Neverness to Everness offers a hilarious, offbeat "anime GTA" experience, but its underlying open-world systems do not justify dropping your current main gacha game. If you are deciding whether to invest your daily login time here, play it strictly as a casual side-game for the absurd boss fights and City Tycoon business management. Do not expect it to replace heavyweights like Genshin Impact; the world map is too underdeveloped to sustain the thousands of hours of grinding required of a primary gacha title.
The Open-World Gacha Trap and Traversal Trade-Offs
Most players assume a new 3D open-world gacha needs to beat the genre titans at their own exploration game. The reality is entirely different. Neverness to Everness actively punishes you for treating it like a traditional exploration RPG. Hotta Studio built this urban sci-fi world to serve as a backdrop for wacky, unpredictable encounters, not a meticulously crafted puzzle box meant for endless wandering.
The immediate bottleneck you will face is traversal. You start the game stuck on a measly scooter moving at a complimentary snail's pace. In a massive city, this feels terrible. You have two choices to solve this time-sink: grind out the main progression to officially unlock flashier, faster vehicles, or simply steal them GTA-style. Stealing cars is the optimal decision shortcut. It completely bypasses the early-game movement penalty and lets you engage with the map on your own terms.
However, moving faster only highlights the game's core structural flaw. The overworld itself is largely empty and lackluster. Gacha players operate on strict daily time budgets. If a game demands 40 minutes of daily commissions in a barren city, retention plummets. Neverness to Everness attempts to mask this emptiness with absurdist humor. You might be driving to a shop only to get intercepted by a mouthy pair of sentient boxing gloves. This mini-boss instantly transforms the street into a literal boxing ring.
These quirky boss fights are highly entertaining, but they highlight a massive asymmetry in the game's design. You gain incredible, meme-worthy micro-encounters, but you lose the cohesive environmental storytelling that makes long-term grinding tolerable. Players who try to clear the map marker-by-marker will burn out within a week. The math simply does not favor exploration. Instead of scouring every alleyway for hidden chests, treat the open world purely as a highway to your next weird boss fight.
Prioritizing the City Tycoon Loop Over Map Clearing
If the open world is a trap, where should a new or returning player actually spend their time? The hidden engine driving the game's longevity is the City Tycoon side activity. In most gachas, your early hours are spent hoarding premium currency and rushing the main story to unlock daily artifact domains. Here, pushing the business management simulation yields a far higher return on your time investment.
The City Tycoon mode anchors the game's economy and gives the urban setting a mechanical purpose. You can purchase commercial properties, like a cafe, and manage their output. This creates a highly specific resource loop. Upgrading your cafe to serve better meals requires bulk ingredients. Sourcing a few dozen tomatoes sounds simple until the nearby shop with a giant tomato sign out front turns out to be entirely out of stock. The game forces you to pivot, turning a basic grocery run into an improvised, chaotic adventure across the city.
This is exactly where the game's systems align perfectly. The asymmetry of investment here is wild. Spending two hours hunting down vegetables to optimize your virtual cafe yields significantly more account momentum—and actual enjoyment—than two hours aimlessly driving your slow scooter around the outer city limits fighting random mobs.
New players should aggressively prioritize unlocking and funding these storefronts. It shifts the genre of the game from a subpar action-RPG into a bizarre, highly engaging urban life sim. When you reframe your daily login around managing your business empire rather than fighting damage-sponge enemies, the game's structural flaws matter far less. You log in, collect your cafe revenues, hunt down specific upgrade materials, fight whatever talking sporting goods get in your way, and log out. By treating the combat and exploration as secondary systems supporting your Tycoon empire, you completely bypass the gacha grind fatigue that kills most new releases in this genre.
Rethinking Your Daily Login Strategy
Stop treating Neverness to Everness like a primary progression game that demands your undivided loyalty. Shift your daily time budget entirely toward the City Tycoon management systems and steal cars to bypass the miserable early-game traversal. By treating the game as a weird, casual business sim interrupted by hilarious boxing-glove boss fights, you extract all the charm without suffering the burnout of its lackluster open world.
