The tendency to treat the protagonist's battle as the 'important' one and turn the rest into background haze is pretty common, actually. So much so, in fact, that the Mekton Zeta game system made a direct reference to it in their gaming mechanic section, in how a GM could structure their combats so that you could have the titanic space battles without overloading the players with essentially irrelevant detail. Sort of like how if you examine Macross Frontier, the space combats are really only about half a dozen important people, with the rest being really glossy explosions and laser fire in the background.
Anime like Bubblegum Crisis and Tekkaman Blade try to step away from this convention by actually reducing the combat to a handful of people, or by staging events so that the combat occurs in a relatively confined place. Most of the combat sequences either take place in wide open areas (in space in Tekkaman Blade, or in the uninhabited desert,) or in combats involving a set number of enemy combatants (usually two or three in Bubblegum Crisis, with five being the most they face in one go, as a rule.)
The Sailor Moon mechanic was always based on the idea that Beryl was never at full combat strength. She couldn't afford to launch the entire Dark Kingdom at her enemies, because she couldn't power them all up and sustain them for the entire fight. And the energy she could split off for her generals was carefully hoarded, and had to last them for the long haul. Which was why they kept trying to steal energy from others. They were essentially trying to refuel the war machine. And since every one of the soldier critters required the general expend energy to empower it, losing them was a blow to their overall reserves.
In that scene, Kunzite pretty much has to win with what he has. Which also explains why he's not getting any more support, even though Beryl has to know that the Senshi are tossing the rules for clandestine warfare out the window in an attempt to ace the general. This is about to become obviously, visibly public. And that's not good for Beryl in the long run, as her reserves aren't up to the kind of firepower an 'awakened' world can bring to bear on them if they figured out how to. So Kunzite is on his own, in an attempt to limit the damage.
From how it unfolded, it seemed like there were really only two main groups in that combat. The first was obviously the protagonist. Everything unfolded from his own mind in a stream-of-consciousness point of view. The combat off-screen was actually a little hard to follow, and it wasn't very easy to see what was going on, but from a first-person dialog point of view, that's actually very reasonable. The combat felt a little like Call of Duty, where you have a fight taking place around you, with people calling out instructions to either side, and other explosions in the distance, which resolve into more firefights the closer you get. The brain-fart moments when he mentally tried to tally up the situation, or realize something he'd forgotten to set up beforehand, served to break up the action and separate one combat sequence from the next one, without taking the reader out of the fight, which was nice. It gave the reader a chance to deal with the previous scene and get ready to handle the next one, while in a few cases introducing humor. The bit where the protagonist relates to Sailor Moon by comparing her to a Final Fantasy character was a hoot.
I'm not sure if the pocket nuke is enough to take out Kunzite. Certainly not at full power, possibly with so many other things going wrong for him at that point, and with his power reduced, maybe even likely. But 'escalation' always has repercussions. The flash of the nuke in Tokyo will blind anyone for miles who was looking at the blast zone, and given how it was put together, there's going to be thousands of people who were blinded by that thing. Even assuming Sailor Moon can pull off some kind of wide-area healing miracle, the fact that someone in that fight was willing to use a tactical nuke to win will get NATO forces swarming into Tokyo faster than you can say "Fallout, anyone?"
The most intelligent thing for the Dark Kingdom to do in that case is to use a mind-controlling general at that point, take control of the NATO forces, and use them to institute a coordinated hunt for the Senshi, with orders to kill. Were I running the other side, it's the first solution I'd try to bring about, seeing as how the NATO nations have been kind enough to provide all that firepower, with so little understanding of the kind of things Beryl can do to them.
That's just my take, but it would be a concern, I think.
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Those who fear the darkness have never seen what the light can do.
Anime like Bubblegum Crisis and Tekkaman Blade try to step away from this convention by actually reducing the combat to a handful of people, or by staging events so that the combat occurs in a relatively confined place. Most of the combat sequences either take place in wide open areas (in space in Tekkaman Blade, or in the uninhabited desert,) or in combats involving a set number of enemy combatants (usually two or three in Bubblegum Crisis, with five being the most they face in one go, as a rule.)
The Sailor Moon mechanic was always based on the idea that Beryl was never at full combat strength. She couldn't afford to launch the entire Dark Kingdom at her enemies, because she couldn't power them all up and sustain them for the entire fight. And the energy she could split off for her generals was carefully hoarded, and had to last them for the long haul. Which was why they kept trying to steal energy from others. They were essentially trying to refuel the war machine. And since every one of the soldier critters required the general expend energy to empower it, losing them was a blow to their overall reserves.
In that scene, Kunzite pretty much has to win with what he has. Which also explains why he's not getting any more support, even though Beryl has to know that the Senshi are tossing the rules for clandestine warfare out the window in an attempt to ace the general. This is about to become obviously, visibly public. And that's not good for Beryl in the long run, as her reserves aren't up to the kind of firepower an 'awakened' world can bring to bear on them if they figured out how to. So Kunzite is on his own, in an attempt to limit the damage.
From how it unfolded, it seemed like there were really only two main groups in that combat. The first was obviously the protagonist. Everything unfolded from his own mind in a stream-of-consciousness point of view. The combat off-screen was actually a little hard to follow, and it wasn't very easy to see what was going on, but from a first-person dialog point of view, that's actually very reasonable. The combat felt a little like Call of Duty, where you have a fight taking place around you, with people calling out instructions to either side, and other explosions in the distance, which resolve into more firefights the closer you get. The brain-fart moments when he mentally tried to tally up the situation, or realize something he'd forgotten to set up beforehand, served to break up the action and separate one combat sequence from the next one, without taking the reader out of the fight, which was nice. It gave the reader a chance to deal with the previous scene and get ready to handle the next one, while in a few cases introducing humor. The bit where the protagonist relates to Sailor Moon by comparing her to a Final Fantasy character was a hoot.
I'm not sure if the pocket nuke is enough to take out Kunzite. Certainly not at full power, possibly with so many other things going wrong for him at that point, and with his power reduced, maybe even likely. But 'escalation' always has repercussions. The flash of the nuke in Tokyo will blind anyone for miles who was looking at the blast zone, and given how it was put together, there's going to be thousands of people who were blinded by that thing. Even assuming Sailor Moon can pull off some kind of wide-area healing miracle, the fact that someone in that fight was willing to use a tactical nuke to win will get NATO forces swarming into Tokyo faster than you can say "Fallout, anyone?"
The most intelligent thing for the Dark Kingdom to do in that case is to use a mind-controlling general at that point, take control of the NATO forces, and use them to institute a coordinated hunt for the Senshi, with orders to kill. Were I running the other side, it's the first solution I'd try to bring about, seeing as how the NATO nations have been kind enough to provide all that firepower, with so little understanding of the kind of things Beryl can do to them.
That's just my take, but it would be a concern, I think.
---
Those who fear the darkness have never seen what the light can do.