P.N.(Product Number)03 was created and published by CAPCOM exclusively for the Nintendo GameCube in March of 2003. It was directed by Shinji Mikami, known for his work on the original Resident Evil—as well as the remake in 2002, Dino Crisis, God Hand and many others. As we posted on our Instagram, many of the project leaders later went onto work at a studio that many of you are familiar with - PlatinumGames. PlatinumGames is responsible for well-known titles such as Bayonetta, NeiR: Automata, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Vanquish. I mention this because after playing P.N.03, you can certainly see similarities of design with Bayonetta and gameplay inspiration with Vanquish—which Mikami confirms. P.N.03 is a little rough around the edges compared to more polished products of Vanquish or Bayonetta and the combat can get a bit repetitive in my view but if you're a fan of PlatinumGames and like a challenging gameplay experience, P.N.03 might be right up your alley.
Onto the music.
The P.N.03 Soundtrack is a blend of Up-Tempo Electronica/Drum and Bass/Techno with a fair blend of glitchy religious vocals, power chords and eerie synth fades. There are a number a tracks I'm enjoying from the score—possibly a review coming later on—and have to say, I am very proud with the quality of the finished project, overall we came away with 32 tracks including the trailer music. The music files were extracted from the meka.sbb and pn03.sbb files and there are some duplicates that were omitted: meka_24 and meka_25, meka_23 and meka_26, as well as pn03_002 & meka_003. Finding the loop point was a little trickey at first but once I found it I looped each track once and allowed the track to play for an additional 20 seconds or so before I would fade-out and add silence to end it. The previous number of projects you may have noticed we've shied away from looping the music tracks twice, fading-out on the third loop and I think that's been the right decision. When I'm casually listening to a score, I found that when a track—particularly a long battle track—is playing on the second loop, I tend to skip to the next track. This hold true for me even with officially released soundtracks that are professionally editing that way. Now, when a given track is very short, we'll still add a second loop to it but for a majority of the tracks, I think we'll stick to one-loop and fade-out the track at a point that sounds best.
Some of the tracks are recycled throughout the game, such as: meka_017 which is the Boss Battle Theme for AAF-03 Sonnenblume / Energy Crystal Boss Battle / AAF-04 Orchidee and AAF-06 Lowenzahn Boss Battle. So, I titled this one "Boss Battle Theme" rather than list every individual boss name, which would just make it just a little too long.. Every track is organized the way you would experience them in-game with apt titles or descriptions without giving away any spoilers. As usual, no sound effects were included, only music and short cues.
And that's it! Let me know if you have any issues with the project and you'll find the P.N.03 Soundtrack available in both FLAC and MP3 formats in our archive. Enjoy!
