15-Year Wait for R-Type III Remake Ruined by Hitboxes

Fifteen years after R-Type Dimensions remade the first two entries in Irem's legendary shmup series, R-Type Dimensions III has finally arrived to give R-Type III: The Third Lightning the same treatment. The visual overhaul is gorgeous, with rounded, plasticky 3D art that one reviewer compared to the style of artist Jordan Speer. But the remake launched this week with hitbox and collision accuracy problems so severe that they're generating the bulk of player complaints, and in a genre where you're threading your ship through pixel-tight gaps between bullets, that's about the worst thing that can go wrong.

ININ Games, the developer and publisher, issued a statement on May 25 acknowledging the feedback. "Our development team is fully aware of the situation and is hard at work on fixes and improvements, with the Xbox crashes being our top priority right now," the studio wrote. That last part is the kicker: Xbox players are dealing with outright crashes, and ININ is prioritising those before it even gets to the hitbox issues. There's no timeline for when collision accuracy will be addressed. Nintendo Life gave the game a 5/10, calling the accuracy problems a source of "frankly unfair difficulty."

I get that patches exist and studios can improve games post-launch, but this is a shmup. The entire appeal is memorising patterns and executing with precision. If your hitbox doesn't match what's on screen, you haven't shipped a hard game; you've shipped a broken one. R-Type III is widely considered the best entry in the series, and this remake adds real value with two-player co-op, multiple difficulty modes, and the ability to swap instantly between the new 3D visuals and the original SNES graphics. All of that is undermined when players can't trust what they're seeing. ININ says it will "evaluate how to mitigate those issues as soon as possible," but the game is already out and already scored. A physical release is planned for August, which at least gives the studio a few months to get the digital version into shape before more copies hit shelves. Ports of the R-Type Tactics strategy games are also on the way, rounding out what ININ is billing as an R-Type summer.