Welcome to a futuristic action packed adventure where you'll find danger around every curve. This is P.N.03, Shinji Mikami's latest creation, and the first title of the magnificent "Capcom 5" to be released on the Nintendo GameCube. It may look like Devil May Cry set in the future - and having Mikami-san as a director may very well mean it is, but once you start playing it, you'll see it's totally the opposite. It's a shooter, an old school shooter, with a very sexy outfit.
Product Number 03 is all about action. Forget about those four hour cut-scenes a la Metal Gear Solid 2 and Final Fantasy X, because here, you'll find pure action from start to finish. The game begins with an in-game cut-scene featuring Planet "Ode", where little life exists and only a few buildings and structures are present. After a few moments, two incoming robots start giving our sexy lead character a dose of laser therapy, and that's when we first witness her impressive skills.

After that, you take the role of Vanessa Z. Schneider, who is given her first mission briefing by the mysterious "client". The mission: to destroy CAMS (Computer Arms Management System) once and for all. Vanessa accepts the mission with no questions asked. But few know that Vanessa is actually thirsty for revenge, since when CAMS went ballistic and started killing every human in sight, two of the victims were her own parents.

The premise of the game is simple, you need to destroy all the enemies in a room, and then continue to the next. Every room has a different challenge whether it is to destroy small enemies within a time limit, attack powerful bosses, or chain all of them into one combo. While clearing a room may only last a few minutes, the action never wears off.


Brilliant!

The innovation in P.N.03 comes from the "chain system". When you destroy an enemy, you trigger a timer that you can find at the top of the screen. Destroy a second enemy within that time, and you got yourself a combo of two. The brilliance of this system is knowing how to pull a chain of multiple targets by knowing each enemy's strengths and weaknesses. For instance, the harder the enemies are, the higher the timer will be. Another interesting thing is to figure out how to chain an entire room. Since many enemies may be too strong and take too much time to destroy, destroying one after another might not be the best strategy. What you have to do is to fight the enemies long enough to leave them with very weak HP. After all of them are worn down, you can easily pull the chain combo. You need practice and skills, and it's brilliance like this that makes P.N.03's combo system a very unique one.