The only part of the game that currently uses AI is the backgrounds. All of the characters and UI are hand-drawn.
We don’t really like AI either, but creating backgrounds takes a lot of time, and they’re not really the focus of the game, so we decided to use AI-generated backgrounds and then manually adjust them ourselves.
Personally, if we have enough funding or time in the future, I’d also prefer to have everything hand-drawn. But it’ll depend on how development goes.