Yuji Horii, the game designer known for Dragon Quest and The Portopia Serial Murder Case, used AI to create a mystery adventure game called Interrogation Room Komiya and released it for free on X. According to Horii, the whole thing took only about 30 minutes to make. On 5ch, some posters praised the technical feat (“this is genuinely impressive”), while others debated whether AI would push game development toward smaller teams and lower budgets — alongside the counterpoint that “tools are meaningless without talent behind them.” Plenty of nostalgic comments also recalled the setting of Portopia.
2026.10.11 19:41
Dragon Quest and Portopia creator Yuji Horii releases AI-assisted game ‘Interrogation Room Komiya’ for free — a mystery adventure that took “about 30 minutes” to make
Game designer Yuji Horii, known for the Dragon Quest series and The Portopia Serial Murder Case, announced on his X (Twitter) account that he had made a game using AI.
Source: famitsu.com / Original article here
Yeah, lately whenever there's a "big Horii announcement!" headline, this is the first thing that crosses my mind.
I really hope he lives a long life…
Doesn't have to be Horii, either — bring back stuff like the old Famicom Tantei Club or Jinguji Saburo (Detective Jinguji Saburo) games.
I feel like Jinguji games were still coming out fairly recently.
The latest Famicom Tantei Club game, which came out two years ago, got slammed by longtime fans.
Apparently adventure games just don't make money.
I like them too —
I really wish they'd make a new Cross Tantei Monogatari (Cross Detective Story) game.
Anti-AI crowd, lol
Feels like the aftertaste of reading a short-short story.
Komiya wasn't killed — he's the old security guard.
Apparently a bunch of the famous Dragon Quest music tracks were also knocked out in about an hour each.
Pure talent and connections — what an absurd racket.
It lets you make games with smaller teams, less time, and lower budgets after all.
Guess it's an era where anyone can make a game now.
But nothing happened! (a riff on Dragon Quest's classic "used the Medicinal Herb, but nothing happened" message)
Software makers are finished.
I feel like copying something with AI and using AI to build software are different things, but lol, I do want Adobe's stranglehold to end.
Can't tell anymore, honestly.
Apparently in one test the accuracy rate was only 50% —
basically a coin flip.
I still don't get what the Astron spell (a Dragon Quest defense spell) was even for, to this day.
Being able to watch a new enemy's behavior for a while before acting is actually huge —
especially against late-game enemies with quirky, tricky special skills.
Like for low-level runs, or when you need to survive turns with a fixed attack pattern.
Look who's talking, posting from the nursing-home internet forum.
Apparently it actually learns properly and eventually stops using it.
The only catch is the learned data wipes the moment you cut the power.
Learning finishes after 4 turns against the same enemy, but the final boss gives you no chance to save,
and that boss has 7 transformations that each count as a separate enemy,
so if each form takes 4 turns to learn, you end up looking like an idiot repeating the same move for all 28 turns.
I really hate this kind of art.
Way too busy.
Thinking "more detail = more impressive" is just dumb.
It really drives home how important subtraction — knowing what to leave out — is in creative work.
Apparently AI image generation has a tendency to fill in any empty space it sees.
That's exactly the kind of idea a "smart idiot" would come up with.
Humans still need to handle the adjustments — readability, where to put the focus — and that goes for writing too, not just art.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The Portopia Serial Murder Case, released in 1983, is one of Yuji Horii’s defining works and helped popularize the mystery adventure genre in Japan. Interrogation Room Komiya follows in that lineage — a small-scale piece that appears to be an experimental attempt to assemble a scenario and visuals quickly using generative AI. The thread mixed praise for the technology (“anyone can make games now”) with skepticism (“tools are useless without talent behind them”), broadening into an industry discussion about how AI use might affect game development costs and team size. What’s easy to overlook, though, is that rather than AI having “automated” the production, the foundation here is still Horii’s own skill at planning and writing. Given that he has long spoken about how commercially tough the adventure game genre is, it’s more accurate to read this release not as a new commercial title but as an extension of personal experimentation and playfulness.
*This article is composed as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Mystery Adventure] Dragon Quest and Portopia’s Yuji Horii releases AI-made game ‘Interrogation Room Komiya’ for free — development time “30 minutes”“.
