The game was originally designed for a 4 Mbit cartridge, only for it to get cut down to 2 Mbit due to a worldwide chip shortage at the time. As a result, over half of the game's content was cut, leading the developers to make the remaining three levels notoriously mazelike in order to artificially extend the game's length.

The resulting product was a disappointment to both Sega and Osomatsu-kun author Fujio Akatsuka. Hideki Sato, who designed the Mega Drive, stated that Hachamecha Gekijou reflected poorly on the system thanks to it being its first title that wasn't a port of an earlier arcade game, and that it made him wonder if he had poorly designed the system's hardware. Akatsuka, meanwhile, already treated video games with open scorn, but Hachamecha Gekijou outraged him so much that he threw an ashtray at an unnamed developer.