To paraphrase IBM's slide from a 1979 panel: a computer can never create, therefore computers must never make creative decisions. AI2U: With You 'Til The End prides itself upon using generative AI as a focal point in its game, powering the basic intelligence of its three protagonists as you interact with them. In choosing to utilize AI for this game, developers AlterStaff Inc. have anchored themselves to a means by which a fun game can never have been made. AI2U is the best it could have been, and it is exceedingly dull.

The basic concept behind the title is that you are thrust into a trio of scenarios wherein you must find a way to escape being within the vicinity of an extremely yandere anime girl. These include Eddie (a pink-haired cat girl), Elysia (a witch in a forest), and Estelle (a robot girl in a derelict spaceship). In theory, you are supposed to navigate around their personalities and obsessions while solving puzzles in their abodes that will eventually grant you your freedom. In practice, you're roaming around their houses looking for tchotchkes. The three AI anime girls react to you in real-time and will even voice their displeasure at some of your actions--Eddie, for example, insistently demanded I apologize to her for "pushing her" (forcibly trying to move between her and an open door). You can ask the girls just about anything, and they'll react to it. It's goofy to do things like bringing up famed Vtuber Nyatasha Nyanners to Eddie or ask her to look for a Samoflange in the kitchen. But it loses its appeal rather quickly; all three of these AI-fueled anime girls require constant interaction before screaming at you from the other side of the house about how ignored they feel. In a game where you're supposed to rummage through a pseudo-randomly-generated apartment looking for detritus, this gets annoying.

And it's not like the conversations ever get particularly engaging, either. There are some vague scripts behind each of the three girls and what goes on with them, but none of it ever really arrives to a point. See, each "run" through a given scenario with the three girls is mildly randomized; certain rooms in the setting might change, and certain set pieces you can engage with might or might not be there. So certain aspects of each character's personality might show up--or not. With Eddie, we know she likes coding, playing piano, taking care of plants, and painting. There are a handful of pictures around her place that imply as much, and across our various playthroughs in her apartment, we could further glean this because an art room, a plant room, and a gaming room would appear. This means... nothing. I could flip through Eddie's emails and discover stuff about the medication she was taking or some ominous e-mails from an Apocalypse Protection Bureau, but even if these did amount to anything it wasn't stuff Eddie herself ever mentioned in any of the playthroughs--even if I brought it up. The world is literally on fire outside our windows, and Eddie would shrug it off and tell me they wanted to keep me safe because they love me so much. There was one time with Eddie when repairing her Parrot statue made her tell a little anecdote about a parrot she had as a child... which she refused to elaborate upon and never brought up again in any of the other playthroughs.

Part of that is baked into the game itself so that you can't just rush through the scenarios upon later playthroughs. There's also some manner of "trust" system in the game, wherein you can garner trust from the girls by giving them objects that randomly spawn around the house. The girls are supposed to open up once they start trusting you... but the whole ordeal was a crapshoot. It's hard to judge when you've finally maxed out your trust with one of the girls, especially since any progress with them resets between runs. Between that and the AI being a bit of a hair-trigger, details like parents having divorced, graduating with a degree in Computer Science, or being cursed by a demon to have an evil duplicate of yourself feel like so many red herrings. It doesn't help that each scenario has a variety of endings you can attain, but they're all rather unsatisfying. With Eddie, you can either escape her clutches or convince her to leave the apartment with you (into what I must remind you is a post-apocalyptic world that is literally on fire). You'd think you need some vast amount of trust from Eddie to convince her to join you outside, but in my experience, just the basic chatter is enough to make her answer in the affirmative if you ask her if she'd like a leisurely jaunt out in the burning neighborhood. Tragic backstory? What tragic backstory?

It's not like there isn't anything else to do but roam around looking for widgets while an anime girl barks at you. Eddie's scenario has a cooking mini-game, Elysia dresses up the cooking game as a potion-making mini-game, and Estelle has some tasks for repairing a spaceship. The dishes and potions would help you if you're suddenly being chased by a murderous anime girl. But again: items are randomized in each run, so the dishes you can make or potions you can brew are limited to the ingredients you can find - not to mention finding the recipe somewhere. Because of what I assume is a quirk of the AI, it's possible for the girls to give you an ingredient or other items when you ask them nicely enough. But don't ask them for butter, because the text generator has a Scunthorpe problem and it'll show butter as "****er".

At every turn, AI2U displays a disappointingly shallow mechanic that illustrates how worthless its touted generative AI is as a creative tool. Why is the AI so desperate for constant interaction? Because that's how the developers tailored it. Why do the girls give you items upon request? Because the devs never asked them not to. Even the generated voices--all three of them, for the girls--remind you that no voice actor would even dream of involving themselves with a project like this (especially not while there's an ongoing voice actor strike specifically over voice talents having their vocal data stolen). The sad part is that the basic idea itself could work and even has been done before (and with far better horror elements than just "pink anime girl smiles while she stabs you"). There are decades of horror-themed visual novels that are immediately more effective takes on the concept AI2U wishes to execute--and even the most unoriginal of those games are more satisfying to play than this, a game with characters that have no character, stakes with no risks, and goals that offer no rewards. Even the most uninspired of those games win out over AI2U because of the inherent value of someone typing up an actual character over a gussied-up random number generator. I'm giving this game a "D" because it is, at the very least, functional in what it sets out to do. Still, this game as a product and as a creative endeavor gets an expulsion notice. Even in some theoretical world where generative AI does become the main tool by which games are made or where the underlying tech does "get better," it won't make AI2U: With You 'Til The End a better game.