Kazuma Kaneko, the artist behind the iconic character and monster designs of the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series, announced that his free-to-play roguelike card game Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter would be ending services on April 22. Simultaneously, he announced the release of a brand-new game, KAZUMA KANEKO’s Tsukuyomi, set to launch exclusively for the Nintendo Switch. Both Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter and KAZUMA KANEKO’S Tsukuyomi are developed by COLOPL.
The story of the new game takes place in Tokyo, in the year 20XX. A massive, apartment building known as “THE HASHIRA,” the pinnacle of luxury and technology towering over the bay, ends up getting sealed off by a plasma barrier and is now infested by bloodthirsty demons known as Jinma. Izayoi Tsukuyomi, an agent of the NCO, is tasked with infiltrating the demon-infested skyscraper, taking down the Jinma and helping the surviving civilians.
Much like The Divine Hunter, KAZUMA KANEKO’s Tsukuyomi will be a roguelike deck builder with RPG elements, set in the procedurally generated dungeons of THE HASHIRA. Looking at the teaser trailer, it seems like the game will be inheriting a big portion of the lore, story and the characters of its predecessor, while also featuring some brand-new designs and revised gameplay.
Another major feature of The Divine Hunter was also the somewhat infamous “AI Kaneko,” an AI model trained on dozens of Kaneko’s original drawings. AI Kaneko was used to analyze players’ behavior in the game and create brand-new personalized cards based on the actions and choices they made throughout their runs. However, since KAZUMA KANEKO’s Tsukuyomi is set to be an offline title, it seems like there won’t be direct generation of cards like in the previous game.
Instead, as revealed in a recent livestream, around 3,600 unique card designs generated by players in The Divine Hunter have been hand-picked by Kaneko and the development team and will be moved over to KAZUMA KANEKO’s Tsukuyomi. The cards will be obtainable through the Okami System (powered by AI Kaneko in the previous game), which will this time choose one of the 3,600 predetermined AI designs based on player choices. Aside from this, on the game’s official website, the developers disclosed that they had been using AI in the production of images, video materials and music, in accordance to the AI Policy set out by developer COLOPL.
KAZUMA KANEKO’s Tsukuyomi is set to release on April 23, 2026, for the Nintendo Switch.
