ShiftUP CEO Kim Hyung Tae hasn’t exactly been lowkey with his pro-AI stance over the years, but he and his company have now made it clearer than ever with one of the most god-awful videos I’ve ever had the displeasure of witnessing from a company with enough money to do better.
Critical Hit
Welcome to Critical Hit, where I (or someone else on the PC Gamer team) celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle.
Stellar Blade: Blood Rain—the sequel to 2024’s Stellar Blade, which I thought was just fine—is due to come out later this year. And what better way to market it than with a terrible AI-generated music video where Evie’s skin-tight suit has a belly button and fingernails, and parts of her outfit phase in and out of existence all while she smiles at the camera in a deeply unsettling manner.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s all to accompany a song that is also AI-generated. Shrill computerised bleeps masquerade as Evie “singing” high notes during the chorus—which eventually melt into an ear-splitting cacophony of robotic words—and a musical composition that barely understands the fundamentals of what makes music good in the first place.
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It is a song so utterly devoid of soul, and also of anything that feels even remotely related to Stellar Blade: Blood Rain and its universe. It actively undermines the game, its theme, and any visual identity it’s attempting to present in favour of something that looks shit, sounds shit, and completely discredits any goodwill ShiftUp may have had.
And it makes me worry about the way a hobby I have spent so many years loving is going. For all of the videogame soundtracks that have made me cry, or pumped up, or irrevocably happy. Because they were crafted by a human who understood exactly what they had to do to make me feel those things. Humans who also feel the things they were trying to make me feel through their music.
Videogames are a form of art, and art needs a human touch. Parading around a song that feels so utterly lifeless, that doesn’t tell me what Stellar Blade: Blood Rain is actually about? It’s frustrating, but especially coming from ShiftUp—a company that is certainly not short of money thanks to the revenue it makes from gacha game Nikke: Goddess of Victory. One which consistently finds itself estimated in the top 10 to 20 gacha earners alongside giants like Hoyoverse.
It can do better. It does do better! Nikke is home to some of my all-time favourite videogame bangers. It literally has a long-time rhythm game composer on its team who is responsible for a good chunk of Nikke’s discography. I cannot understand why anyone would think that some of the worst AI-generated music I’ve heard in a hot sec is the better option.
I’m not entirely sure what effect ShiftUp was hoping to have with this video, but it has completely turned me off trying Blood Rain entirely. I was actually rather looking forward to seeing how the team could expand upon the Stellar Blade universe—I thought the first game’s narrative was surprisingly underbaked considering the company’s chops for storytelling in Nikke, and I was hoping to see more good stuff in Blood Rain.
And big companies normalising this behaviour only paves the way for more to follow suit. It threatens to open the floodgates, to no longer relegate this kind of garbage to those AI YouTube playlists made with some terrible 80s-themed thumbnail while everything looks and sounds diabolically crusty and deep-fried. It has the very real possibility to continue showing up in our games in a big way, while still demanding the same kind of money we were paying to have a human involved in its creation.
That sort of domino effect is how we have the very real possibility of ending up with reams of samey, soulless games that feel like the very antithesis of why this hobby exists in the first place. And that’s why it’s so important to call this garbage out for what it is the moment we lay eyes on it, to let companies like ShiftUp know that this ain’t it, and we don’t want it.
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