Re-release this: P.N.03

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Ah, the Capcom Five. For those who weren’t there or don’t recall, this was a slate of supposed GameCube-exclusive titles that Capcom was set to produce for Nintendo’s little purple box, as a show of support for the latter after the former had spent most of the last era of consoles producing games solely for the Playstation. Shinji Mikami of Resident Evil fame was the one spearheading this project and working in some kind of directorial or executive role for each, which came alongside a remake of Resident Evil, ports of other games in the series, as well as the new prequel, Resident Evil 0. Capcom and Nintendo really were back together, like old times.

Of the Five, four were released for the GameCube: the crown jewel of the bunch, Resident Evil 4, of course, as well as Viewtiful Joe, Killer7, and P.N.03 — that’s shortened from “Product Number 3,” and is “P-N-3,” as far as pronunciation goes. P.N.03 is also the only one of the bunch that ended up remaining an exclusive. It turned out that Capcom’s American branch accidentally announced that the entire slate were GameCube exclusives, when it was just supposed to be Resident Evil 4. And then, before that game even launched for the GameCube, Capcom announced that there would be a Playstation 2 version later that same year. Mikami was not pleased with Capcom going against his specific wishes for RE4 to remain a Cube-exclusive title, which likely kicked off the move to internal, semi-autonomous studio Clover, and then his exit from Capcom to found the actually autonomous Seed/PlatinumGames.

On the bright side for GameCube enthusiasts, their versions of these games were the superior ones for one reason or another, and they got P.N.03 all to themselves. Sure, people didn’t think that was much of a dub in the moment — this is a game that very safely made it into “mixed or average reviews” territory — but that undersells it a bit. There are times where it feels a bit unfinished, and there’s not all that much of it if you’re talking about how long it takes to finish a run, but it still ended up being something of a cult classic for a reason. P.N.03 is different, both from games that look like it and even those that might have pulled some inspiration from it. And for those who the game clicks for, any of the concerns in those reviews can be tossed out the window, because it rocks.

Which is not to say those reviews are wrong, necessarily — not everyone is going to be thrilled about a full-price game that takes about four hours to get through, or one designed with the intention of you playing through it at least three times on different difficulties to learn the ropes, improve your gear, and then finally play the game “for real” on its toughest difficulty while wearing an ultimate suit all your previous attempts unlocked for you. They might not love how little voice acting there is, or that all of the enemies are robots, or that there are like, two dozen rooms in the entire game that you will see again and again and again and — wait for it — again even over a single playthrough.

For those who are into titles with the spirit of an arcade game, however, who have braved enough roguelikes and dungeon crawlers to not care even a little bit about the variety of what you’re seeing so long as you’ve got something enjoyable and tense to do while you’re there, then P.N.03 is going to be for you. And that’s what matters in the end, right? Not the 63 on Metacritic, but whether or not, to you, specifically, the game rips.

Describing P.N.03’s genre takes a little bit of work, because it’s a third-person shooter, sort of, but one that has more in common with old-school arcade and Famicom games than its genre contemporaries. A confusing situation, given third-person shooters weren’t around when the kind of games that inspired P.N.03 released. It should not surprise fans of Vanquish — which was much better received critically than P.N.03 but got some of the same “huh?” reception, anyway relating to how you were supposed to go about things within — not one bit that Mikami not only helmed both titles, but considers Vanquish to be a successor to P.N.03, one that was able to see through some of what he had envisioned for the GameCube title.

Kerry Brunskill had the right descriptor for P.N.03 back in 2020, when she described it as a “dodge ‘em up.” P.N.03 forces you to remember enemy patterns, to learn which ones to prioritize both for defensive purposes and for extending your combos to rack up additional points, and the emphasis, even more so than on the shooting, is on the dodging. It’s not a shoot ‘em up, no, but it’s also not quite a third-person shooter: it’s something in between, where you literally dance between bullets and rockets as you look for the right opportunity to fire. Dodge ‘em up it is.

