Last week, developer ShiftUp released a video marketing its upcoming sequel Stellar Blade: Blood Rain. A so-called "music video" which was riddled with generative AI, from Evie's harrowing grin to a very rubbish song with cringeworthy robotic vocals.
The video has garnered a whole bunch of backlash—from myself included—as people wondered why on earth a company raking in good gacha money (its other game, Nikke: Goddess of Victory, is a consistent high ranker on gacha revenue charts) felt the need to put out something so utterly devoid of soul. Or really, that didn't have anything to do with Stellar Blade: Blood Rain in the first place.
Well, ShiftUp CEO Hyung Tae Kim has now come out to tell us that we're just misunderstanding, guys!
"EVIE, the character at the heart of this video, was created from head to toe by our talented artists and modelers through more than a year of dedicated work," a tweet from him read. "The AI is not creating her from scratch. It is rendering and presenting the character based on the data, design, and craftsmanship our team created. We would truly appreciate it if you could view the work with that understanding in mind."
EVIE, the character at the heart of this video, was created from head to toe by our talented artists and modelers through more than a year of dedicated work.The AI is not creating her from scratch. It is rendering and presenting the character based on the data, designs, and…July 31, 2026
I think if anyone here is misunderstanding, it's Hyung Tae Kim himself. Anyone could deduce that Evie's design wasn't the thing being created with AI. But when almost every other aspect of your video is generated with AI—parts of her suit literally morph in and out of existence, the food she eats has that horrible AI slime effect to it, signs plastered along walls and vending machines are in garbled nonsense AI language—it not only undermines whatever vision you had in mind for your character's design, it cheapens your overall image.
And that's before you even get into the fact that the song is also AI-generated, despite ShiftUp having some crazy talented composers on board. If you really wanted to go all-in on a music video to market your game, you could at least get a real human to whip up a song.
Unfortunately, I don't envision ShiftUp or Hyung Tae Kim slowing down on AI usage anytime soon. South Korea is a huge consumer of AI, and its embrace of it has rippled into the development cycles of studios who reside there. Kim himself has been on the AI train since around 2022 (despite being a talented artist himself) which makes this unsurprising, but most certainly disappointing nevertheless.
