Kitchen Fantasy Returns After Nearly a Year of Shutdown — But Wiped All Player Data and Told Veterans to Start From Scratch

A game that's been dead for nearly a year announces its glorious return — sounds like a win, right? Not when Kitchen Fantasy (料理次元) casually reveals that ALL veteran player data has been permanently nuked. Your memories, your spending, your collection — all gone. Welcome back, now start over from zero.

Here's the timeline: Kitchen Fantasy, a food-themed gacha game, officially shut down on July 19 last year. Then on April 30, players spotted a comeback announcement on the game's official WeChat account — the game would relaunch on May 20th (a date with romantic significance in China, known as 520 for sounding like 'I love you'). The bombshell buried in the announcement? No legacy data will be preserved. Every player must register fresh and start from absolute scratch.

The NGA forum erupted. The top-voted comment nailed the community's mood perfectly: 'A relaunch with no player data... so they're just going to milk us all over again?' — using the Chinese slang 噶韭菜 (gē jiǔcài), which means harvesting players like crops. The sentiment was universal: the devs collected all that gacha money before shutting down, and now they can't even be bothered to keep the save files?

One player posed a devastating technical question: 'Wait, they deleted player data when they shut down? How much hard drive space could it possibly take up?' This hits the nail on the head — for any live-service game, player save data is tiny. The only explanations are either catastrophic incompetence (no backups) or deliberate choice (they never planned to preserve it).

In a nested reply thread, someone dug deeper and discovered the game had even added a new UR rarity tier before shutting down — meaning the game itself had evolved, yet all that progress was unceremoniously erased. One particularly eloquent player wrote: 'When the game shut down, players weren't just sad about losing the game itself — they were mourning the time they'd invested. Now you're back and saying all that data is gone? That's not a comeback, that's a slap in the face.'

Beyond the data wipe controversy, players also questioned whether the game can even compete in today's market. One commenter called it 'ancient — I played it at launch and it was basically DMM browser-game quality by modern standards.' Others noted that Kitchen Fantasy is an all-female character game returning right in the middle of the 有男不玩 (yǒu nán bù wán, 'no males, no play') wave — a movement among male gamers demanding purely female-only rosters. The timing could be strategic, but without legacy player data to retain veterans, carving out a niche in this crowded space will be an uphill battle.

TL;DR: Winning the resurrection match is great and all, but when you delete everyone's save data and tell them to restart, you have to wonder — who exactly is this comeback for?