South Korean developer Smilegate announced last week that their roguelike deck builder RPG Chaos Zero Nightmare will not be exhibited at Anime×Game Festival 2025, one of the country’s biggest pop culture events. As the reason behind their withdrawal from the event, the developers cite wanting to “prioritize resolving current issues and stabilizing our service.” According to KOREA WAVE via AFPBB News, the decision comes after a wave of criticism from Korean players due to several issues, including controversy over how female characters are handled in the game’s story.
Chaos Zero Nightmare launched on October 22 this year to positive initial reception, but despite being a high-budget project with over $41 million USD invested into development, the game quickly ran into some major issues which left many of its domestic players disappointed. There were many complaints about a lack of content, system errors (including users losing all of their account data), and an overall dissatisfaction with an “unreasonable” monetization model. Furthermore, the game’s art style has been heavily criticized under allegation that the character designs were AI generated (this claim was denied by the developers). But what seemed to have struck the nerve of most players was the way the story was handled.
Apparently, many Korean players felt like the protagonist (player) had been put into “too passive” a role, taking away from the overall immersion. This includes complaints about the female characters not paying enough attention to the protagonist and instead showing affection for other male characters. Some players found that the story in general is biased towards the male side characters. Furthermore, many expressed that the scenario did not meet their expectations, a sentiment fueled by rumors that the majority of the writing team left the studio during the development process, which meant that a completely new set of people had to take over the unfinished story.
Chaos Zero Nightmare director Hyung Suk Kim addressed the latter in an emergency YouTube livestream, which was summarized on the game’s official English Stove page. As he explains, the rumors about the writing team members’ departures were indeed true, and he cites his own “excessive interference” as the reason for their withdrawal. “As the deadline for the final script approached, I grew impatient and made the reckless decision to participate directly in the writing process and push the project forward. The scenario writers I worked with were talented individuals, but my excessive ambition and interference ultimately stifled their creativity,” he said, apologizing to the player community.
While it hasn’t even been a month since the game launched, it seems like the pressure from fans has put Smilegate into quite a tight spot. As the company is one of the biggest sponsors of Anime×Game Festival 2025, deciding to halt the promotion of their most recent game might have been the safest move they could make in order to protect the reputation of the event. As Kim explained, the development team is currently working on resolving the issues and rewriting the story to meet the players’ expectations. However, considering the backlash doesn’t seem like it’s going to calm down anytime soon, it is yet to be seen when and to what extent the development team will be able to get the game back on track.
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