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Thanks so much for the review :D  really glad you enjoyed it overall, and I appreciate you sitting with the tension transparently instead of just reacting to it.

I definitely feel you on the irony, it's done with some intention on my end; it even gets called out a few times in the news tickers to lean into it, and I deliberately used lower-tier models for the capsule and banner to keep them a a bit uncanny.  

Under that, it's also a resource call: I'm solo devving this and had only 24 hours. Half the challenge and practice of a jam has always been self-honesty about my resources; what's core and worth hand-building versus what I grab "mostly-fine" off the shelf and refine later if I have time. AI feels like an extension of that. I put my greatest allocation into the thing only I could do — the gameplay, the balance, listening and integrating feedback from playtesters — and as such some of the art got hand-crafted, but a lot had to stay as the AI placeholders, which I still put love into building.

Hopefully you can evaluate along those terms-- I did as much as I could by hand here and put in a lot of love into this game. Even the AI bits are the tip of the iceberg, you don't see the 30 attempts I didn't use, the retouching of artifacts, the recoloring/resizing to match palette and design bible, etc, etc.