ONM Remembered – #455
“So, should you buy it? You’ll love it if you like Posh Spice videos – mainly the futuristic one. This has about the same amount of gameplay.”
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 132 (September 2003)
The first of Shinji Mikami’s Capcom Five, P.N.03 didn’t exactly set the world on fire. It’s not a good sign when even with nearly twenty screenshots set in front of you, you can barely tell the difference between them. To the game’s credit, it’s not all white corridors – there’s one level set in a dusty brown canyon. And some corridors are slightly off-white!
Watching footage of the game I can see a whole bunch of Mikami’s traits all over it – the strong female protagonist ala Jill Valentine, the purely mechanic-driven gameplay of God Hand, the endless corridor-trekking of Killer7… but judging purely from a video playthrough, it doesn’t seem to gel all that well. It’s got a huge emphasis on “style”, but that style had nowhere near the panache of Viewtiful Joe or Killer7 (not to mention other games did the “looking like the inside of an iPod” aesthetic better). It’s aiming for simplistic arcade-style mechanics, but it clearly just left a lot of people thinking, “is that all?” One interesting intention by the developers was making a game that’s fun to play and fun to watch, and while I can’t vouch for how fun it is to play, I began fast-forwarding and skipping through the longplay after five minutes, so…
I want to argue it’s a game that might’ve survived better on downloadable platforms rather than a full-priced disc game, though it’s also not a concept really worth reviving, y’know? Ah well. We all have our flops.
