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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, P.N.03 is either some sort of on rails shooter, or a free-roaming action game with controls that are too stiff, but in either case, too underwhelming to be worth a look.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: The control scheme is indeed very rigid, although this is very much intentional. More importantly, it's visually very stark. This is a game made of interchangeable white rooms grey hallways.
Why I Like It Anyway: The appeal of P.N.03 can be explained in one simple sentence. It's a Clover game. Of course, this only explains everything when one understands exactly what that means. Clover Studio was the name given to a little semi-autonomous development house they set up with the most creative people they had on hand at the time (most notably Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, and Atsushi Inaba), most notably responsible for the Resident Evil games, and Devil May Cry. Their goal was, in large part to create what became known in many circles as The Capcom 5- five original games for the Gamecube, to offset Capcom's general status as a sequel-factory.
Strictly speaking, the only real common thread between The Capcom 5 besides the platform and publisher was that Shinji Mikami played an active role in the creation of all of them. Shinji Mikami in fact has had a hand in nearly every notable game to come out of Capcom since the mid-90s which didn't have Mega Man or Street Fighter in the name, and I could easily sit here and write an entire article on just his personal influence on the industry, but this won't be it. In any case, the five games in question were P.N.03, Viewtiful Joe, Dead Phoenix (which never saw release), Resident Evil 4 (whose inclusion in the list I personally consider a bit of a cheat), and Killer7.
Essentially, the Clover formula, which has its roots in Devil May Cry, is to make a nice solid action game, with a major emphasis on sink or swim pattern recognition, and earning points to spend on upgrades between levels by playing in a sufficiently stylish and skillful manner. Within that general frame of mind, they have created a fairly remarkable variety of games, from the shockingly oldschool side scrolling brawler Viewtiful Joe, to the rather remarkable Zelda-like Okami. The purest form of the idea however is on full display in P.N.03.
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P.N.03 is a game with only the thinnest pretense of a plot, in which what can really only be described as a power-armored ballerina dances around through a large sterile-looking maze of a base, dodging through lasers and blowing robots to pieces with wrist mounted guns in disinterested fashion. The entire game is based around racking up kills as quickly and efficiently as possible, and looking good doing it. Both in the sense dodging smoothly and effortlessly through enemy fire, and in the sense that the first thing the creepier element out there always notes about the game is the way buying auto-fire upgrades gives the main character various new firing animations with varying degrees of hip gyration.
The style and skill side of things is handled quite well. When in a fight and playing competently, you have a nice smooth uninterrupted little dance routine on display, with the main character dancing around, firing off special attacks with elaborate pirouettes and plies, racking up huge kill combos for points. Between levels you spend those points to buy and upgrade new sets of power armor with varying stat potential and special move selections. The final suit unlocked after a run through on hard mode most properly captures the spirit of the game, giving access to the full move-set, but with the catch of dying in only one or two hits. Naturally, a special ending exists as a reward for playing through the entire game this way.
Of course, while P.N.03 works excellently as an exercise in perfectionism and forcing reviewers to look up the names of ballet movements, it is otherwise a very Spartan experience. Smooth grey corridors, smooth grey robots, smooth white corridors, smooth red robots, quick MGS-codec style dialog exchange, repeat. And repeat, and repeat, and repeat. While there is some variety to the levels, the consistency of the visual aesthetic means there isn't a lot going on to hold the interest of anyone who isn't in it for the pure zen of the perfect play-through.
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Exacerbating the dullness, while at the same time adding challenge for the target audience, between each level, a series of optional challenges are put forth, offering up randomly generated remixes of rooms and halls from earlier in the game, featuring progressively more difficult enemies. In addition to keeping one on their toes, this makes it possible to play catch-up if low on style points and seriously in need of upgrades.
The end result of all of this is a game that really isn't for everyone, hence its place in this feature, but which really is a nice find for the sort of person whose primary focus in playing games is spotting patterns and working to achieve perfection. Ultimately, P.N.03 is a quarter-munching arcade title that was created too late to have its demographic still in strong numbers. Following up on this with a game that harkened back to the only slightly later reign of the side-scrolling beat'em up with Viewtiful Joe yielded one of the most popular games on the console however, so it may just have been before it's time.
After the big Gamecube push, Clover studio went on to, in Capcom fashion, crank out a sequel and a port of their one big hit before hopping over to the PS2 to produce God Hand, a 3D brawler with the same mindset as their other games, and Okami, a Zelda-like game with a central paintbrush gimmick which made it baffling at the time that it wasn't a DS game, and made for an obvious Wii port later. Shortly after the release of Okami, Clover was disbanded, and surprisingly, rather than being reabsorbed into Capcom proper, reformed as a new company called Platinum, a subsidiary of Sega, and proceeded to develop Mad World. This, of course, being a highly stylistic game on a Nintendo system, rewarding chained and varied combo attacks, staying true to the principles first established here.