The literal nature of the dancing had to be emphasized there, because those of us who have written about our share of bullet hell games and such over the years are certainly prone to describing the action — and the act of weaving in between the hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of bullets on screen — as a chaotic ballet. Vanessa Schneider, the protagonist of P.N.03, actually does dance in between bullets and rockets, though. Character designer and artist Kenichi Ueda studied the bodies and movements of dancers in preparation for drawing Vanessa, and then actually did draw her and all of her animations rather than use motion capture. Mikami went so far as to say in a blog entry at Capcom’s website (via Google translate) that, “Well, I don't think there are many CG models that can express the beauty of a woman's body to this extent,” before revealing that Ueda was responsible for hand-drawing Vanessa and her animations.

Say what you will about the simplistic and reused environments, or the general lack of diversity in the enemy types, the number of sound effects that you know that you know from other games, but Capcom nailed Vanessa’s whole look. Watching her dance around incoming bullets, acrobatically twist and leap and wheel away from incoming explosives or into cover and back out, backflip over barriers, crouch into a jaguar-like pose on the ground before rolling underneath danger, then spring up and deliver death from her hands to these robots while tapping her foot and moving to an unheard song is mesmerizing. And there’s something to be said about drawing all of this by hand instead of using motion capture — would the technology, at that time, have perfectly captured what Ueda envisioned? Would they have been able to find the dancer they needed capable of doing all of these motions, in a way said tech could keep up with? Mikami certainly didn’t seem to think so, and frankly, it’s tough to argue against the result of the path they chose. Hell, Vanessa’s movements even inspired the developer of Stellar Blade over two decades later, and it will take a lot to convince me that it wasn’t just Devil May Cry that Mikami’s Tango Gameworks was pulling from when they created the movement-and-music-based action game, Hi-Fi Rush.

One thing that might have made P.N.03 difficult for people to get into was the decision to turn something this acrobatic, this energetic, this dynamic, into a game with tank controls. You cannot move and shoot at the same time, which might seem odd, but instead of immediate criticism, consider why the developers made the choice that they did. It’s a very intentional one that will make sense if you can be open to the why. You use the analog stick to move, of course: pressing up on it moves her forward at a jog, and pulling back on it will have her do a little spin move backwards. The Y button is for crouching, and then movement while crouched — a roll — is guided by the stick. A is for shooting, B for jumping. X targets enemies, which you don’t usually need to bother with unless you’re being very specific about the order of operations for combo purposes. The Z button is for immediate 180-degre turns, which come in handy in a tank shooter, but are also great for quickly getting to the threats that enter rooms behind you. Your robot foes teleport in, you see, so if you hear shots but don’t see where they’re being fired from, the answer might be directly behind you.

You use the C-stick to peer around corners — it changes the camera’s view in a way that also lets Vanessa get an angle where she can see or at least target the robots, but maybe they can’t see her. It’s selecting an angle to view from more than a smooth, mobile camera, however, so even though it’s the C-stick now, it feels more like manipulating an N64 camera via directional C button presses. Remembering to mess with the camera sometimes is going to be the lone way to avoid enemies firing from around corners that you can hear, but not yet see. While some robots wait to target you, specifically, some of them are programmed to just shoot, shoot, shoot when an intruder is nearby, whether they can visually confirm their presence or not, so listen and look before leaping.

The left trigger and right trigger allow Vanessa to twirl away and dodge to the left and right, respectively. Pressing one direction once gives a little spin move, and a second time adds a cartwheel. You can chain together these movements, as well as backwards spins and backflips and jumps and rolls, to, again, dance around projectiles. The tank controls might seem odd at first, but the idea is that you are making very precise and intentional movement decisions in order to dodge incoming fire. Moving left tied to the left trigger makes an intuitive sense, with more nuanced movements committed to specific buttons, and the analog stick responsible for as little as possible outside of actually running around. You won’t do a lot of running while fighting, given you can’t shoot and move at the same time, but you also don’t need to. The game opens with a cinematic of Vanessa standing in place, letting robots come to her, and it’s only when they begin to fire on her that she moves at all… and to move in the same kind of ways you can move her via the tank controls and button-specific inputs.

After all of the dodging finishes and a brief window opens up, she performs a special move, called an Energy Drive, which is an attack you perform with a series of button presses on the D-Pad and then the A button to fire. The most basic one is right, left, and A, and one of your first stronger Drives requires slightly more (up, down, up, A), but they all perform a similar function: wiping out stronger and/or more enemies faster and concurrently, in order to minimize danger to you and maximize scoring. Energy Drives differ depending on which suit you’re wearing, and they’re limited in use by how much energy you have in reserve. Which also varies depending on not just the suit, but how much you’ve upgraded its energy capacity.

