ANANTA launches January 15, 2027, and NetEase is putting its enormous anime city on phones from day one

January 15 is now the date when ANANTA has to stop being an impressive collection of trailers and become a product.

NetEase announced the worldwide launch during Gamescom, confirming PS5, PC, iOS and Android for the same day.

The game will be free-to-play.

The city is no longer pretending to be a modest open world

Naked Rain describes ANANTA as an urban RPG built around extreme freedom.

Players will move through business districts, hidden alleys, old streets and quieter areas across locations including Nova City and Chongxiao.

The developer points to Shanghai, Hangzhou and Tokyo as real-world inspirations.

The aim is not simply to create a large map. The studio wants its cities to support ordinary routines, strange encounters and major action sequences without separating them into completely different games.

Cars are only the beginning of the traversal list

ANANTA currently advertises cars, motorcycles, subway travel, helicopters, yachts and hang gliders.

Previous footage has also shown characters swinging through the city and using its vertical architecture to move between streets and rooftops.

Naked Rain's stated philosophy is essentially that players should be able to go where they can see.

That promise is going to become expensive once the same city needs to exist on a mobile GPU.

Calling it anime GTA is convenient, but increasingly incomplete

Urban driving, police-style action and chaotic traffic naturally invite Grand Theft Auto comparisons.

ANANTA is also structured around a cast rather than one fixed protagonist.

Players can switch identities and experience the city as different characters, with roles including an officer, hacker, delivery rider and content creator.

Those roles are supposed to alter what the player can do rather than simply change the outfit on the same avatar.

Going viral is now part of saving the world

NetEase's new pitch is “Go Viral. Save the World.”

Reputation and social influence are being incorporated into progression, with missions and city events contributing to the player's visibility and unlocking additional resources or perks.

That gives ANANTA an unusually contemporary theme for an open-world RPG.

The influencer is not merely background satire. Algorithmic culture is becoming part of how the player interacts with the city.

More than 100 NPCs come with stories and quests

Naked Rain says players can encounter over 100 NPCs with individual stories.

Relationships can lead to allies, items, badges and additional combat abilities.

Earlier demonstrations also showed a broader NPC ecosystem where characters move through the city and unscripted activities can appear around the player.

Some interactions are ordinary. You can visit shops or pet cats.

Others include gang conflicts and snooping on people's phones.

The city is being filled with places that are supposed to matter

NetEase lists cinemas, mahjong parlours, arcades, cat cafés, maid cafés, gyms, restaurants, clothing stores and open-air hot springs.

The obvious question is how many of them contain substantial activities rather than a short interaction.

The publisher has not yet documented every urban system in enough detail to answer that.

Combat treats street furniture as part of the moveset

Naked Rain is building battles around environmental improvisation.

Characters can disarm opponents, use terrain and weaponise ordinary objects during martial-arts encounters.

Footage has shown tyres being thrown into enemies and fights spilling naturally across urban spaces.

It gives the open world a purpose during combat rather than freezing the city into background decoration whenever a battle starts.

The mobile version is where all of this becomes technically uncomfortable

A dense city is difficult enough to optimise for a fixed console.

Android alone covers a huge range of GPUs, memory capacities, cooling designs and display resolutions.

A phone also has to deliver this workload within a few watts while sharing its thermal budget with a modem, display and battery charging.

NetEase has not yet published final iOS or Android minimum specifications, performance targets or storage requirements.

A PC trailer tells us very little about the final phone

Crowd density, traffic, shadows, reflections, foliage, interior complexity and draw distance can all be changed dramatically between hardware tiers.

That means ANANTA merely existing on Android will not be the interesting achievement.

The question is how much of the city shown in promotional footage can survive on a reasonably common handset.

A technically functional mobile port with empty streets would satisfy the platform list while undermining one of the game's central ideas.

Touch controls have to absorb an unusual number of systems

ANANTA combines driving, melee combat, ranged action, character switching, vertical traversal and conventional exploration.

Each system already consumes substantial controller input.

Naked Rain has not yet shown enough of the final mobile interface to establish how those actions will fit onto a touchscreen without overwhelming the display.

That problem cannot be solved by resolution scaling.

Free-to-play remains the other major unknown

NetEase has confirmed ANANTA will launch for free.

The final monetisation structure has not yet been explained in enough detail to establish how characters, cosmetics or progression will be sold.

That matters enormously in a game whose identity depends on switching between a varied cast.

A system where characters are primarily earned through story progression would create a very different open world from one where access revolves around repeated paid recruitment.

For now, that distinction remains unresolved.

Mobile is not being treated as a delayed adaptation

The official pre-registration campaign places App Store and Google Play alongside Steam and PlayStation.

All four environments are scheduled for January 15.

There is no “mobile later” footnote.

That makes smartphones part of the launch design rather than a port planned after the console game is finished.

Naked Rain was built around this cross-platform problem

The studio operates teams in Hangzhou and Montreal and says its staff has more than a decade of free-to-play development experience.

NetEase also highlights expertise across console, PC and mobile operations.

ANANTA is an unusually literal demonstration of that structure: build something that looks like a large console open world while designing it to operate as a global free-to-play service across several device classes.

Its release date also guarantees GTA comparisons

Grand Theft Auto VI is currently scheduled for November 19, 2026.

ANANTA follows less than two months later.

They are very different products, but the proximity is difficult to ignore when both sell the fantasy of moving freely through a dense modern city.

ANANTA's distinction is equally obvious: anime styling, free access, character switching and native smartphone versions.

The real risk is not lacking ideas

ANANTA has almost too many.

More than 100 NPCs, multiple cities, numerous jobs, social influence, cars, aircraft, boats, acrobatic traversal, interactive combat and free-to-play progression all compete for attention.

The difficult part is turning that list into one coherent game rather than a sequence of disconnected systems.

Mobile makes the problem even harsher because every extra system also consumes memory, interface space and processing time.

January turns the technical showcase into a commitment

For several years, ANANTA could impress simply by demonstrating possibilities.

It now has to deliver them.

On January 15, Naked Rain is expected to put Nova City on a gaming PC, a PlayStation 5 and a smartphone at the same time.

If traffic, vertical exploration, crowds and urban activities survive that transition intact, ANANTA could become one of the clearest examples yet of the traditional boundary between mobile and console games collapsing.

If the phone version has to strip much of that away, it will reveal exactly where that boundary still exists.