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# The most-watched Stellar Blade video is the one many hate
- URL: https://www.regenraygun.com/the-most-watched-stellar-blade-video-is-the-one-many-hate/
- Published: 2026-08-05T11:44:56.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-05T17:19:43.000Z
- Description: How Shift Up's fun AI music video roiled western audiences.
- Author: Jon Jordan

Shift Up's YouTube channel tells a story its critics would rather it didn't. *Wanna be in LOVE*, the AI-assisted K-pop music video the studio posted on 31st July starring *Blood Rain's* new protagonist Evie, has generated 1.1 million views in five days. 

The game's official reveal trailer, up for a month, has 982,000\. The previous music video, *Make Up My Mind*, managed 167,000\. The Nintendo Switch 2 announcement got 152,000.

The video the internet spent a week calling slop is comfortably the biggest thing the studio has published for this game, and it got there roughly six times faster than the trailer it beat.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6f/3f/6f3fd27f-61e1-4e99-abf2-04a5bf37aeee/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-05-at-11.36.51.png)

The backlash was real, however. YouTube's own AI-content label sits on the video; Shift Up's credits acknowledge game assets regenerated with AI support from the studio's in-house AI Labs. 

Viewers spent days in freeze frame picking apart shifting faces between shots, inconsistent animation and camerawork they believe to be well below the standard of a studio whose commercial identity is inseparable from its character art.

What makes this more than the average slop pile-on is who defended it, how fast, and the fact that he had told everyone this was coming.

Kim Hyung Tae is not an executive who wandered aimlessly into an art argument without a set of sharp tools. He is among the best-known Korean game illustrators — art director on *Blade & Soul* at NCSoft and the pen behind the house style that built *Goddess of Victory: NIKKE* and *Stellar Blade* into a KOSPI-listed company. [On X](https://x.com/jamm3rd/?ref=regenraygun.com), his bio starts “Illustrator”. Shift Up exists because of his drawings.

And he has strong views about AI too. On 9th January, at South Korea's 2026 Economic Growth Strategy event, Kim laid out the case plainly. Shift Up puts around 150 people on a single game. Chinese studios put in between 1,000 and 2,000\. On manpower alone, he argued, Korea cannot compete on either quality or volume. Generative AI is how a smaller country closes that gap. 

He also pushed back on the jobs objection, arguing the answer is not fewer developers but developers fluent in AI, so that “one person can perform the work of 100 people.”

That was seven months before the video. Whatever else it is, *Wanna be in LOVE* is not improvised cost-cutting. It is the first visible output of a strategy its CEO announced to his own government in January.

When the backlash hit, [he answered within hours](https://x.com/jamm3rd/status/2083211972276007299?ref=regenraygun.com), replying to a fan who had asked him to use his real artists instead. His argument was that Evie herself was created by Shift Up's artists over more than a year, with AI used to transform or render those existing assets rather than inventing the character.

Of course, it didn't land well. He was ratioed for defending his own studio's work.

But the audience doing the ratioing is not the audience paying the bills. *Stellar Blade's* revenue skews heavily toward China; *NIKKE's* toward Japan. Asian markets have absorbed generative tools into production and marketing with comparatively little drama, while Western audiences treat each instance as a moral emergency. 

*Stellar Blade's* fanbase was primed for that fight anyway. The 2024 rows over Eve's design and the launch patch that toned down her outfits taught much of it to read Western criticism as bad faith by default. A visible contingent is now cheering the video precisely because it annoys the people it annoys.

As for the result, the current scorecard says Shift Up spent less and reached more people, putting its new protagonist in front of the largest audience she has had.

Looks like Kim Hyung Tae's strategy is working.