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[Thief1987]

More info in the Gematsu article

Project Mugen debut trailer, details, and screenshots

Publisher NetEase Games and Thunder Fire Studio developer Naked Rain have released first trailer, information, and screenshots for the newly announced free-to-play “urban open-world RPG&#8221…

www.gematsu.com

... free-to-play “urban open-world RPG” Project Mugen, which will be available for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PC, iOS, Android, and the cloud. The PlayStation 4 version is newly confirmed. Pre-registration is available now via the official website.

Urban, Open-World Setting – Explore a vast map that delivers a rich city life experience. From neon-lit nightlife to serene parks, every corner of the city holds a story. Engage in open exploration, scaling skyscrapers, diving into subways, and interacting with a dynamic environment that reacts to your every move.
Unique Combat Experience – Engage in team-based combat with four characters, each having different attributes that synergize with each other. Utilize environmental objects in battle and make use of the urban terrain to deal with monsters in various ways.
Captivating Artistic Style – Project Mugen is more than a game; it’s a visual journey. The art direction, a blend of modern aesthetics with ethereal touches, promises to captivate players at every turn.
Fast Paced Traversal and Vehicles – Every character has a basic movement skill such as parkour, swinging, or wall-climbing. Some characters also have a unique travel ability based on their individual identity, like riding a special war hammer. Players can also intercept and ride vehicles like cars in the city.

 

[Arsic]

Gotta be honest all these anime looking games in the last 5ish years look the same. It all seems like they are made by the Genshin Impact devs.

Genshin
Tower of Fantasy
zzz
Mugen
Blue protocol
Star Rail

Am I missing any ? It’s so hard to differentiate these games to me and not think they are all just gacha games with piss easy combat for idiots without any kind of end game or challenge to go up against.

 

[K2D]

Ah.. wrong Mugen.

 

[killatopak]

The movement looks amazing,

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

This looks fucking stunning!!!!

 

[sigmaZ]

 

[Doom85]

Those environments look great, as does the characters‘ traversal. Combat looks good too.

 

[Salz01]

Sign me up. Thank god for eastern devs….

 

[Guilty_AI]

Looks good but... its gacha isn't it? Please don't be gacha

 

[Thief1987]

Looks good but... its gacha isn't it? Please don't be gacha

Most likely as it is on mobile. I see it as a NetEase's take on Genshin.

Edit OP updated with the info from gematsu

 

[Aenima]

Will be there day 1. Looks amazing. If i stay long or not depends how fair the monetization is for free players. Never played a F2P game from NetEase so no idea how they do things.
I find it funny that they ripped off the traversal from spider man, but its great for fast traversal in urban open world.

 

[Larxia]

This looks incredible.
This is exactly the kind of open world I'm looking for. It's so rare to see large and good looking anime open world games, and here it looks amazing, full of life, with complete freedom, I love it.

The problem however is that it's also releasing on Mobile, which means gacha / mobile systems. I would be a lot more excited if this was a regular console / pc game instead.

I used to like Genshin at first, but the whole mobile design ruined it for me. It's not even the Gacha pulls that I hated the most, they were annoying but not what drove me away from genshin. What made me stop Genshin is the whole mobile game design, where you have a limited amount of ressources per day, forcing you to log in every day for your daily grind, the horrible artifacts RNG making it that it can take you MONTHS to get the equipement you want, etc...

I want to be able to play whenever I want, for how long I want. Being forced to log in every evening for 20 minutes ends up being very annoying, every tasks feel like a job rather than playing.

Oh and I also hope this won't have the horrible Genshin dialogues.

 

[Heisenberg007]

It looks fantastic!

If they go easy on gatcha, this can become a big hit.

 

[Danjin44]

If it’s F2P gacha game then I have zero interest, especially the fact we have Granblue Fantasy Relink coming out that’s going give me proper game without any of F2P gacha crap. Funny thing is Granblue series came from mobile gacha game.

