Play Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter

"We have SMT at home" vibes. Kaneko Kazuma is a legend, and one of my all-time favorite artists, but this game is at times ugly. There's a weird quality to the art that makes everything look cheap and even some of the nicer pieces, like the characters, seem poorly rendered. The main character designs themselves are beautiful, 100% Kaneko, but regardless of how great they look, the card art drags everything down. The models for the cards are clearly AI generated slop. It looks like whatever care and individuality was put into the designs of the characters went out the window when it came to the card art, which is generic at best and horrendously ugly at worst.

The game itself is a decently fun dungeon crawler but it's clearly just a mobile game ported to PC. The UI is ugly and dated looking and of course, it's a gacha game so there's a level of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ by default to watch out for though as of writing, I'm not deep enough into the toilet to know how crappy it'll get. If you can look past all of the above it's not the worst experience, but I can't recommend due to the godawful AI bs. Putting Kaneko art beside the generated garbage makes it look worse and more obvious that no one even looked at whatever they generated or even thought to smooth out the AI kinks. 🤮

A lot of buzz has been bought by COLOPL for this game. A lot of hype surrounds its usage of lapsed artist, Kaneko Kazuma, and how he's "back." Nothing could be further from the truth. The game's art is generally quite awful. Anything not done by Kaneko seems to have been generated, which is most of the game's art assets. The gameplay is incredibly boring and gets same-y and tired after an hour. I can only imagine just how much worse it gets after the opening hour(s). I will never know, thankfully.

A narrative surrounding an "AI" Kaneko creating generated artwork in order to mimic and subsume Kaneko and artists as a whole does not justify the usage of generated art, especially at the terminal velocity of mobile slurry content mills. From the looks of things, Kaneko is barely involved outside of marketing, main character design, and some card art. How exactly is an older celebrity w/ a known nickname going to be subsumed and erased by an image generator to begin w/? Capitalism is what's "erasing" artists, not a programme.

It feels almost banal to say to a COLOPL game is bad, but this is like almost as bad as Tales of Luminaria was. Abysmal stuff everyone. Pack it up.

3/10.
Long term SMT/Persona franchise fan its a bit jarring to see a goofy mish mash of monsters. I'd give it a pass if I couldn't directly say oh that's this monster but in a body suit...and on a bike...
Over world encounters gamble your prized currency..your HP..and like 70% of the time you have a choice between loosing x amount of HP and x amount of HP, its a lose lose regardless.
Battles are intuitive, although RNG to a point. Having monsters with shields and prepping debuffs is some what impossible unless counting cards and skipping turns. I THINK its alleviated to a degree with meta progression but the tool tips also say "youll get this at some point in the run" not a direct quote but close. I could see myself playing a round or two while waiting for food or something but nothing serious worth time, money or serious thought.

This game is great, the people who are complaining about how bad the AI art is are too tunnel visioned on complaining to pay attention to the plot and understand that the ai art is bad on purpose because the whole message of the game is that ai art is a hollow mimicry of real art.

If you are put off by this game or by Kazuma Kaneko's use of Ai art, Ai art is bad because:
1. The methods used to produce ai art are unethical and require an exorbitant amount of energy
2. Ai art is of lesser quality because it lacks the inherently human qualities required to make good art.
Images and data used to train publicly available Ai models are very often illegally obtained. The Ai algorithm used in this game was trained exclusively off of Kazuma Kaneko's work under his supervision, and the model was trained by hand to produce mediocre results on purpose in order to exacerbate the difference in quality between Ai and Human art, which also ties in to the in game lore of these ai generated monsters being produced in mass by an evil entity and being a mimicry and fake of the real beings they are supposed to be.

If you are against Ai art give this game a chance, you will find that you agree with the message its conveying. Given that the morality of relying on demons to fight demons is a core aspect of many Shin Megami Tensei games, I'm suprised how few people are actually willing to give this game a chance to make its point.

If you don't like that its a mobile game or microtransactions or the currently rough around the edges translation that's perfectly fair. But don't let the Ai art stop you from actually trying this game out

My friend who I play Counter Strike 2 with said if I post a review on this game and it gets 5000 likes and 5000 Awards that he will buy me a RTX 3080 and 2 Kilos of The lamb ham. So I'm just gonna leave this here Help a brotha ~
　
　
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