Recently, whenever I chat with colleagues about games, I often like to repeatedly bring up the concept of "next-generation anime-style games." However, this term doesn't really hold much meaning; it's purely to help me better understand the trends of the new round of competition in the anime-style game market. After all, even "anime-style games" lack a clear definition to this day. So here, I will tentatively define them as F2P games featuring 2D illustrations or animated rendering styles, led by characters with diverse personalities and designs, and maintaining seasonal and periodic content updates.
As the name suggests, "next-generation anime-style games" refer to products that attempt to create genuine differences from current "anime-style games" on the market in certain aspects. This "difference" can be in development scale or investment cost, game theme and core gameplay, or even profit methods and operational models, just as traditional players like to use "Xth generation" to define the development and changes in the console market.
For a long time, I believed that the emergence of #Funtime would become an important turning point in the next-generation battle among anime-style games—not only because it truly achieved a high-risk attempt at the open-world genre under the "modern urban" theme, but also because Everythinggj about it is tangible and visible. While most anime-style games are still in an intermediate state between concept showcases and playable demos, it is already so close to us. Look, when I count on my fingers, I realize there are less than a week left until its open beta launch.
Thanks to the invitation from Hotta Studio and Perfect World, we were able to experience the pre-open beta version content offline in advance. Unlike previous tests, this demo did not have specific selling points, emphasizing a "play freely" approach. Most of the content we had already seen in the third test, yet it still represents all the attempts and improvements #Funtime made in less than two years.
Precisely because everyone is already quite familiar with it, I prefer to view this final offline event as a graduation exam. The results of this exam may not determine the examinee's entire life, but they are sufficient for the market to spot some trends.
So, before I actually got my hands on the game, the first thing that came to mind was a rarely mentioned concept: "two years." This is the time that has passed since #Funtime's initial reveal to its open beta—more precisely, one year and eleven months.
For the upcoming next-generation battle among anime-style games, competing on investment, gameplay, graphics, and even pricing is almost inevitable. Although many developers consider "modern urban" settings to be the most promising genre for next-generation "open-world anime-style games," everyone knows deep down that while it sounds easy to make, it is actually incredibly difficult.
Thus, we see many similar games taking five or six years to develop. Initial reveals receive good responses, but as the development cycle drags on, troubles multiply. I'm sure you've seen numerous projects in recent years with development cycles exceeding five years, or those that fell into long silences after高调 (high-profile) announcements, eventually having no retreat and being forced to rush to release.
Because time is often the most valuable resource in game development. It not only determines the final completeness of the game but also decides the number of trial-and-error opportunities you have, especially when facing something that looks very familiar but is essentially completely opposite.
We often say that the appearance of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild redefined the game architecture of "open worlds." Through a purely handmade approach, it delegated the arrangement of gameplay flow to players, using scene construction as natural guidance to enrich the experience of exploration and combat. This approach formed the underlying gameplay logic of previous open-world anime-style games—if I were an adventurer in a fantasy world, then exploring, fighting monsters, and opening chests would naturally be my desired daily life.
However, under the theme of "modern urban," this logic can no longer be applied. Reinforced concrete not only changed the landscape but also touched upon the path dependence and traditional methods of anime-style game developers.
Is this important? Very important.
On a superficial level: People living in modern cities do not carry swords and guns with them, and your enemies won't be slimes or goblins appearing out of nowhere; you need to find a reasonable cause for enemy appearances. In the wilderness, players interact with nature itself, attempting to climb trees and hills, gallop across plains, and search for treasures in caves or historical ruins.
But cities don't operate that way. Some people may still attempt to climb buildings, but more people will realize that the building in front of them is not just a vertical mound of earth; it should provide gameplay or services that truly fit the background. Moreover, the protagonist shouldn't be the only individual in this world with demands for urban life.
On a deeper level, changes in worldview architecture indirectly alter many conventional game design approaches. For instance, the guided map composition mode pioneered by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild uses unconventional scene structures like waterfalls, towers, and villages to hint at action and exploration routes for players. However, when buildings and overpasses block the view, this design seems less versatile.
At least for players who are more accustomed to exploring on foot, its role in game design has indeed been greatly diminished.
Therefore, I am more inclined to care about whether urban-themed games represented by #Funtime have truly completed the construction of "modern life content." If they fail to do so, they will merely be reskins of previous-generation open-world games, featuring similar combat systems, similar stamina and exploration mechanics, while losing the advantages inherited from their predecessors.
