If you aren’t aware of 2003’s P.N.03, it was the first of the “Capcom Five,” a set of five Capcom-published action games initially developed as GameCube exclusives. Of the four of these that were released (very appropriately, Dead Phoenix didn’t make it), P.N.03 was the only to remain exclusive to Nintendo’s console, likely owing to its mixed reception and low sales. This is despite the director’s chair having seated Shinji Mikami, one of Capcom’s bigger names at the time, and perhaps one of the game’s bigger selling points these days.

The team’s ambitions evidently exceeded their budget and schedule, and the result is a small pool of enemies and environments liberally reused to squeeze more runtime from one playthrough than seems physically possible. That isn’t hyperbolic: effectively earning and upgrading Vanessa’s suits means spending time between the game’s levels—which are already similar in visuals, layout and enemy placement—replaying remixed versions of those levels with randomised door destinations. Essentially, I think this game would have benefitted from being treated more closely to an arcade game, with tighter pacing, steeper challenge and a more replayable foundation. Even then, its length certainly isn’t its only issue.

The reason for which I’m talking about P.N.03 at all is that, at its core, it’s a super unique action game. I’ve seen it described as a third-person shooter, and while Vanessa is definitely shooting in front of an arguably third-person camera, the shooting itself is clearly not the game’s focus. Rather, shooting is the bread of this dodging sandwich; it’s both the spaces between evasion and the pay-off that punctuates it. After all, while mashing your single attack button glues you to the ground and fires at the currently targeted enemy, most of the controller is dedicated to avoiding damage by ducking, rolling, jumping and sidestepping. Crucially, the only source of invincibility is spending meter on “Energy Drive” attacks; the challenge is to purposefully and stylishly slip around enemy projectiles within tight corridors, repositioning and finding brief openings for counterattacks. And yet, you wouldn’t necessarily know this from the game’s opening.

While most of my time with P.N.03 was spent within the sterile confines of an AI-controlled military base, the game opens with a jaunt towards it, broken-up by dialogue sequences, tutorials and various enemy encounters. Vanessa is dropped-in at the perimeter of this open zone, immediately staring at a distant, static enemy on a raised platform to the side. If you fire at the enemy, whose projectiles are too slow to be of any real threat to you, you’ll notice that you’re stuck to the floor and need to mash to deal any actual damage. If you instead decide to run around and test your buttons, it might be a bit more evident that this is a game about movement, since hopping about looks flashier than the shooting feels (even if the basic running is pretty stiff).

With so much breathing room and with enemies at such a distance, there’s not much stopping you from just running past any initial incoming fire. The projectiles themselves lack visual prominence, especially when they’re moving towards the camera from afar, missing an opportunity to emphasise the importance of reactively evading them. For instance, projectiles in a typical shmup—a genre that’s all about projectiles—usually look loud, as if screaming at you to get the hell out of the way. In P.N.03, enemies’ firing actions are often visually louder than the beams they’re firing, which makes very little sense for encouraging players to dodge those projectiles as they slowly approach. Admittedly, this makes far more sense in the game’s dominant tighter areas, in which projectiles rarely have the time to warn players themselves. Really, this seems like a fault with the camera position and angle that hasn’t been accounted-for: projectiles and their relative depth should visually be treated with the importance that they hold during combat, but they’re nearly invisible when incoming at oblique angles.

A core issue that I noticed with the game’s opening concerned the targeting reticle. Right at the start, walking forwards slightly summons the reticle around the aforementioned initial enemy, before that enemy has had a chance to pose a threat. It’s an invitation to stand still and shoot it, engendering a static, preemptive approach that’s antithetical to the evasive, reactive combat beyond the introduction. I can see it as an attempt to give the player a safe space in which to figure-out the game’s attack system, but the single attack button is likely too basic to fully warrant that safety net, considering how the more complex Energy Drive system is introduced alongside more aggressive enemies. Plus, I feel that introducing attacking in the context of counterattacking would have been more appropriate for its practical use throughout the game.

