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The story
Level-5’s Nintendo Direct footage has been flooded with dislikes on YouTube. The trigger was the discovery that part of the video was actually AI-generated fake footage — and on 5ch, users pointed out the irony, since the company had previously stated it didn’t “use AI that much in its games.” With reports that the studio is simultaneously developing as many as 14 titles, some questioned whether its development structure can even keep up. The thread ended up tangled between two separate arguments — whether using AI is acceptable at all, and whether hiding AI-generated content and passing it off as real is acceptable — with the anti-AI camp and the pro-AI camp clashing throughout.
What people said
How did it turn into this on its own?
Because it turned out to be, of all things, a fake video output by AI.
Snack World Reloaded
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
Holy Horror Mansion
Decapolice
Puchi Poyon
Yo-kai Watch Puni Puni
Yo-kai Watch: Great Detective Nyanosuke
Yo-kai Watch 2: Hadou
Professor Layton and the Curious Village Remake
Professor Layton and the New World of Steam
Inazuma Eleven Cross
Inazuma Eleven: Blazing Revolution
Inazuma Eleven RE
A 30th anniversary title
The president reportedly checks every single one of these himself — no wonder development is slow.
That company's only got about 300 employees, right?
Sounds just like Culture Brain (a small studio infamous for overextending itself into obscurity).
I knew they were using a lot of AI, but it was actually fake?
They went and said "we don't use AI that much in our games," so now anything AI-touched automatically counts as fake — what a dumb own-goal.
No way anyone actually believes a modern game can just be spat out by AI.
Ah, I see — so development basically hasn't progressed at all, and they used generative AI to fake a promo-style video to cover it up.
That's basically fraud, but given Level-5's habit of delaying everything and their insane number of projects in the pipeline, it wouldn't be shocking if they did.
And if they get criticized, they can just deflect the blame onto "anti-AI" backlash.
I see. Wouldn't be surprised if they're using this to solicit investment too.
Do they really want to repeat the same mistake as the "Winny" affair with this anti-AI rhetoric?
Have they forgotten how Japan fell completely behind overseas IT industries because of that, and is still catching up to this day?
If that hadn't happened, we might be living in a world where we're pulling in a million yen a month and buying whatever we want with the dollar at 80 yen.
If Winny had been left to run wild, wouldn't Japan's content industry have collapsed?
Are you from a generation that never actually used it?
It's an entirely different animal from AI.
The world has always weeded out jobs this way, hasn't it?
Are you going to protect every single job the same way every time — "think of the watchmakers," "think of the bank tellers"?
Stick to that kind of emotional argument and we'll lose to the rest of the world.
That's just because you're only picking up on opinions like that.
It's the plagiarism angle that's the real issue.
The backlash over jobs is no joke in the US either —
even programming, which was already a copy-paste culture to begin with, is getting slammed for AI use now.
What's not fine is when it obviously reeks of AI.
If you're gonna do it, do it without getting caught.
In a world with a norm that AI use must be disclosed, only generated content that breaks that norm without anyone noticing has any reason to survive.
Not disclosing it is basically grounds for a lawsuit.
But it's exactly the people who try sneaky little schemes like that who end up blowing up the worst.
That's really what it comes down to.
If they can't even hit their own deadlines properly, I can't keep sticking with them.
The last Direct probably would've gotten torn apart if it weren't for the Yo-kai Watch 2 remake, so they're needed.
Their like count and impressions are overwhelming too.
Level-5 is the only one still generating this much buzz nonstop.
surprised he hasn't been dragged through the mud before now.
Since the company isn't publicly listed, President Hino gets to run it like a one-man army.
It wouldn't be strange if it vanished any day now.
They're dreaming way too big about AI.
Still better than being like Square Enix, going 10 years without a new release and never finishing anything.
But other countries won't care about morals at all, and they'll keep developing right alongside AI's evolution.
At least Europe seems to be pushing solid legal regulation, and I'd guess the US will move that way too once the administration changes.
Isn't it really just China and North Korea with zero restraint?
The Yo-kai Watch 2 promo video was probably fake too, huh.
The walking animation felt off, and the way the background text
stood out felt AI-generated too.
Guess they figured even Yumenosuke could be finished off with "Generator 21" (thread in-joke treating AI as just another shortcut tool).
So Tanaka (lol) was serious after all.
As long as you don't get caught.
Lol, you're basically spinning it like "cheating is a sign of a capable man."
If that logic flies, the game industry's morals are done for.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Level-5 is an unlisted game company known for series like Yo-kai Watch, Inazuma Eleven, and Professor Layton, led by president Akihiro Hino. What drew the bulk of the criticism in the thread wasn’t the use of AI itself, but the fact that AI-generated footage was presented as if it were ordinary development footage — conflating that with the broader “is using AI acceptable” debate tends to muddy the real point. At the same time, the thread mixed in tangential threads of discussion, such as comparisons to the Winny case in debates over Japanese IT policy and comparisons of AI regulation across countries, which belong to a separate context from this specific incident. The report that the company is developing as many as 14 titles simultaneously also fueled speculation about how finished the footage really was, but that remains speculation within the thread rather than an officially confirmed fact.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “[Bad News] Level-5 Direct’s Dislikes Turn Into Something Outrageous….”
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