A Persona and Shin Megami Tensei artist trained an AI model to draw like him, and look at that, it wasn't worth it

Persona and Shin Megami Tensei's iconic artist Kazuma Kaneko has trained an AI model to create artwork based on his style for his next game, but in the end, he reckons it would've been quicker to just create the art himself.

Former Atlus artist Kazuma Kaneko is one of those video game artists that has cemented themselves as a legend thanks to their style. From the early days of the Megami Tensei, through Shin Megami Tensei, Persona, Devil Summoner, and most recently, Metaphor: ReFantazio Kaneko's art style and demon designs have been as much of a main character of the series as anything else. Kaneko was even brought on by Capcom to design Dante and Vergil's Devil Trigger designs for Devil May Cry 3.

Kaneko left Atlus in 2023 and joined mobile developer Colopl, and after a few years of silence, their first game together is now revealed. Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter is a dungeon-crawling roguelike in which you participate in battles with "Jinma cards" in an effort to conquer a structure called the Steel Tower.

One of the biggest new mechanics in the game is something known as the AI Kaneko System, which creates brand-new cards with AI-generated artwork based on your actions in-game, like deciding whether to help NPCs or not or your battle history. Players will be able to upload their AI-generated cards, with popular ones being turned into actual cards down the line.

Speaking to Game*Spark (via Automaton Media), Kaneko spoke about the process of training this AI model alongside the game's producer Yusuke Saito. Saito confirmed that the illustrations were trained on illustrations made after he joined Colopl, rather than basing it off his Atlus work: "we had it create tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of illustrations, and we continued to train it on the ones that Kaneko thought were closest to his drawings."

Although Saito admits, "We can't expect it to be "Kaneko-san's creativity itself." And since we can't expect that, we can't expect Kaneko-san's fans to be satisfied with it"

Kaneko said the generation process was easy for human characters, but as we know, his monster designs are the main event, and these proved to be a little harder to the point where this training process turned out to take longer than his regular output.

Kaneko said, "it's difficult to get it to draw creatures that don't actually exist, like 'a creature with two heads,'" Kaneko added, "Once it manages to output a similar image, I sometimes combine multiple images here to get closer to the image I want. To be honest, it's quicker for me to draw it myself from start to finish."

After nailing his first JRPG, Metaphor: ReFantazio's lead UI designer has one piece of advice for his old self: "Your PC is going to break in 2021. Do something about it!"