"A game with huge potential plagued by a few control issues and a short length"

P.N. 03 follows Shinji Mikami's recent trend of creating quirky games that attempt to incorporate oldschool type gameplay elements into new games and make the games ''stylish''. Some of them work; others do not. After Devil May Cry, Shinji split off with the Devil May Cry team and went off to work on P.N. 03. The rest of the team went to create Viewtiful Joe (which wound up being better). It's a shame that P.N. 03 wound up being like it is, because it really had a lot of great things about it, and you can definitely see Shinji's ideas trying to show.

The basic premise of the game takes place in a futuristic robotics area. You control Vanessa Schneider, a mercenary, who apparently likes to dance. Her most recent mission is to dispatch of a group of robots called C.A.M.S who are attacking a planet. Vanessa has some kind of vendetta against these robots for killing her parents, although we never learn why, or anything much beyond that.

The soul of the game lies in exploring this planet and destroying as many of the C.A.M.S as possible. Vanessa is given very limited weaponry to fight these little things--a palm shot, or blaster on the end of her hand. With this, and a brand new artificial combat suit equipped to her, you journey through the levels and kill as many of the little buggers as possible. But, there are some interesting little things to note. Vanessa is a very skilled acrobat. In the process of dispatching of the C.A.M.S she will perform an array of flips and maneuvers while appearing to dance. Something like dodging may come across as Vanessa doing a ballet-esque flip or cartwheel. Combat can be very amusing to watch and observing Vanessa as she gracefully flips and rolls across the screen and blowing up the enemies.

The true fun of the game lies within building up long combos after destroying enemies in order to gain points. These points can then be exchanged in order to power up Vanessa's suit. It can increase her palm shot power, her life, her energy, and can also be used to learn special moves. These special moves (which simulate real dance moves), used much like the Devil Meter in Devil May Cry, are executed as one would in something like Street Fighter. If done correctly, she will briefly flash for a moment and fire different types of blast at the enemies. These can range from a multi-targeted scattershot to twin beams of energy to a giant bomb. They can be very helpful when the enemies may appear overwhelming, since not only will the move be likely to clear most of the screen for you, but also Vanessa is also invincible for the time that it takes her to perform the move. Alas, even with fully upgraded energy you won't be likely to be able to pull off a special move once or twice before you'll need to search around for energy to do another one. Along with powering up Vanessa's suit, she can buy different suits as the game goes on, which all have their strengths and weaknesses. You will pretty much have three types to choose from: Balanced, Offensive, and Defensive suits. Balanced suits will be, just as the name suggests, fairly equal in all categories. Special moves will be fairly powerful and the suit will be very versatile. Offensive suits will be very powerful in terms of attacking capacity and the special moves will be quite devastating. However, the suit might not have a lot of life or weak armor. Defensive suits will have a very good reaction time, high life, and sometimes even an automatic fire option (although until the last batch of suits your finger is still faster than the auto).

However, the game has its share of flaws. While the control of the game for the most part works, there are one or two glaring errors which can completely mess it up. The biggest one is simply that Vanessa must stand still while firing at enemies. Now, in some games this may not be such a big deal. But this game was designed with a very frantic form of gameplay in mind. In the later levels Vanessa simply cannot afford to stand still. You may have up to 8 enemies firing at you at once. You should be running while firing at enemies, or dodging and flipping then doing quick counterattacks. But instead you must run, then fire. Then dodge, and then fire. The moments when you are standing still leave you a complete sitting duck. This seems like a very minor thing but it may be the game's biggest problem. What's the worst about it is that it's something you would've thought they might've realized during Beta Testing or something like that. Another large control issue is toggling between targeted enemies. Throughout the game you may have to suddenly change targets, possibly to keep your combo meter going or to take out a weaker enemy quickly to avoid damage. Whatever the reason, you need to be able to tab something quickly to change it. Hitting the ''X'' button certainly isn't a reach, but your reflexes expect to get it faster than you actually do, and even then with all of the enemies on screen you can spend 5 seconds scrolling through enemies until it gets to the one you want; by then you've probably been shot.

