In an era of post-launch updates and patches, it seems increasingly common for games to be rushed out the door. Any number of examples could spring to mind, Cyberpunk, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Fallout 76, these are games that made big promises and delivered only buggy facsimiles of what was advertised. However, rushed production cycles aren’t a recent development, and one needs only to recall how E.T. crashed the entire industry to know how constant of a problem it’s been. P.N.03 is poised to be my new favorite example of a rushed game from the pre-patching days, summarized with the following sentence: P.N.03 is a third person shooter that was so rushed the developers didn’t have time to add guns.

That sounds ridiculous, but you can check the Wikipedia page to see quotes from the developers and the original trailer, which show how guns were cut due to time constraints. This is why the protagonist simply shoots energy blasts from her hands, and upgrades just change their power and speed. The environments are notably bland, with generic sci-fi white walls and repetitive grey corridors comprising eighty percent of the game. The runtime is short, and the cast of enemies is too small and simple for an action game.

Wait, action game? Didn’t you say earlier that it was a third-person shooter? Well, yes. P.N.03 is a blend of elements, where your character is only ever shooting instead of doing melee attacks, but you’re expected to acrobatically dodge and maneuver around arenas like a typical action game. You could think of it as a blend of director Shinji Mikami’s influences, from his time overseeing the keystones of the action and third person shooter genres with Devil May Cry and Resident Evil 4. It’s an interesting concept, and Mikami would go on to fully realize that idea with Vanquish, but the implementation here had so little time before Capcom’s release window that the concept is about all we can talk about. There aren’t any bugs or anything, it looks fine, it’s just bland. The only reason I care enough to make a full writeup is that in the very final level, you can glimpse what the game was trying to be. You get arenas that let you elegantly dodge bullets and put your skill to the test, and an amazing final boss that has a mindblowing sense of scale. Even though it’s an incomplete game overall which I would never recommend for its own sake, it holds enough promise to where I hope someone in the future can give its vision a new life. But of course, there’s no need to rush.

Truly a bizarre game from the folks who brought you Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, and Devil May Cry.

The gist of the game is that you play as Vanessa Z. Schneider, a sort of space mercenary, who dance-fights her way through levels. By and large the game is a series of rooms that you'll do battle in by blasting some robots and dancing around. For that, I love it.

However, that's about the extent of it. The game is high on style and starts poking at some nearly Nier Automata-like plot beats towards the end of the story, but can't quite follow through on any of those fronts.

PN03 walked (danced) so that Bayonetta, Sayonara Wild Hearts and Nier Automata could run (also danced, but did it well).

A small, overlooked link in the 3D-space chain Capcom forged from 1996 to 2006. Essentially a dead-sea scroll or rosetta stone that allows us to work out how the studio progressed from Resident Evil and the original Devil May Cry to its now-revered stable of mid-2000s action games like God Hand, Resident Evil 4, Devil May Cry 3 and Dead Rising; there’s even the genesis of Capcom-offshoots like Bayonetta and Vanquish in the mix here!

Unfortunate that it’s been left to languish in the GameCube’s dusty cupboards for so long - Capcom are unwittingly sitting on a little 4-hour gem here that they could easily wrap up in a PC-compatible bow and market in much the same way as killer7 or Onimusha: Warlords. Lots of talk about how this unfinished experience was doomed from the moment it had to be released on a £40 plastic DVD case in the 2003 days before post-launch updates, but there’s a chance for redemption here on the digital-only storefront. Absolutely worth checking out on Dolphin - a simple 1080p upscale and an aliasing filter over its minimalist aesthetic gives it enough shine to pass as modernity. And you’ll be able to save-state past the one-hit-killshit to focus on what really matters here - boogie-running beats and a mecha called Mister Giraffe.

Two questions to decide if you'll enjoy PN03:
Do you enjoy arcade style games that involve trying to get a high score by doing the same thing over and over?

Does the "sexy girl shooting robots while inside a 2004 iMac and jamming to electronica" aesthetic appeal to you at all?

