XIII, if you've never encountered it, is based on a 1980's Belgian comic series about an amnesiac with the skills of a government agent attempting to discover their identity and in turn uncovering their involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate the US President. The original game was developed by Ubisoft, the same year they also released Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time, Splinter Cell, and Beyond Good & Evil. A different time. We are fully aware and terribly sorry that the initial launch of XIII Remake on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC did not reach players’ expected quality standards,” Microids CEO Stéphane Longeard said in a statement. “A bit more than a year ago we took the decision to hire the studio Tower Five to finish the development of the game. Tower Five worked with us in the past, notably on the great port of Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders on Nintendo Switch. We really wanted to take the time to fix the game and offer owners of XIII Remake a free update paying the best possible tribute to the original game we all love.”

Watching the trailer above, the remake does look better than it did before, although I'm still surprised that so much effort has been put into revising a remake to a game that was just-okay when it was released nearly twenty years ago. Alas, it looks like this XIII remake its just a prototype for a studio who wants to show they can handle new tools. Not an actual remake by folks who respect the original and want to bring it to modern audiences. I never played the original but surely it has to be better than this. The game is terribly optimised and suffers greatly from performance issues. It also stutters and chugs along somewhere between 10fps or below whenever there is more than one character on screen and the amount of screen tearing in this game is absolutely staggering. Character Models/A.I will often be contorted and doing something that they're not meant to be doing. For example, there were many a-time where I'd be in a gunfight with a few enemies for them to only to disperse and run off into a corner and just stand there. Level Design is quite awful as there were a few occasions where I'd wonder around a small area for about 10 minutes with no idea where to go, only for a YouTube gameplay being able to assist me as the Game's Navigator decides whenever it wants shows up. There is very little care or effort put into this title which is quite apparent especially when there is so much clipping issues that often requires a few restarts before key objects correctly appear and there's even grammatical errors in the trophy description. I would also remap some controls (nothing fancy, just changing buttons inputs from "hold" to "press") however, despite these settings getting saved, the game would just decide when it was going to obey them. Paris – June 29 th 2022 – Microids is delighted to share that a major update for the game XIII Remake as well as the Nintendo Switch version of the game will be released on September 13 th 2022. As a reminder, the game is the remake of the iconic cel-shaded FPS from 2003, and is the adaptation of the 5 first volumes of the Belgian graphic novel of the same name by artist William Vance and writer Jean Van Hamme.

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ElRoberico my PSP playthrough is still ongoing but it's been a damn fun ride with a lot to dig into. The missions may feel more concise, but this IS an originally handheld game and was helmed by Hajime Tabata just like Crisis Core, so the design approach is unsurprisingly similar in some regards. Here's what SNK producer Yasuyuki Oda had to say in a recent interview with Gamereactor (courtesy of Google translate) - mentioning how as much as the team "would love to" release these games on the Switch, there are admittedly "no plans" right now:

On that date, owners of the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC versions will receive a free update and enjoy the game as intended. The development studio reworked the entire game from the Art Direction to the AI and added numerous technical improvements. Finally, Tower Five implemented the highly awaited online multiplayer mode for up to 13 players. At EVO Japan 2023 this weekend, SNK announced it would be releasing The King of Fighters XIII Global Match for the Switch.Such a shame, I dont get why they couldnt have just embraced the original and touched it up with some nicer shaders and lighting. Microids and PlayMagic apologised for the state of the game in November 2020 and said they were committed to fixing its issues. The combat system is where the game has lost people, and to be completely frank, it doesn’t get exciting until 10 hours in. That’s a long tutorial. However, it does provide a more strategic system that keeps you on your toes. Greysun Morales from Twinfinite, when I DM’ed him about why he likes Final Fantasy XIII, said, “The combat system isn’t technically amazing, per say, but it does create an inventive mechanic that keeps your team on the ropes and keeps the player thinking ahead. Instead of having those JRPG tropes such as a warrior and a healer, every character in the game was capable of pretty much taking on whichever role they needed to be, which I appreciated. You can even see these combat ideas take play in FF7 Remake too such as the staggering system.” You can watch how this reveal unfolded on the official EVO Twitch channel. It takes place around the 09:15:20 mark.