In Hopes of Less Slop in 2026

Author

Stephanie Liu
December 30, 2025

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Speak Up Sesh

This month, we had The Game Awards on December 11, and to pretty much no one’s surprise, it was a Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sweep. For better or for worse, the game was the talk of the town after it came out. Even if you didn’t avoid it, it was hard to ignore its presence on social media between players treating it like it was the only RPG to have ever come out after Persona 5 and thus revitalizing a genre that was probably surprised to hear that it was dead, and players complaining about the aforementioned group. After TGA, though, more drama was airdropped over the community.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s usage of AI during development disqualified it from the Indie Game Awards, meaning that it lost its GOTY status in that competition. The honor then went to Blue Prince, which was also a contender at this year’s TGA. Apart from the already existing arguments about Expedition 33’s quality, there’s now a new layer to the arguments: whether its usage of AI was valid. Some believe that any genAI usage at any stage of development automatically makes the game bad. Some believe that the little amount used at such an early state of development has no bearing on the quality of the end result, and thus people shouldn’t judge a game based on that.

Really, the main issue that seemed to crop up again and again throughout 2025 was not Expedition 33, but rather, genAI and its place in video game development. In the past, I’ve spoken against its usage in translation, but now, it’s gotten to the point where games fully made using genAI are on the market. In an oft-misquoted interview, Hino Akihiro, the CEO of Level-5, commented on how many companies are relying on genAI. His own company had released a presentation on how it incorporates genAI into the workflow.

Hino’s claim that genAI can increase productivity in the creative world is funny considering his company’s track record of schedule slips. Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road has had a long and troubled production; everyone who has been following the story of its development even casually knows about this. Like Clair Obscur, genAI was probably used only during a portion of the development time, with humans coming in to fill in the blanks or build on the foundation that genAI made.

But for a company like Level-5, which is now notorious for its schedule slips, how much, really, is the amazing technology of genAI actually helping the process? Victory Road is fun and all, but for a game that was delayed as many years as it was, it’s rife with game-breaking bugs. I had to repeat the Nose match three times because the game kept crashing in the post-match cutscene. Speaking of Chronicle Mode, Galaxy was added as a route only recently, with Ares and Orion still nowhere on the horizon. Odd that I can’t recruit characters like Nosaka and Asuto when they existed in the beta, and even odder that these routes covering stories that came out, like, a decade ago aren’t in the game at launch.

Changes are consistently made to how the game works, such as the addition of Fabled (Basara) characters and the experience points issue that a developer forgot to toggle off before the game came out. You could argue that Fabled characters are a way to keep the player engaged, much like the DLC mode for Pokemon Legends Z-A. GameFreak wasn’t constantly rolling out little patches to fix bugs and disrupt the game’s existing mechanics prior, though. It hurts to say, as someone who genuinely really likes Inazuma Eleven and was excited for Victory Road, but it feels messy and rushed for such a major license.

Obviously, none of the issues I mentioned are related to genAI. Unless Level-5 started branching out more, their documents and Hino’s comments make it clear that they use genAI more for artistic direction. Using AI to fill in the audience instead of someone sitting there to manually draw them all in sounds like a pretty efficient use of it, but I also remember the slide of them using genAI to come up with the idea of a circle filled in with main characters from Inazuma Eleven, Go, and Ares for the anniversary artwork. It just seems like such a waste of time and resources for something that a human shouldn’t have trouble coming up with themself.

Nowadays, “human-made” is like its own status symbol. There’s value in something that can be confidently said to contain pure human creativity and zero theft. Blue Prince’s socials were quick to point out that no genAI was used at any point of development. The Hundred Line—unfortunately but predictably snubbed at The Game Awards, which has always had a bias against games with an overtly anime art style—was also mentioned as “perhaps the last long game made without genAI” on Twitter. With AI having a much more tangible consequence on even those who don’t live in areas affected by the data centers through rising RAM prices, here’s hoping that more and more backlash will grow against it in 2026.

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