XIII

Contrary to popular belief, I do not think the original XIII is a classic. It's arguably the greatest case of style over substance that I've ever seen in a game. If it weren't for the comic-book style, it would not hold up half as well as it does. This remake attempts to improve small things while maintaining its own sense of style. I came into it with the expectation that things would be slightly different, but I did not expect it to be as bad as it is. Comments about the stylistic swap aside, there's an air of something being off from the moment this game starts. The cutscene that started off the original XIII has not been remade, instead being repurposed as this fourth-wall-breaking gag that neither helps establish the rather serious story nor stands on its own. From there, things go downhill. The second you get a gun is when things go from sliding downhill to falling face-first right off of a cliff. Guns feel lousy to use, the AI is braindead (even on the hardest difficulty!), the performance is inconsistent, and the sound mixing is horrendous. Still, I managed to play two hours of this before I found out about something so stupendous that refunding the (roughly) forty dollars spent on this was no longer out of the question. If you moved around when an NPC was talking to you in the original XIII, their head would follow you. If an important NPC has to tell you something to progress the story, your movement and camera are locked on that NPC. That this effortless feature isn't present in its remake almost twenty years later is indicative of the overall quality of this package. They might make it a little better through updates, but heed my advice: don't buy this. Not on sale, and certainly not for forty dollars. Play the original instead. You'll need to patch it to make it a little more playable on modern operating systems, and you'll have to contend with its ***-awful saving system, but it's cheaper and provides a much better experience than this remake could hope to offer.