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PN03

for all its missteps nothing since has quite captured stg literalism thru action the same way. much as it's often credited as a spiritual successor, even vanquish largely abandons the more prescriptive translation in favour of something broader and more general, sharing all the influence but few of the specifics. PN03's dedicated to turning tate rectangles into all white prisms and carrying over all the button pounding, micrododging, score chaining, and x-axis shuffling -- constricting only as much as necessary to keep the interplay between vanessa & her enemies in perfect attunement. beneath the repetitive layouts and grueling upgrade grinds there's so much potential here, so many little successes that hint at how fruitful even a little bit more development time could've been had capcom not had fiscal gaps to fill. as it stands we got a pretty good reimagining of the shooter as ass shaking nu millennium music video, but we should've got a fucking great one