Gaming

Level-5's CEO Apologized for AI in a Showcase, Then Confirmed AI Is the Company's Future

By Omar aka Crypt0 · Sep 16, 2026

Level-5 chief executive Akihiro Hino did something unusual this weekend: he apologized for using generative AI, and in the same statement confirmed that generative AI is central to his company's future. After fans noticed AI assisted footage during the Level-5 Vision 2026 II showcase, including trailers for Professor Layton and the New World of Steam, Decapolice, and Fantasy Life i, Hino posted a public statement on social media on September 12.

The apology was specific. Hino said the team used AI processing to make the presentation more spectacular, as an experiment with the latest technology, and that he was sorry some viewers felt uncomfortable. He then drew a firm line: scenarios, character designs, and basic settings are created by human hands. What AI does at Level-5, he said, is digitize human made creative work, accurately converting original artwork into polygons, for example. He assured players that released games carry only human made creative work.

Then came the sentence that matters more than the apology. Hino wrote that AI efficiency frees creators to spend more time on the essence of creation, and that the company plans to shorten its development cycle for major titles from five years to two. The statement closes with 'we will take this as a lesson,' aimed squarely at the showcase. The strategy itself keeps moving the other direction.

The response shows why the line matters so much to players. Samuel Deats, director of the Castlevania animated series at Powerhouse Animation Studios, argued that even human made assets processed through generative AI implicate training data scraped from artists, saying the tools are trained on works taken from countless artists. Japanese fans, in a market where generative AI carries less stigma than in the West, voiced serious concerns too. One longtime fan wrote that the statement left real worries about the environmental cost and about respect for the team members who built the games.

Here is the new normal in game development, stated plainly. Studios now run two products: the games and the story they tell about how the games get made. The trust gap is the real asset at stake. A five year cycle cut to two could mean more games sooner, and AI handling the mechanical digitization of human art is a defensible use. The studios that will win this argument are the ones that say exactly where the AI stops, in public, before the showcase airs.

Sources

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