Square Enix’s ‘Splatoon’ Rip-off Will Also Have AI Garbage

Every day, AI increasingly takes hold of our dystopian hellscape. AI voice acting in one of gaming’s most popular shooters? Yup. Steam opening the doors to AI shovelware? Oh yeah. Now, Square Enix is feeding gamers AI slop in its upcoming Splatoon clone.

So eat up your computer-generated sludge, folks, because Square Enix isn’t eager to cut down on using AI content any time soon

How does Foamstars use AI?

Foamstars, which has been called a “Splatoon-like” shooter by multiple gaming outlets, is an online “party shooter” heading to PlayStation 4 and 5. Featuring two teams of four, players use foam to build “slippery surfaces to surf around the arena at high speed,” according to the game’s official page. Gameplay focuses on objective-based combat, with players using their gun to maintain map control, spraying foam to quickly and easily traverse around the environment. In other words, it’s Splatoon with foam instead of ink.

Foamstars is being published by Square Enix, with Toylogic developing the game. According to a new report by Video Games Chronicle, Toylogic utilized AI image generation service Midjourney to create some art assets in Foamstars. Kosuke Okatani, the game’s producer, tried to defend Foamstars’ AI artwork by claiming it is just a minimal part of the game.

“All of the core elements in Foamstars — the core gameplay, and the things that make the game enjoyable — those are all made by hand,” Okatani said, according to VGC. “However, we did want to experiment with AI as well.”

Okatani wrote off the practice by saying AI makes up “about 0.01 percent or even less” of the game’s content, claiming that the development team simply “dabbled in [AI] by creating these icons in the game.” Midjourney was used for a series of albums for the game’s OST, something Square Enix stood behind in a statement to VGC.

“In this instance, we experimented with Midjourney using simple prompts to produce abstract images. We loved what was created and used them as the final album covers players will see in the game,” Square Enix said. “Everything else was created entirely by our development team.”

What is Midjourney, and how is Square Enix using AI?

Midjourney is a powerful and highly accessible AI art generation program offered on Discord. Everyday users can quickly and easily create stylized images through text descriptions sent to the platform. Infamously, Midjourney scraped a wide assortment of popular artists’ work without permission.

With time, Midjourney has grown incredibly advanced, offering highly stylized anime art through simple descriptions. Here’s an example of Midjourney in action, using the prompt “anime episode still shot of an octopus girl drinking bubble tea, pixiv, splatoon-like” under the anime-oriented Niji 5 model. While imperfect, the image mirrors Splatoon’s aesthetic a little too closely.

As for Foamstars, the game certainly looks fun enough. But AI artwork for music covers? Really? This might be a small “experiment,” but it won’t stop at that. I can see Square Enix slipping more and more AI images into its games, here and there, gaining gamers’ consent to computer-generated artwork. After all, Square Enix’s president Takashi Kiryu recently declared that the company plans to “be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions.”

“I believe that generative AI has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming,” he said. “In terms of new business domains, we previously identified three focus investment fields, namely blockchain entertainment/Web 3.0, AI, and the cloud.”

So no, count me out on playing Foamstars later this year. I think I’m good.

(featured image: Square Enix)