Vanessa Z. Schneider
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| Vanessa Z. Schneider | |
|---|---|
| P.N.03 character | |
 Vanessa as she appears in P.N.03 | |
| First game | P.N.03 (2003) |
| Created by | Shinji Mikami[1] |
| Designed by | Kenichi Ueda (animation)[1] |
| Voiced by | Jennifer Hale[2] |
Vanessa Z. Schneider (Japanese: ヴァネッサ・Z・シュナイダー) is a character from the 2003 Capcom video game P.N.03. A mercenary working in space, she is tasked with destroying berserk robots, utilizing a high-tech bodysuit that allows her to fire energy blasts from her hands. By the end of the game, she realizes she's a clone. Created by game director Shinji Mikami, Vanessa was designed to be sexy with an emphasis on dancing, with animator Kenichi Ueda creating her animations by hand after studying the movements of female dancers. She is voiced by Jennifer Hale.
Vanessa was mostly well received, with much praise going towards both her sex appeal and her constant motion. Several outlets compared her to characters such as Lara Croft or Samus Aran, though acknowledged she was hampered due to P.N.03's GameCube exclusivity. Retrospectives further blamed the title's poorly received gameplay as weighing her down, and argued that in any other title the character would have become iconic. Despite this though, arguments have also been made that that very gameplay is in part why she is regarded as well, due to the character's human element.
Early in P.N.03's development, game director Shinji Mikami was unsatisfied with how the title was progressing. Originally called "Robot War Game" as a placeholder, he considered that the concept itself was not the problem, but the lead character. He wanted to recapture the simplicity of games as produced on the Famicom, so he asked one of the designers to "create him a character design". When he asked the designer if she wanted to create a male or female character, she responded "Woman!", to which Mikami approved.[3] As the character developed, Mikami wanted her name to represent a mix of cultures due to life aboard a space station in the future, with "Vanessa" being French, the "Z." middle name alluding to a British name, and "Schneider" being German.[1] Game producer Hiroyuki Koboyashi meanwhile wanted the character to be a "cool and sexy mercenary with a tough exterior that hides her dark past".[4]
Early on the character was intended to use traditional firearms, something Mikami really wanted to include in the game. However, they were unable to complete the animations for these weapons in time,[5] and her attacks were changed to energy bolts coming from her hands instead.[6] Vanessa's animations weren't done by utilizing motion capture, but were instead hand animated by Kenichi Ueda.[1] They wanted to have the character fight as if she were dancing, with movements that were intended to be "stylish and rhythmic".[4] These animations were done by heavily studying female dancers, with an emphasis on artistic motions.[7] Her crouching animation in particular was meant to resemble a jaguar, taking inspiration from an early title for the game due to how "supple and athletic" Mikami perceived her to be.[8]
In terms of character design, Vanessa is a woman with short brown hair and orange sunglasses, wearing a skintight black and white bodysuit that wraps around her body and connects to her spine. The suit in turn has a protrusion jutting from the back near the collar, where it stores large amounts of energy that can be fired through her gloves.[7][9] A wide variety of different colored suits can also be unlocked during the course of gameplay, each having a unique "energy" attack.[10] One particular suit, Papillon, is a black suit that leaves large amounts of skin exposed, revealing a butterfly tattoo on her lower right abdomen.[11]
The development team grew quite attached to the character while creating the game, wanting to see her used in projects after P.N.03's release. Mikami himself noted similar sentiment, lamenting that he'd gotten "ahead of himself" when creating the game, and sees her as an "independent adult woman" when it comes to her appeal.[1] While he acknowledged the character's emphasis on sex appeal, he felt there was a distinction between her design and works by other companies such as Dead or Alive, and felt there was importance in recognizing the line between tasteful and distasteful approaches to the subject.[1] Koboyashi meanwhile during an E3 presentation for the game emphasized that significant work had gone to make the character sexy, namely in regards to her buttocks, stating that due to the game being in third person perspective and her back perpetually towards the camera "of course we have to focus on the important parts."[12]
