Developers Smilegate of South Korea announced something very unexpected last week: their highly-anticipated roguelike card-building RPG Chaos Zero Nightmare will not be joining the Anime×Game Festival 2025. The reason, as stated by the company, is to "prioritize resolving current issues and stabilizing the service." This move comes after a wave of backlash from South Korean players, particularly surrounding the game's controversial handling of female characters in its storyline.
Launched in late October, Chaos Zero Nightmare started with promising reviews. It had the backing of a $41 million budget, a mix of roguelike mechanics and turn-based RPG depth, and even hit over two million global downloads within days of release. However, it didn't take long for the game to face some serious problems. Players started complaining about the shortage of content, regular system errors (in some cases, even including full account data loss), and what many felt was an "outrageous" monetization model. If all that wasn't enough, players also criticized the game's art style, with many players speculating that the visuals were AI-generated. The storyline, however, really brought out the most heated criticism.
Reports from automaton media state that many of the local players felt the protagonist of the game was too passive, making it hard to get fully immersed into the experience. Female characters, a key draw for the game's audience, rarely focused on the player; instead, their affections centered on male side characters. Some players even went as far as to suggest that the script was rushed due to significant staff changes during development, with rumors circulating that the majority of the scriptwriting team had left mid-production, forcing a new team to take over a largely unfinished story.
Worse yet, the game's visuals drew skepticism-many accused Smilegate of using AI-generated character designs, a claim the studio denied. But what really lit a fire under players was the storyline. Kim said that while some members of the original script team had indeed left, the main reason for the game's narrative shortcomings fell on his own "over-interference." "As the final script deadline approached, I became anxious and made the reckless decision to personally get involved with the scriptwriting and push the project forward," he confessed. "The scriptwriters I worked with were all incredibly talented, but my excessive ambition and interference ultimately stifled their creativity."
The pull-out carries extra weight, considering Smilegate is one of Anime×Game Festival 2025's main sponsors. Skipping the event-a large pop culture gathering in South Korea-avoids putting a troubled game center-stage, saving face for both the festival and the studio. It's a practical decision, considering all the issues which still plague Chaos Zero Nightmare, including but not limited to payment errors, unskippable repetitive dialogues, skill tooltip mismatches, and quest progression bugs which needed multiple patches since the release.
In the coming months, Smilegate's development team is hard at work addressing these problems. They are revising the storyline to better meet player expectations and hope for community trust again. An announcement has yet to be released regarding how long it will take for these changes to go live or when the game will be ready for a more stable release. For the time being, fans of Chaos Zero Nightmare have nothing but to wait, at least with a sense of cautious optimism that the many concerns will be addressed in coming updates, restoring this game to its initial promise. Whether Smilegate can pull it off remains to be seen, but for now, the focus is on fixing what went wrong before moving forward.