It depends on how much energy capacity you’ve got in the suit at a given time, but you should be aiming to destroy as many robots as possible with Drive attacks. Your normal attack is a shot out of the palm of Vanessa’s hand, which can destroy weaker enemies well enough, but you’re going to have to fire a lot against tougher ones, even when you’ve upgraded the shot’s attack power. You can see some of the old-school design in the way the shot works, too, as there’s no autofire or holding down the button to shoot more unless you have a specific suit that includes this feature. You fire as fast as your thumb can move, and no faster. Now there’s one more reason to be thankful for those tank controls, since you can maybe change the way you’re holding the controller to briefly slam on the A button repeatedly with an index finger instead of your thumb, if you’re faster that way, in a pinch, without having to worry about moving around the wrong way.

So! You use this palm attack when saving up your energy for bigger prey, or as a way to chain together a combo by buying yourself a few seconds with a few taps of the A button. Every enemy you destroy has not just a point total to consider, but also a different time that they’ll extend the combo window by. The first kill always grants you plenty of time to find a second — 15 seconds in rooms that might take you 45 seconds to clear, for instance — but the second one is going to depend much more on what kind of foe it is you’ve defeated. If it’s just one of the little guys who barely ever shoot at you, or give you a huge window of opportunity before they finally do fire, you’ll get just a few seconds before the combo window closes. If it’s a bigger enemy, though, one where an Energy Drive is inarguably the way to go, you’ll get much more time.

It’s also important to consider that this time isn’t “extra” time; it’s not added to the existing amount of time your combo has left to it. If you have 14 seconds left and kill a robot that’ll give you five, you now have five seconds left. Which means you need to think about who to take out first, and then second — rack up kills of the weak guys to focus on the stronger ones, hoping you can string it all together fast enough to avoid losing the chain? Or take out the big guy first, then casually pick off the weaker foes once you’ve triggered or seen additional enemies to add to the combo?

The Energy Drives often target multiple foes, which helps with these decisions, but when all you’ve got to use for the moment is your standard attack, you’re going to have to think about your order of operations here. Especially since scoring isn’t just for showing off: points are also your currency for items and upgrades.

The shop includes purchases for things like Continues, which you can find scattered across the main levels of the game, sure, but on the tougher difficulties you might need more of them since they’re more like extra lives than continues. More important than even continues, though, are the suits. There are 11 suits in the game, 10 of which you have to acquire, and eight of those by purchasing them. Now, you don’t have to go for every suit in the game, by any means. Other than the two unlockables, which you get either by completing all of the Trial Missions on specific difficulties or by purchasing the rest of the suits, each is in a specific category. Guardian, Blazer, and Fusion, with Prima, Intera, or Ultra levels for each. The Guardian suits are designed with defense in mind, as they feature low attack strength, but include automatic firing, high health, and middling energy reserves. The Blazer suits are high-offense, without automatic fire but featuring high energy reserves for tons of Drive usage, and palm-shot power that makes up for the slower firing speed. Fusion suits are somewhere in the middle, with more health than the Blazers and more energy than the Guardians, but less of either of those at their respective bests. They’re the balanced option for if you aren’t confident enough in your dodging to go all-in with a Blazer suit, though, or know you’re not wanting to sit around taking enemy fire like the Guardian suit allows you to do. Compared to the other suits, anyway.

Taking damage does break your combos and slow you down, too, which impacts your score, so figuring out how to thrive with a Blazer or Fusion suit makes the most sense to me, but the point of having the options is that you can customize to your own playstyle. You receive bonuses after each room is completed if you can defeat all of the enemies, and if you can avoid taking any damage. Faster is better, too, and active combos mean score multipliers: you’ll see the combo multiplier next to the point total it’ll be multiplied by in the top-right of the screen, with the figure climbing with each robot destroyed within the chain. Since you have to upgrade each suit a ton in order to maximize its potential, you’re going to want to learn to avoid taking damage, destroy robots efficiently, and chain together lengthy combos all while moving across rooms in a hurry.

