Level-5 president and CEO Akihiro Hino has apologized after fans called out generative-AI artifacts in the studio’s recent digital showcase — including footage tied to new Professor Layton and Yo-Kai Watch reveals. Video Games Chronicle’s Andy Robinson reported the admission and apology on Sept. 13, 2026, after social media users gathered evidence that much of the presentation leaned on genAI.

Hino confirmed the company used the tech to juice the show. “It was entirely due to the desire to make the presentation more spectacular that we incorporated processing that also served as an experiment using the latest AI,” he said, per VGC. “It appears that some people felt uncomfortable about this, so I deeply apologize.”

He drew a hard line — at least on paper — between flashy showcase processing and what ships. Scenarios, character designs, and basic settings, he said, are still made by people. Level-5’s AI use, in his telling, is mainly about digitizing human creative work (for example, turning artwork into polygons), and “no simplistic AI-generated output data is included in the games that are released.”

Efficiency is the other half of the pitch. Hino said AI time-savings let creators spend more on “the essence of creation,” and that the studio is trying to shorten major-title development from about five years to about two — still “trial and error.” He also conceded the showcase went wide: the desire for a “clear and flashy presentation” led to AI “in a wide variety of ways,” and Level-5 “will take this as a lesson” into the next presentation.

For fans who watched beloved franchises return only to spot uncanny backgrounds and face swaps, the apology addresses the trailer optics more than it settles whether AI stays in the pipeline. Hino is promising human authorship on the parts that define the games — and a cleaner next showcase — while keeping AI in the efficiency toolkit.

Sources