This was nothing short of a disaster.
In Sega's Gundam Battle Operation, the fully ground-based combat allowed players to orient themselves using the cockpit's dashboard and the view outside the window.
But here?
Unless the player sitting in front of the screen could magically awaken Newtype sensory abilities in their living room, this was just a pure 3D motion sickness simulator.
"What did the level design team say?" Chuta Mitsui turned to the planner beside him.
The planner hunched his shoulders, his voice barely audible, "They said—the universe is inherently vast and empty. Since it's 3D aerial combat, using an infinitely looping black background as the map saves the most resources. They just need to scatter a few Zakus randomly across the coordinate axes."
What a convenient excuse: "the universe is inherently vast and empty."
This wasn't game development; it was copy-paste assembly line work.
The level design team didn't even need to design terrain. They just had to keep duplicating and pasting files in a folder named "Void" and then tell the players: "Go, venture into this pitch-black darkness and find those few Zakus whose textures haven't even finished rendering yet."
Watching the Gundam on the screen flail about like a headless chicken, Chuta Mitsui's already thin confidence completely evaporated.
They added UI indicators for enemy positions and a target-locking assist function. The situation improved slightly, but only slightly.
A few days later, Chuta Mitsui returned to inspect the project's progress.
The Gundam on the screen continued to tirelessly swing its beam saber, while the tester's fingers mechanically repeated the same combo: "lock-on, dash, shoot, melee."
From a purely code-execution standpoint, the game wasn't crashing, and the collision detection wasn't completely broken. This allowed the project manager standing behind them to breathe a sigh of relief, even considering lighting a cigarette to celebrate this rare moment of "stable operation."
However, something bizarre happened.
After clearing three consecutive stages, the tester suddenly paused the game and turned to the manager with a bewildered expression. "Um... is the program stuck in this scene? I feel like I've been playing the first stage over and over."
The supervisor was taken aback for a moment, then pointed to the tiny white characters in the upper right corner of the screen. "No card? Look, it says 'Stage 3'!" he exclaimed. "The enemy configuration is different too. It was two Zaku I units earlier, but now there are three High-Mobility Zakus."
The tester opened his mouth, but only managed to stammer, "Does it make a difference?"
This was the most awkward part.
In this universe, rendered in pitch-black to "save resources," the so-called "High-Mobility Zakus" and regular Zakus were just two different-colored pixels to the players.
Without any reference points or sense of distance, the effect of "high mobility" was that the red dot on the radar moved slightly faster.
As for the level design? It was a joke.
In the first stage, you blew up three red dots in the pitch-black void.
In the second stage, you blew up five red dots in the same pitch-black void.
For the third stage, the planners simply adjusted the spawn coordinates of these red dots and stretched their health bars a bit.
"This isn't a game at all," Chuta Mitsui said, his voice as cold as ice as he crushed the cigarette pack in his hand. "This is a 'spot the difference' game on a radar simulator. Players paid money for this? To stare blankly at a black screen with nothing but a UI moving?"
The Lead Planner tried to salvage the situation with technical jargon: "But Director Mitsui, the core of space combat is—"
"Shut up," Mitsui cut him off, pointing at the solitary Gundam on the screen. "Sega's Gundam Battle Operation makes you feel the weight of the machine, hear the roar of the thrusters, even feel the ground shake beneath your feet. What have we done? We've created something that looks like we threw a plastic model into an ink bucket—just spinning and spinning."
The tester chimed in quietly, "And... spinning too much really makes you nauseous. Without any visual anchors, I can't tell if I'm flying up or falling down—just watching the radar spin wildly. After ten minutes, I felt like my breakfast was about to come back up."
The physiological response known as 3D motion sickness was amplified infinitely against the featureless black backdrop.
The players weren't piloting Gundams in battle; they were experiencing a low-quality version of an astronaut's centrifuge training.
The room fell into a deathly silence, broken only by the faint hum of the CRT monitor.
Everyone knew that if this thing were ever showcased at E3, it wouldn't just fail to challenge Sega and Sony—it would make Bandai a laughingstock overnight. This wasn't the "last fig leaf" they'd hoped for; it was the final, massive nail in the coffin of the Bandai Games Division.
Chuta Mitsui looked at the dejected technicians, a sudden sense of amusement striking him.
Is this their vaunted "technological accumulation"? Is this the leverage they thought would get them more money from Sega?
"Shut down the test unit," Mitsui said, turning to leave. His back seemed particularly forlorn. "Stop wasting electricity. Find a way to improve it."
To combat the nauseating "claustrophobia of space," the planning team had racked their brains and finally devised a seemingly grand solution: fill the void of blackness with something.
"We're adding landmarks," the Lead Planner declared, pointing at the star map in the setting book, spittle flying. "Lunar Goddess II, Fortress Solomon, A Baoa Qu—even Gryps II from the Gryps War and Axis from the two Neo Zeon Wars. Any major hunk of metal that's got a name? Cram it in there! If players get lost, it's because there aren't enough reference points!"
Chuta Mitsui found this logic pleasing. With a wave of his hand, he approved it.
However, when the code was written, the head of the programming team went pale.
These self-taught 3D game developers had just realized with horror that they had never implemented collision logic for complex terrain in the fundamental architecture design.
In other words, this game was, at its core, Space Invaders with a 3D skin. The only core logic was "bullet hits enemy plane."
If they were to cram in a physical Fortress Solomon, the player's Gundam wouldn't explode or bounce off it. It would simply phase through it like a ghost.
"Can you fix this?" Days later, Chuta Mitsui returned to check the progress. Staring at the screen where the RX-78 was phasing through an asteroid, his eye twitched.
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