Oh, and you get post-level bonuses, too, based on your performance. This is where the huge point bonuses come from, since they’re based on the number of rooms completed within a stage, how long it took you to complete it, kills, and so on. Do a great job once and get rewarded for it twice, basically, which will make upgrading those suits a breeze, and in turn makes future levels that much easier for you, too.

Another way to improve both yourself and your pool of points for upgrades is by completing the Trial Missions. After you finish a stage, and before moving on to the next one — there are 11 main missions total — you get the chance to tackle a Trial Mission. Each Trial Mission has five levels within it, but you can’t access the next one until you’ve achieved a certain level of performance within the previous one. So if you come out the other side with an “Amateur” grade and just two-thirds of the rooms in the mission explored, you’re going to have to try again. The good news is that you keep all the points, so it all goes toward the same end, but the later Trial Missions are more difficult and have more potential for high scores, so, you’ll want to improve your performance.

As the Trial Missions use the same room structures as the main missions, and the enemies are the same with the difference being in the order of the levels’ rooms themselves and the enemy placement within them, they’re excellent practice for improving your game. They’re definitely “Trials” in the challenge sense, and you can’t use your continues within them, either. If you die, the trial is over, and you have to begin again from the start of whatever level within you were playing, whereas the main missions have checkpoints that keep you from having to replay everything whenever you die. But the rewards are obvious, in that you can beef up your suit or buy new ones, or even increase your share of continues if you need more of them, and also, completing every Trial Mission on Easy unlocks one special suit, the Blackbird, which means you won’t have to buy every suit in the game to get it.

There are more reasons to play on Easy than just access to a specific suit, however. Like Vanquish, P.N.03 was designed with the idea that you’d learn the game’s mechanics on its lowest difficulty setting, and then proceed to Normal after that, with your knowledge and experience in hand. If you can complete the game on Normal, then it’s time for you to try Hard, and experience the “real” version of P.N.03. I don’t mean that in a gatekeep-y way, either, but in the sense that, by then, you’d have unlocked the most powerful suits and fully upgraded them, while having full knowledge both in your head and in your muscle memory of the game’s design and its expectations for you. You’ll get to play to your and Vanessa’s full potential, and you’ll also need to in order to succeed. There’s a reason that the clear data transfers between difficulties and includes all of your unlocked suits and upgrades for them, is what I’m getting at, and it’s because you’re meant to play P.N.03 again and again, with increased challenge each time to test what you’ve learned and equipped. The final suit you can unlock, the Papillon, does not have any kind of barrier: this is a no-damage ever suit, that assumes you will know how to dodge every attack launched your way. And it gives you the weapons to get away with it, too.

P.N.03 had an accelerated development period, which explains the constant reuse of rooms and just the single non-robot character. There are two cutscenes in the entire game where there is voice acting, and just one voice, that of Jennifer Hale (related: the one complaint that popped up more than once in reviews of P.N.03 that I simply do not understand is criticism of Hale’s voice. It’s Jennifer Hale, guys.) The rest is text conversations in the kind of format those who’ve played Resident Evil 4 will recognize, only without the voice acting, or just plain action and no time for words. The development period was so short, though, that the decision to shoot out of Vanessa’s palms is due to the lack of time to draw and animate guns. No, really. Per Mikami, while discussing what he was able to put into Vanquish that he could not in P.N.03, told Edge that, “I wanted to make sure the main character would shoot guns! In the early stages of P.N. 03 Vanessa had guns, but because of schedule constraints we weren't able to create all of the animations for the guns, so we had to take them out.”

Despite the limitations, though, P.N.03 is a great deal of fun. Again, not for everyone, since it needs to scratch some pretty specific itches, but what games aren’t like that to one degree or another? P.N.03 probably would have thrived in a different era, where lower-budget games and shorted games could be better appreciated for what they are instead of what they are not, but it didn’t come out then. It came out during the GameCube era, when titles like Metroid Prime 2 were forced to add multiplayer modes and artificially extend the life of the game’s campaign because of a bunch of bean counters. Hey, if Capcom and Hideki Kamiya can reunite for a new Okami entry, then maybe there’s hope for Shinji Mikami and P.N.03, too. Or at least a re-release, give us and the game that much.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.