Perfect World Games’ anime-style open-world RPG Neverness to Everness is already giving players plenty to point at and go, wait, I know that reference.
The game has anime Easter eggs scattered around its world, including nods to titles like Bocchi the Rock! and Doraemon. But the one that will hit hardest for old-school car anime fans is the Ghost Racer / Drift Away Legend side mission chain in the Miguel District, which is basically NTE looking at Initial D and saying: yes bro, we watched it too.
After clearing Prologue 2, players can visit the Natsunari Tofu Shop and speak to its owner, Sota. Nearby fans reveal that Sota was once known as the God Racer of Hethereau around ten years ago, before he suddenly stepped away from racing just before going pro.
From there, the side quests pull players into Sota’s racing past, with the tofu shop owner slowly reconnecting with the thing he clearly still loves. And yes, the references are not subtle at all.
Sota drives a Novus ST79 with a panda-style black-and-white look that strongly resembles Takumi Fujiwara’s legendary Toyota Sprinter Trueno AE86 from Initial D. His job as a tofu shop owner is also a very direct wink at the Fujiwara Tofu Store, run by Takumi’s father, Bunta. Even the building itself looks like it was designed to make Initial D fans do a double take.
One early mission even has you delivering tofu using Sota’s car, which is about as close as NTE can get to recreating Takumi’s mountain delivery runs without putting the words Mount Akina on screen. Later races send players drifting through the mountainous roads of Hethereau, so the whole thing becomes a proper anime racing tribute inside an open-world RPG.
The best part? Players can actually buy the Novus ST79 for 600,000 Fons, an earnable in-game currency. So if you want to cruise around NTE pretending you are Malaysia’s next tofu delivery drift king, the game is absolutely enabling that behaviour.
For Malaysian and SEA players, this is the kind of crossover energy that works because Initial D has never really left the culture. Whether you discovered it through the anime, arcade cabinets, memes, eurobeat edits, or that one friend who suddenly became a car guy after watching Takumi drift, the AE86 silhouette is instantly recognisable. NTE tapping into that nostalgia gives the game a bit more personality than just being another stylish anime RPG with a big map.
It also shows how anime-inspired games are getting smarter with their fanservice. Instead of just dropping a poster or random quote, NTE builds a whole playable mission chain around the vibe: tofu shop, retired racer mentor, mountain roads, drifting, and the dream car. Simple, but effective.
Neverness to Everness is available on Android, iOS, PlayStation 5, Windows, and macOS, with the PC and Mac versions downloadable through the official website.
Source: Automaton Media