 

[Sintoid]

What a shameless mix of copypastes

 

[RoadHazard]

Looks visually good, but it's gonna be trash just like Genshin (yes, Genshin is trash).

Nice Spider-Man moves.

 

[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

saintjules like we've talked yesterday, talented devs making amazing looking games with high production values which in this case is yet another F2P gacha.

 

[SABRE220]

Honestly, I wish atlus etc could poach/clone their artists and source their engine because honestly this is the most impressive and refreshing show of styled graphics so far and theres a big gulf from even ones using UE comparatively.

Unfortunately my interest in this game died with gacha but credit where credit is due.

 

[Majukun]

i thought it was the OTHER project mugen reboot or something

 

[8BiTw0LF]

If they would just tone down the whimpy voices and add some music with balls. 80's and 90's anime used to be so cool - what the fuck happened?

 

[RagnarokIV]

Thought this was that game where Goku can fight Bugs Bunny in a tag team with Fred Flintstone and Barney Gumball?

 

[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

PlayStation Japan has posted a blog with more details.

基本プレイ無料『Project Mugen』始動！ 色鮮やかな巨大都市を舞台に、人類を脅かす超常現象に仲間と共に立ち向かおう！

基本プレイ無料のアーバンオープンワールドRPG『Project Mugen』始動！ 色鮮やかな巨大都市で多様なアーバンライフを楽しみながら、仲間と出会い、人類を脅かす超常現象をともに解決しよう！

blog.ja.playstation.com

 

[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

Akira, anyone!?

 

[Rickyiez]

Everyone wanted a piece of that Genshin money now . All hail Gatcha

 

[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

Even if it will be a live service F2P gacha, I think I'll give this one a fair shot.

 

[Roxkis_ii]

Free to play + on moble = No thank you.

This smells like Gatcha.

 

[Aion002]

Astral Chain, Scarlet Nexus, Spiderman and Genshin Impact + vehicles and a little bit of Persona style combined.... That seems cool.

 

[Woopah]

These games are becoming key drivers for PS in Japan, so not surprised Sony is pushing for these kinds of titles.

 

[Hugare]

They straight up stole animations from Spider-man lol

It looks really good, apart from the "anime girl" aesthetic. Can't stand those.

 

[Exentryk]

It looks amazing. And the combat also seems interesting. Would definitely be keen to try even though I might not stick with it since it's a F2P structure.

 

[Melfice7]

Expected nightmare broly

 

[FalsettoVibe]

Looks great....but the gacha stuff may be off putting.

 

[CamHostage]

Honestly, I wish atlus etc could poach/clone their artists and source their engine because honestly this is the most impressive and refreshing show of styled graphics so far and theres a big gulf from even ones using UE comparatively.

I don't think there's much "engine" to this? (It may even be Unity-based again, like Genshin Impact, in which case, Atlus can just go get Unity as well as whatever plugins ThunderFire/Naked Rain used to make the game.)

Rather, this mostly seems to look good just from a ton of manual work (and possibly a ton of repurposed market asset material,) and flashy effects layering. Tech-wise, there's good but also not-that-special stuff going on here from what I'm seeing. (I actually think it'll not need much customization to run on both high-end console/PC and decent phones, which appears to be the plan as there's nothing said about the mobile release being a bespoke version.) Lighting is not particularly accurate, city models have a lot of replication/procedural generation ads well as simplified structure, the terrain is a flat map, nothing extraordinary is used on pedestrian density or tracking, physics isn't rich or deep... it seems to be a rather regular game underneath all the pizzazz.

But it is very, very sexy pizzazz.

Also, they did a ton of work to make the character models stand out and animate with fine detail for fluidity, plus they placed a lot of little lighting touches anywhere that there is a canned animation cutscenes (visual effects and lighting are much more subdued in the "in-game" sequences, and shadows appear to be animated rather than calculated, also have a strange implementation where shadows just disappear/fizzle out in the middle of some effects.) And they have great color choices throughout, including some choice hews for glow effects of attacks and moves. Much like Genshin Impact, NetEase's developers put in a lot of work and paid a lot of money for resources to make all this look so smooth and attractive.