A problem with the regular attack, however, is its immediately hamstrung damage: slowly chipping away at the health pools of the game’s first enemies feels hugely dissatisfying, considering their general lack of any reaction to the shots besides a shrinking health bar. Dissatisfaction is a great way to dissuade players from using the attack, except for the fact that it’s the player’s only meterless option for killing enemies. Better yet, one of the first enemy types that players encounter circles around Vanessa, potentially for extended periods of time, revealing that her main attack fires projectiles that lock onto enemies’ positions at the time of firing; if you start firing this peashooter, some enemies will simply meander out of the way as you’re stuck in place, hoping they’ll choose to stay still for a second. Combined, this all makes the player’s main attack seem almost immediately useless.

While certainly beyond the scope of just the game’s opening, I think that evading and counterattacking could have been better encouraged by making the regular attacks more intrinsically satisfying. As they stand, counterattacks are spread over an extended period of time and require repetitive exertion, lacking an immediate pay-off. I’d have proposed a punchy blast attack that can be charged while evading and released afterwards (with a longer attack cooldown), or can only be activated during evasive animations (with a cooldown window once the manoeuvre is finished). Either approach would keep the player moving and guarantee a greater attack variety, as more powerful attacks with a longer cooldown wouldn’t be as flexible in application as the existing quick shots.

Even then, when going for a counterattack, the game’s targeting algorithm often locks onto the wrong enemy. This leaves you mashing the targeting button until it locks onto the enemy that you wanted to respond to. Evidently, the game doesn’t prioritise closer enemies when switching between targets, which seems like a crazy decision when encounters are usually in such close quarters.

As it is, the player can circumvent both of those issues by using Energy Drives—the game’s punchiest, most effective attacks—at the cost of varying amounts of meter. On top of doing a lot of damage and often targeting numerous enemies simultaneously, they grant invincibility while they’re active, completely sidestepping the game’s evasion system. These special attacks feel like they’re meant to be used in sticky situations, given their long, spectacular animations and the inconsistent regeneration of meter. But then, the prior problems with the regular attack make it feel like Energy Drives are the standard, with regular attacks just being the thing you use when you’re out of meter. In fact, the player is given a full bar of meter and a tutorial on triggering the special moves without regular attacks having even been mentioned beyond the manual. Really, it’s just a shame that players are so quickly directed away from dodging attacks and countering them, and it would have been great for Energy Drives to feel more like an extension of the core loop. Perhaps they could have been used to stagger enemies instead of granting invincibility, still requiring some degree of timing and positional preparation.

On the whole, P.N.03 seems to lean on negative reinforcement to encourage intended behaviour: the player is punished for making mistakes, often taking large amounts of damage from individual attacks, without necessarily feeling adequately rewarded for their successes. The game’s opening certainly didn’t sell me on the core loop; it felt like I actually had to sell it to myself. An open area with a sporadic smattering of enemies didn’t really force me to engage with their attacks, and dealing so little damage against them just made me write them all off as sponges. In fact, getting a damage upgrade soon after the intro made the game markedly more satisfying to play. I can only think that the low amount of starting damage was to guarantee a back-and-forth in early combat encounters, requiring dodging multiple attacks before each enemy dies. Although potentially outside of their budget, I’d have instead suggested giving enemies behaviours that are more reactive to the player’s shots. For example, shooting an enemy could trigger them to charge forwards or shift sideways, forcing the player to also reposition themself. Generally, while robotic enemies make for logical similarity and asset reuse, their lack of emotion and reaction makes them pretty unsatisfying to shoot at, which itself discourages shooting them.

P.N.03’s opening certainly isn’t its biggest problem, but it leaves a bad first impression and does a bad job of both encouraging ideal player behaviour and conforming to the game’s greater structure. A good, far earlier example of an introduction is that of Gradius, Konami’s 1985 arcade shooting game. On top of being critically replayable by allowing for both gentle and hard failure, it gives players ample time to figure-out their (admittedly sparse) controls while avoiding slow, predictable enemy patterns, despite being trapped in a confined space with them. Although Gradius’ brutal positive feedback makes it extremely suboptimal to not kill each group of “Fans” at the start, this will only become evident with experience, and each enemy killed feels rewarding in itself. Perhaps obviously, an opening isn’t just a chance to teach players to play, but also to make them want to continue.

Originally written on 15/7/24, after playing a chunk of P.N.03 but before having tired of its structure. Converted into human vocabulary on 28/12/24, and further edited and posted on 3/1/25.