Shin Megami Tensei board game Kickstarter raises concerns due to gen AI, high prices (2024)

An officially licensed Shin Megami Tensei board game has hit Kickstarter, reaching its 30 million Yen (around £151k) goal within a few days. But the campaign brings with it a number of red flags, including the use of generative AI, high pricing, and a lack of communication.

Japanese merchandising company ICREA launched the Shin Megami Tensei board game Kickstarter on November 12, 2025 with the campaign raising three times its goal at the time of writing. The board game is based on the first SMT title, with players summoning demons to take control of a post-apocalypse Tokyo.

The set comes with a number of components, including 72 demon figures and cards used to emulate the negotiation system from the main series. Some closer pictures of the figures are available thanks to attendees of expos that ICREA visited earlier this year. The figures seem to be high quality — or at least, these display versions are.

However, a number of concerns have been raised since the campaign started. For one, it makes use of generative AI for a number of the promotional assets. While ICREA states that the board game itself wont use gen AI — demon art used for the cards is all taken from existing artwork — it doesn’t paint the best picture for this project.

This is especially true for a project with such high reward costs. The Shin Megami Tensei board game costs a hefty 60k Yen (around £300), which doesn’t even take into account postage or additional VAT fees. While there are a decent number of demon figures, this pricing is multiple times higher than most other video game adaptions that have appeared on Kickstarter.

As an example, the upcoming Horizon: Forbidden West board game was around £117 — while it includes less figures overall, a number of them a far larger than anything in the Shin Megami Tensei board game.

Even ignoring the gen AI implications, there are a few other concerns for the final product’s quality. As mentioned earlier, this project only uses existing demon artwork. While it’s better than AI (and a lot of SMT’s artwork is iconic), there’s a lack of consistency — art is taken from across the SMT franchise, including Shin Megami Tensei 4 and 5.

Furthermore, rather than printing separate Japanese and English versions of the cards included in the set, text for both is crammed onto all of them. As you can see from some of the images on the Kickstarter page, the English text is especially small because of this. For such a premium product, you would expect a little more care to be taken.

One final aspect to note about the crowdfunding campaign is how quiet ICREA has been since the Shin Megami Tensei board game hit Kickstarter. Despite reaching its goal, no updates have been made on the Kickstarter page. The official X account does include posts thanking backers for funding the project, but this is only in Japanese.

While a larger Kickstarter post is perhaps currently in the works, the fact that none of the backer concerns have been answered since launch is far from a good sign. Looking at the comments page, you’ll see the same few points coming up — why is this so expensive, why is there no example gameplay sessions or rulebook, and why are the creators so silent?

With 27 days left to go at the time of writing until the Shin Megami Tensei board game’s December 13, 2025 end date, there’s still time for these questions to be answered. But it does put a damper on what should be a positive release for fans of the Shin Megami Tensei series.

We’ll keep an eye on how things progress with the crowdfunding campaign, but for now potential and current backers are stuck waiting for answers.

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