 

[nikos]

Game looks incredible. Can't wait to play it. Hope it's not too far out.

 

[kiphalfton]

Anime looking games always have awful movement/animations. So in real doubt. But then again it looks like they just ripped off Spiderman web traversal, so I guess it's not too far out of the realm of possibility.

 

[March Climber]

Gotta be honest all these anime looking games in the last 5ish years look the same. It all seems like they are made by the Genshin Impact devs.

Genshin
Tower of Fantasy
ZZZ
Mugen
Blue protocol
Star Rail

Am I missing any ? It’s so hard to differentiate these games to me and not think they are all just gacha games with piss easy combat for idiots without any kind of end game or challenge to go up against.

Honestly I don't mind the idea of these games as they're pushing the idea of what a 'mobile game' means into new heights, with bigger budgets. My main issue is with most of these games' storytelling methods and writing. Since they have no choice but to rely on being a live service game, it means that devs will just add a lot of fluff dialogue that has no bearing on anything related to the plot.

For example, a quest that revolves around how much someone likes apples and knowing more about why they like apples so much, is just not compelling stuff. It makes it tough to care about the main plot because by the time you get to a new 'act' within that main plot, you sort of don't care anymore about what's happening as everything else in the game has been urging you closer and closer to that dialogue skip option. Somehow, this kind of meaningless writing snuck into FF 16 and it's a damn shame that it did.

The sad thing is that most gacha fans simply don't care and won't care, as long as the devs don't cover up the women and make sure they're cute, that's all they care about and those fans will eat up anything that's thrown their way. It's like anime fans when they constantly buy yet another 3d arena fighting game starring their favorite new anime characters.

tl;dr I will give this a shot if it has decent enough writing.

 

[Danjin44]

Why is so hard these devs to make proper game thats not F2P gacha crap? If Cygames can do it with Granblue then so can they.

 

[gela94]

If they would just tone down the whimpy voices and add some music with balls. 80's and 90's anime used to be so cool - what the fuck happened?

weebs

 

[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

New more unscripted gameplay has been shared here in this reddit post.

 

[CamHostage]

Why is so hard these devs to make proper game thats not F2P gacha crap? If Cygames can do it with Granblue then so can they.

Because having an opportunity to make $billions with a product is hard to say no to...

Also, "proper game" as in single-player A-to-Z narrative adventures aren't the business they're in. Cygames has diversified brands with anime, manga, game, and app releases. They would prefer to launch non-stop GAAS/Gacha releases if all of them could be a cash cow, but their strategy is different where they cultivate brands for its various market interests. Netease does what Netease does, and not everybody likes it, but it's proper for their business plan and they're successful at it in an incredibly challenging market.

 

[SABRE220]

New more unscripted gameplay has been shared here in this reddit post.

Hmm I know I cant judge from offscreen gameplay but that looks a solid step down from the trailer, though it might be that was on pc and this is on mobile.

 

[Drizzlehell]

 

[Azurro]

Yet another Waifu free to play game.

 

[Elitro]

The graphics look great, but the game looks really generic.

This waifu pandering is getting really old. I get it that it's the formula used for the other gachas, but there's nothing wrong for your game to have a personality of its own...

 

[Kurotri]

The future is anime girls, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. I personally welcome our weeb overlords.

Hopefully I can marry my waifu soon.

 

[VN1X]

Starting to lose track which one of these is which to be honest. But saying that, this one does look spectacular. I just wish they'd be more forthcoming with what it actually is? Is it singleplayer only? MMO-lite? F2P? Gacha elements? RPG or more of a Character Action game? So many questions...

 

[Fuz]

I don't see Vegeta beating up Mike Haggar. Something's wrong.

 

[Fuz]

P. S.
Fuck waifu culture, what a fucking cancer.

 

[UnNamed]

 

[Kakax11]

Another softcore H-game