Boss battles can be both amazing and irritating at the same time. On the one hand, some of them can involve very strategic and active battles as Vanessa maneuvers around these huge enemies. Since they are bosses, there won't be any annoying floating robots to blast you or make fighting frustrating, so you can really enjoy the game to it's fullest. Along with that, many of the bosses are transforming mechs that will often have several stages before they die. It's not uncommon to have a giant mech-type boss that will transform once or twice. There's also this neat little feature that can totally ruin bosses altogether. Some of the bosses have a little weakness where blasting a special move at them at a certain time will immediately kill them. When I first discovered this, I was really amazed by it. ''Wow! If I shoot a power bomb into the monster's core, it will blow up without having to fight him!'' I thought. However, I soon realized that this was not just for a select few bosses, but almost every boss. It's very much a shame because the boss battles are really fun when you're not blowing them up in 5 seconds.

But when you're not destroying transforming mechs, you'll be exploring a very detailed world and be treated to crisp, elegant graphics. Vanessa and most of the enemies are seen as high-polygon characters with detailed textures. The backgrounds feature sharp visuals with great lighting and very realistic explosions and beams. The game manages to run at a constant framerate and can support many high-quality special effects. This is, however, probably due to the fact that 90% of the game (and the short game that it is) is indoors. Thus while it is very pretty you are basically seeing the same types of rooms over and over. It is true that the levels change overtime, but only 2 of the levels you actually play will be outside. Even though I didn’t mind it too much, over time the levels did begin to get repetitive. Nonetheless, it remains a very pretty game. The cutscenes are done very well and Vanessa's face is very detailed.

One thing that bugs me alot about the game is the manner in which the combo system was executed. In Viewtiful Joe, you were rewarded for being stylish. If Joe slowed down time and killed enemies, he was given a bonus for it. If he zoomed in as well, he was given a bigger bonus and could accumulate huge combos. However, here there is no reward. As long as I kill the same amount of enemies in the room before my combo timer runs out, I could defeat each enemy doing an array of flips and cartwheels to dodge and counterattack, or I could stand completely still and just blow them all away. This can leave you very unsatisfied at times. It can also be very frustrating when you are frantically trying to kill one guy to extend your timer and one guy which you don't see is constantly shooting you in the back, knocking you down and preventing you from killing the guy milliseconds before the timer runs out.

And if not the control issues or the lack of style rewards, then the game is worst hit by its length. I spent quite a bit of time building up money so that I could power up my suits and buy better ones. There are unlockable Trial Missions where you can go through random scenarios in order to gain money. I did alot of these and thought I accumulated a fair share of money. But even then, I had to spend hours upon hours training just to afford one of the final suits, and even then I wasn't able to fully power it up. You will almost always reach the end of the game long before you can have the suit the way you like it. Then there's the story (or lack thereof) which begins to pick up in the second to last stage. Then you beat the game and are treated to a cutscene which makes little sense, and have almost none of your questions about the game answered.

Finally, there's not too much to unlock. There are a few extra costumes and an extended sequence, but to get any of these things you wind up doing alot more than would seem reasonable. There's a cool black suit to unlock if you beat the game having bought all of the others ones (and the suit is quite powerful), but once you do all of the other suits have their limits removed, so there's no real point to having this new one. It then becomes a matter of palette preference, since you can make any suit as powerful as you want. I would have liked there to be a little more than just new suits to unlock, or if not then at least with less of a hassle.

Beyond all this frantic violence and frustration, you can still be treated to the game's soundtrack. I'm not really one who liked techno; I see all of it as nothing more than idiotic tunes using electronic instruments. But if there was ever a type of techno I could seriously see myself listening to, this would have to be it. P.N. 03 features some of the best and most interesting types of techno music I have ever heard. While none of it is particularly memorable, it's good music to have in the background that you (like you will see Vanessa do) will find yourself tapping your foot to while exploring. The music can convey a very interesting atmosphere, and in the cases of the later levels a very psychedelic one.

Overall this comes across as a game that just lacks polish. It has a huge potential to be on the level of Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe, but ultimately just gets killed by a few control problems and some replay issues here and there. It feels alot like a low-budget game that Capcom let Mikami do, and then rushed it before he had proper time to work some things out. Had the Viewtiful Joe Team worked with Mikami on this, or if he had just been given additional time, I think it probably would've come out alot better. Even so it still winds up being one of the most underrated games of this generation, and I still find it very fun. It's worth checking out if you want a quirky game in the style of Viewtiful Joe, but with less oldschool elements and more abstract in its form.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/21/04