If you said "yes" to both of these then this is a great game.
PN03 is absolutely not a game for everyone. The gameplay is clunky (tank controls being a factor), the action is repetitive, and the scenery rarely changes. But if you're into the vibe of the game and come from a world where a high score is bragging rights, then PN03 is genuinely a great time.

fuck man i like this game a lot but it has a LOT of flaws that I can't exactly look past. Mostly due to its difficulty. P.N. 03 requires you to master a very unorthodox control scheme in order to get through levels, however there are also things that you can grind towards to help you make the levels easier, such as suit upgrades and what not. The main problem isn't the fact that the controls are jank; they are designed that way for a reason, and working around them is actually quite stylish, satisfying, and rewarding to do. The problem is when you make it more than halfway through the game, start getting mauled by enemies that are DAMAGE SPONGES whereas your character is quite fragile. Obviously, you want to grind to get those suit upgrades, but the prices for them are so high that if you want the best ones, you would probably spend more than twice the actual games length just grinding, and that's no fun. I think that this all could have been solved if you could rapid fire without destroying your hand by mashing the A button (please, if you decide to play this, make sure to plug in a turbo controller, your hands will thank you later), or if the enemy health count was a lot lower. The plot exists, doesn't really make sense, but thats not why you should be playin anyways. Moral of the story here, is that the game has a LOT of cool style to it, and really satisfying gameplay once you get the hang of it, but the real dealbreaker that prevents me from really being able to rec this fully is the fact that the difficulty spikes are so random and don't exactly make the game an enjoyable experience near the end. At least I feel happy that I played through this, since obscure games like this are exactly why I keep gamin. It's too stylish to hate, but not fun to really play.

En mi cabeza hay una barra, de nombre aún por concretar (algo así como vibración o choque), que se va rellenando según el juego de Mikami. Con God Hand la barra está completa del todo y brilla con luces de neón y fuego a los costados; le sigue RE4 a un 80/90% y Vanquish llena la mitad. Con P.N. 03 la barra está vacía.

Me gustaría soltar alguna tontería del estilo, no es aséptico, es minimalista, pero va a ser que no. Simplemente es fallido.

Por cierto, premio a la peor animación de salto de la historia.

+ Plays like an arcade game
+ Music is fairly popping compared to the rest of the game
~ Sexy / appealing character design
~ Has potential to be better
~ Short game
- Combat isn't polished
- Lot of unneeded lag
- Controls become easier pending on difficulty
- Game feels completely rushed / unfinished
- Lot of instant death moves, even on easy mode
- A lot of filler missions despite short campaign

It’s weird, the biggest flaw with it isn’t its length or lack of content, but instead the feature that feels the most complete: the upgrade system. For a game that you can beat in two hours, you’ll likely only get to use one or two of the suits during a given playthrough- even more annoyingly you’ll need to invest even more points to bring a newly-purchased suit on par with your current gear. It feels like a system meant for a longer game, and ultimately had me stick with the early-game “Prima Blazer” suit, whose special attack was hilariously broken early on, clearing out rooms of enemies in seconds and melting boss health bars. (I looked this up to see if it was a problem with emulation, but, no, this seems to be the basic strategy for speedrunning the game)

I still kind of dig it, though. There's an innate sort of coolness to playing as Vanessa- all your moves have a musicality to them that make weaving in and out of enemy fire feel intentional and stylish, even if the reality is that I’m frantically hitting the dodge button. The closest comparison I could make is Bayonetta’s dodge offset, narrowly avoiding an attack before immediately returning fire without skipping a beat. The game also picks up in its second half, with more lethal enemy configurations and multi-phased bosses that demand your full attention. For something I played more as a historical curiosity, it was a nice surprise.

a strange game to say the least
a promising game that could've been great if it wasn't blatantly unfinished to the point where they couldn't even model a gun

P.N.03's gameplay is quite infuriating. Tank controls do not work for this sort of game and makes attacks very awkward to dodge with regular movement though the game does try to rectify this with a side step dodge that just barely helps you avoid attacks. The enemy variety is non existent and you pretty much see every enemy by mission 4. The damage values are ridiculous and i knew it was gonna be rough when one of the enemies in the first room of the first level has an instant kill tank shot which spoiler alert happens a lot in this game.

the upgrade system is completely scuffed because of the insane prices for new suits which the game wants you to buy. The problem with the suits is that they don't carry over the upgrades you got on the one you currently have and the ones that are available at the start either make you a glass cannon or a tank that can barely do damage. now this is where the level 2 suits come into play which offer balanced upgrade trees but also cost a whopping 300 000 points which again is a complete waste considering you'll be weaker than you currently are by the time you gather the cash to unlock it.

