Atlus veteran Kazuma Kaneko, currently affiliated with mobile game developer COLOPL, has been quite active on X these days, generously answering fans’ questions and sharing untold Persona and Megami Tensei trivia on the platform. In a response from July 20, Kaneko also talked a bit about his future plans.
According to the post, Kaneko already has a new game planned, and he’s currently preparing to launch an official project within COLOPL for it. Of note, he mentions that he’s not planning for the new project to include mechanics that rely on AI.
Since joining COLOPL, Kaneko has been involved in the live-service roguelike deckbuilding RPG “Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter,” which released in May 2025, followed by “Kazuma Kaneko’s Tsukuyomi”, a rebuilt, offline version of the former released in April 2026. To the disappointment of some of his fans, both of these titles use generative AI, albeit in different ways.
The first game adopts a system that automatically generates new in-game cards based on logs of the player’s behavior and choices. These gen-AI cards coexist with original cards hand drawn by Kaneko. While the in-game model for this game was trained exclusively on Kaneko’s own artwork and a cycle of RLHF, concerns arose following launch when the model seemingly generated designs similar to existing, copyrighted ones.
On the other hand, the more recent, offline version of the game ditches the live custom card generation system, but still includes some of the cards generated by the original game’s AI model.
In reference to these titles, Kaneko says he feels troubled because many people seem to be misunderstanding him. “While I did participate in the development of a game that uses AI mechanics, I did not use AI for my own artwork,” he says, likely hoping to emphasize that there was a clear distinction between the artwork generated by the game’s model and the artwork he drew by hand for the game. Thankfully, it seems fans of Kaneko’s work who had qualms with Tsukuyomi’s use of AI can rest assured when it comes to the next title.