So, what exactly is "modern life content"?
It refers to things modern people do (or can barely manage) in urban life, such as driving on motorways, entering stores to shop... What are characters doing when no special events are occurring? You see, the story background of #Funtime is set in a large metropolis called "Hailote," and the protagonist is a "semi-public servant" responsible for handling supernatural affairs. They earn a salary, live in free employee dormitories, and enjoy plenty of free time to do whatever they want on the streets. It's quite enviable.
Therefore, to understand the level of modern life content construction in #Funtime, you must focus on the interactive experience between characters and the city, observing how it differs from previous open-world anime-style games.
To achieve this, #Funtime introduced a very important design element that is easily overlooked by the market and anime-style game users: maximizing the presence of in-game currency to simulate a real urban economic system.
In-game currency is an element present in almost all service-based games. It is the minimum reward players can obtain through pure content gameplay, usually used for character progression or trading insignificant items, and is also a common method for operators to give free rewards. In Hailote City within #Funtime, this in-game currency is called "Fangs," but the difference lies in the fact that it is almost the core item necessary for the city to function, which is rare in pure service-based games—the closest example is probably the online version of that game released over ten years ago that still frequently appears on Steam's bestseller list.
Hailote City indeed possesses most of the major gameplay elements you can think of in "urban" themed games. Players can shop in the city, buy cars and houses according to their preferences and needs, or spend money on "meaningless" items like gacha capsules or trendy toys. Meanwhile, the city also provides corresponding profit-making methods for characters living within it, such as running shops or racing.
It is worth mentioning that although these elements were released when #Funtime was first unveiled and used as promotional highlights, the game optimized the UI for this part of the "urban simulation" content during the third test earlier this year. They were integrated into a single directory named "Urban Tycoon," allowing players to more intuitively access the required information and functions.
Returning to the main topic, in this process called "urban life simulation," the game consistently asks players for Fangs, and the rewards are also primarily in Fangs. This made me consciously pay attention to and earn Fangs, as if it truly became a necessary resource for living in the city. Even in the game, I felt more than once that Fangs guided player behavior in urban life, forming an effective cycle between core combat gameplay and daily activities.
Because players want to buy cars and houses, they will focus their efforts on gameplay with clearer returns, such as shop management, ride-hailing, or other lifestyle activities. By placing successfully contained anomalies in purchased properties, players can gain benefits in combat and exploration.
This is a gameplay guidance model built entirely on positive rewards. More importantly, it represents #Funtime's tentative answer, as a next-generation anime-style game, to the unavoidable "content drought" issue faced by all products of similar scale.
With development costs for similar products rising, every version update for open-world anime-style games means significant resource investment: new stories, new performances, new characters, new gameplay, and resolving old issues, each requiring substantial input. Based on past experience, the speed at which users consume content seems always faster than imagined. Coupled with information sharing within player communities, players often exhaust prepared content shortly after a new version is released.
To address this, #Funtime naturally prepared countermeasures. At this offline event, the Hotta Studio team stated that to welcome the upcoming open beta, their content reserves have already entered later versions—at least for a long period after launch, the game will not enter a negative state of content shortage.
But after all reserve content is exhausted, the game still needs a self-sustaining continuous gameplay loop. At that point, "urban simulation" content will become the main source keeping the game hot. A self-consistent in-game economy gives players a goal that, while utilitarian, is clear enough, and the meticulous attention to detail in content adds a touch of emotional value to this inherently utilitarian objective.
Admittedly, #Funtime is still an ARPG-type anime-style game. Character cultivation and real-time combat remain its primary gameplay. Even compared to some anime-style games on the market that specialize in "combat" or "action performance," it hasn't made many visible innovations. It still follows the development思路 (approach) of keeping the large framework unchanged while piling up small mechanisms and proprietary terms. In the game, you can still see combat mechanisms like "elemental reactions" or "character switching attacks," which have become standard in similar products...
To be honest, whether it's the immediacy and feedback of combat performances, or the combinations of moves, skills, and actions, #Funtime has at best achieved an above-average level among competitors of this generation—although this is already the best result obtained after several rounds of testing and listening to extensive player feedback.
But for #Funtime, this is not Everythinggj; in fact, it accounts for less than half of its total content.