i came across this game in a Youtube video and thought it looked pretty cool but unfortunately it just isn't a very good game

posing like a Super Sentai ranger after every dodge is pretty cool though

If nothing else, an interesting test run for what could have been an alternative approach to third-person shooters instead of the RE4 template that ended up becoming widely adopted. It's a neat concept - the success of the player depends on their ability to dodge incoming attacks and tap the attack button as quickly as possible rather than emphasizing the aiming aspect of shooting - but the surrounding pieces feel shockingly scant for what was part of the infamous "Capcom 5." It's even weirder knowing that Shinji Mikami directed this game as well, since there's almost no indication of his fingerprints beyond the tightness of the mechanics on display. It's difficult to describe how little there is to dissect/discuss here outside of the gunplay: the writing is flat and borderline unfinished in how threadbare it is, and Vanessa has virtually no characterization beyond wanting to get paid and being a proto-Bayonetta with her spicy mid-combat posing. It's just so...nothing. I can't say I didn't have a good time, as the actual game is decent enough for a quick playthrough, but I'd be hard-pressed to describe it in any meaningful way beyond its combat. Disappointingly shallow.

So I wanted to check out PN03 mainly out of curiosity. I didn't expect to find some hidden gem or whatever, I just wanted to poke around and see what went wrong. I did end up learning that, but it actually turned out to be a pretty decent game!

So, PN03 is extremely simple. You run and you shoot, and not both at once (people got mad at this at the time, but it works, honestly given that Mikami would go on to help with RE4 I wouldn't be surprised if that's where that came from). The emphasis is on the defensive side, Vanessa aims on her own, your task is to dodge around attacks. You have a dodge roll (more of a twirl really), a jump and tank controls to do so, and the result is surprisingly swift most of the time. Vanessa is dancing and moving to the beat (kinda, not all songs sync to it) all the time and well-executed fights end up looking like a ballet of weaving through enemy attacks. You also have invincible super moves executed with fighting game-style motion inputs which depend on the suits, more about that in a bit.

What really ties the game together is the scoring system, in all of its simplicity. When you kill an enemy, a timer pops up. Kill another enemy, the timer renews and you start a combo. When the combo ends, multiply points by its value. Simple stuff, but pretty addictive, especially because score = currency so you're definitely gonna want to focus on it. It turns what would have been a slow, defensive game into a rapid-fire series of small choices in every fight. Frankly anything even lightly grazed by Hideki Kamiya might just be destined to have a great combat loop, because when it comes to core gameplay loop, PN03's really great. However, this game was rushed like hell- It was developed in seven months and quite literally every corner had to be cut to push it out that fast. It's a miracle that what works works, but there's a lot that doesn't, so here's a bunch of thoughts (most negative):

-I think Vanessa is supposed to be a Dante-style wise-cracking too cool for school badass mixed with a femme fatale, but she never really gets to show off in cutscenes and only has two voiced scenes, so unfortunately her character doesn't really carry across too well.
-Enemies are really simple (both in design and function) and kinda erratic, which kinda ruins the flow sometimes.
-Almost all of the dialogue is carried across radio conversations, styled like MGS codecs except without VA, just text. It's all really bland too, it'd honestly have been better to just make it a completely mute game and shoot for a more abstract style. There's exactly one actual story beat, and it's a "my arm was my wife"-tier ending twist.
-All of the game takes place in pristine white sci-fi corridors, with the exception of one mission and a couple rooms that are on the outside of a desolate planet. It's very repetitive, but mixed with the OST it manages to gain a weird, oniric feel at the best of times. I kinda dig it, though more variation would have been nice.
-Music is REALLY good.
-Plenty of enemies have charged OHKO attacks and that is really annoying to deal with.
-There's a continue system. I wish it wasn't there.
-While I praised the scoring system, things are way too expensive. Throughout my playthrough I could only buy one of the many armors offered to me, and I had to grind to upgrade it into actually being better than the default one (which I had also maxed out).
EDIT: Apparently store prices were a lot lower in the JP version which... sounds better. You're not really missing out on the story at all so maybe just play that.
-Special moves are also tied to armor, which means that through one playthrough you'll get to see 3 or 4 at best, which is a shame since there's a dozen or so.
-The game is way more fun with autofire but to get that you need to buy the few armors that have it and purchase it as an upgrade for them.
-Bosses suck. Not a single one is good and the final boss is both spongey and trial and error.

So despite all that, the fact that I rate PN03 as an overall pretty good action game should really emphasize just how good that core gameplay is. I recommend playing it on Easy, I played on Normal and that was really punishing (save states may have been used sparingly in place of continues), unfair at times. But I do recommend it, which surprised me. It's only some three hours long, extremely linear and overall quite fun. It's also just interesting as a piece of history, especially with how both Vanquish and Bayonetta would pick up on some of its ideas, and pull them off better than it did.