’t have some solid story beats, but what it really did extremely well was to not take itself too seriously. It was over the top. Even in Saints Row 2, which was arguably far more serious than anything that came after, there was already a good bit of “it ain’t that serious” happening. You just have to look at Johnny Gat’s trial scene to see that.

At the end of the day, it was a fun, cathartic way to check out for a while. And if it involved a madman with a giant pink cat head running murder games, or the main character becoming president before gaining superpowers in a simulation… well… why not?

Looking at the gameplay videos, Ananta feels like a slightly more low-key version of that. I mean, in the video dropped today, a gang starts a beef with the main character because they want to host a concert, only apparently, renting a venue isn’t how they want to go about it. And, honestly, what does the main character have to do with concert management anyway? Then there’s the Venom/Spider-Man superpowers the main character has going on.

According to the descriptions on the game’s site and video, a big part of the game is building a social media presence, which seems a bit odd for a sort of cop, but we’ll roll with it. That really does have Saints Row vibes with the Third Street Saints building an entire media empire.

Of course, it’s a small quibble on my part. Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row are, at their core, very similar games. It’s just that the latter took a rather large narrative divergence as more games were developed. One maintained a more true-to-reality narrative, and the other one purposefully went off the rails.

Ananta has something else in common with the latter parts of the Saints Row franchise. As one comment on the first Ananta gameplay trailer put it, “The devs really just passionately strung together their favorite bits of every game they’ve ever played.” Saints Row did that, only with other types of media. We had Jane Austen narrating bits of Saints Row IV, and by Gat Out of Hell, we had a full Disney princess thing going on with Satan’s daughter, and Shakespeare was running an entire section of Hell. It was stupid, but it was fun stupid. Ananta may not be quite that weird yet, but the devs had to be singing “My Favorite Things” while putting this game together.

Based on comments, it seems that as development progressed, the devs also made the main character less serious than he originally was. Instead, we have a chill, humorous individual, which makes sense with that whole social media thing. And well, I don’t know how seriously you can really take fights started with you by a gang of musicians mad about concert venues.

So far, I love all of this. I was originally just excited to have a game like this set in an open-world urban environment. That’s the same reason Neverness to Everness has my attention. But what I’m seeing now, I’m loving even more. I’ve missed Saints Row for a long time, and this looks like an excellent successor.

As an aside, I’m also thrilled this game is doing monetization without the gacha system. I play a lot of gacha games, but that doesn’t mean I’d much rather just buy outfits and customization items to play dress-up with. Honestly, a gacha system in this type of game would be weird anyway.