As mentioned earlier, the version available at this offline demo event is infinitely close to the upcoming open beta version. Apart from graphical upgrades, optimizations to some models that are hard to notice at first glance, and NVIDIA-provided DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Generation with more natural ray tracing effects, we didn't see many unexpected elements. However, this allowed me to focus on details outside the main storyline and combat gameplay, such as those relatively less "utilitarian" aspects, or things that touch upon the essence of anime-style games—in fact, this is what the title of this article, "Essence of Anime-Style Games," attempts to refer to.
"What exactly are anime-style games?" has never had a clear answer. In more contexts, it leans towards a commercial concept or rhetoric, aiming to develop products from the perspective of user preferences. The market has repeatedly confirmed the effectiveness of this development model from the side—it seems that what always drives the enthusiasm of anime-style game users and communities are those game characters with distinct personality traits and the fan-created phenomena based on them.
The main storyline of such games often puts great effort into shaping characters. When players like the characters in the game enough to spend real money on them, the business logic of anime-style games holds true. Therefore, the core value of anime-style games actually comes from the characters and the interactive content matched with them.
I think this is perhaps the greatest attraction of anime-style games for their core users—at least for me. It might not sound nice to say: In the upcoming new round of competition among anime-style games, players will have more gaming choices, and time will be even more precious. Therefore, compared to those grind-heavy contents based on combat that require repetition, I lean more towards intangible flow-state content.
As an anime-style game player, I've never been a "meta chaser," because I tend to believe that the essence of these games lies in how they provide emotional value to players. In the past, players were satisfied with simple affinity voice lines, but today, each character's episodic story, simulated text messages and interactive dialogues, and even "special events" derived from affinity levels have become standard features.
#Funtime naturally included all the elements mentioned above from the start, but merely having them only puts it on the same starting line as similar games. The reason it is said to be touching upon the "essence" is that #Funtime's construction of "urban simulation" gameplay provided inherent advantages for creating emotional value from the very beginning.
During the last test, #Funtime added more character interaction systems. As affinity with characters increases, you can go for drives with other characters, stroll hand-in-hand through the city, play arcade games together, or even live under the same roof. This time, I even dragged them along to play a few rounds of mahjong.
The broad backdrop of the modern city and the simulation gameplay of urban life give this extended character interaction more合理性 (reasonableness), just like how you might go out with colleagues after work in real life, hanging around the streets—the only difference is that you probably don't have beautiful female colleagues.
This ensures that characters not present in the current story are no longer just human-shaped standees standing in place. It also allows those scenes in #Funtime with a strange sense of animation déjà vu to serve purposes beyond imagination and photography. Combined with the well-received first-person switch and drone mode from the previous test, you can more easily gain emotional connections with characters in this game, along with the resulting emotional value.
This is probably the truth that #Funtime realized during its previous tests, and it is one of the reasons I classify #Funtime as a "next-generation anime-style game."
Two years ago, also in Suzhou, at a similar event venue, I played the test version of #Funtime for the first time. At that time, the first PV for #Funtime had just been released, and many players were paying attention to it simply because of Hotta Studio and the impressive-sounding tagline of "modern urban open world."
In that version, the biggest feature of #Funtime was its construction of the urban "shell." #Funtime is a great simulator for anime cyber-pilgrimages; Everythinggj in the map operates according to real-city rules, and the combination of new weird tales themes with templated combat is decent, though there are still不少 (many) flaws.
In subsequent tests, Hotta Studio frantically explored, attempted remakes, and optimized based on players' complaints and feedback.
Take the vehicle driving experience before the third test, for example. Nowadays, the handling of most vehicles has become relatively realistic and smooth, and no one describes it as driving a slippery coffin anymore. Almost simultaneously, several tests filled in new content, such as the once-viral "prison break" gameplay and the song collaboration with "MyGO!!!!!" Many details and derivative gameplay elements that are "unnecessary" in persistent online games began to appear in the cracks of Hailote City.
Among these, Hotta Studio's efficiency in absorbing player opinions and making decisions is surprisingly fast for a game company with hundreds of employees.
Interestingly, after this demo, participants no longer focused on the game's shortcomings—or rather, there was no need to look for flaws because its urban architecture has become nearly complete, and its features and advantages are sufficient to cover most imperfections at the experiential level.
Soon, #Funtime will become the first product in the anime-style game market to bring the "modern urban open world" to the forefront. I am willing to believe that its greatest advantage among anime-style game users is neither combat nor the free exploration of the urban open world, but rather Hotta Studio's "willingness to listen" and its touch upon the essence of anime-style games.
We'll just have to wait and see.