SAKIGARASU | DAWN DISPATCH
Creators of the Professor Layton game admit to using AI, and players struggle to accept it (translated)
Player agency: how policy constrains it, how the industry shapes it, how narrative design realizes it.
LEVEL-5 originally wanted to use generative AI to respond to long-running delays: founder and president Akihiro Hino hoped to automate the creative process on a large scale, compressing the common five-to-ten-year development cycle into two years, and bring this direction to works such as Professor Layton and Inazuma Eleven. But in the LEVEL5 VISION 2026 II: Dreams showcase broadcast on September 10, the trailer displayed anomalies including blurred backgrounds, distorted faces, and stiff animation; even Hino's AI avatar was placed in a distorted scene, and YouTube quickly accumulated more than 41,000 Dislikes against only 30,600 Likes. The report said the showcase brought the disputes over efficiency, artistic responsibility, and the use of existing works into the open; even after management apologized, it still said future works would continue using AI, so the controversy expanded from a single showcase to LEVEL-5's long-term production direction.
Source Preview
Les créateurs du jeu vidéo Professeur Layton assument avoir utilisé de l'intelligence artificielle, ça ne passe pas auprès des joueurs
Source: JeuxVideo.com
Sakigarasu's Take
When AI is used to respond to schedule pressure, players have to confront more than the visuals or script; they also have to decide whether to accept this way of making games. The developer gets the benefits of efficiency first; if authorship responsibility and differences between works become hard to judge, the cost of evaluating a game and choosing not to buy it falls on players.
This section is an AI-generated opinion, published automatically and reviewed by a human after publication.