A Cup of Water Against a Cartload of Burning Firewood

This was simply a disaster.

In Sega's Gundam Battle Operation, because it was entirely ground combat, players could judge their direction through the cockpit dashboard and the scenery outside the window.

But here?

Unless the player in front of the screen could actually awaken Newtype perception right there in their own living room, this was nothing but a pure 3D motion-sickness simulator.

"What did the level design side say?" Mitsui Chuta turned and asked the planner beside him.

The planner shrank his neck in, his voice as low as a mosquito's buzz. "They said—space is empty to begin with. Since it's 3D aerial combat, making the map an infinitely looping black background saves the most resources. All we need to do is scatter a few Zakus randomly along the coordinate axes—"

What a fine "space is empty to begin with."

How was this game development? This was clearly assembly-line work of copy and paste.

The level team did not even need to design terrain. They only had to keep copying and pasting inside that folder named "Void," then tell the player: go, into this pitch-black darkness where you cannot see your own hand in front of your face, and find those few Zakus whose textures have not even finished rendering.

Mitsui Chuta looked at the Gundam on the screen, crashing around like a headless fly, and the little confidence he had to begin with leaked away completely.

So they added enemy UI indicators and an assist function for locking on and turning toward targets. The situation improved a little, but only a little.

A few days later, Mitsui Chuta came again to inspect the project's improvements.

The Gundam on the screen was still tirelessly waving its beam saber, while the tester's fingers mechanically repeated the combo of "lock on, dash,