How to get Final Fantasy XIII to work on Windows 11 25H2 (also, DXVK)

July 1, 2026

CWs: none

Hiya! I recently bought Final Fantasy XIII on Steam at 60% off (~5€). I did not know what I was getting myself into; I spent around five hours troubleshooting to figure it out. You do not need to disable any feature on Windows system-wide, just add exceptions for the game. If the game crashes after you press start in the launcher, try this!

• Install the FF13Fix mod to make the game run better overall and avoid crashes.


• I heavily recommend the 4GB patch from ntcore.com mentioned in the FF13Fix README, because from what I've read, it seems the game will crash at certain points if it cannot use more than 2GB of RAM. The patcher modifies any 32-bit executable to use up to 4GB of RAM.


• You will need to disable CFG (Control Flow Guard) and DEP (Data Execution Prevention) for FFXIII.
  
  Open Windows Security > Select "App & browser control" > Select "Exploit protection settings" > Select the "Programme settings" tab within Exploit protection > "Add programme to customize" > Select "Add by programme name" > Type "ffxiiiimg.exe" > Add.
  
  To disable CFG, scroll to CFG > Select "Override system settings" > Ensure the toggle is set to "Off".
  If you do not disable CFG, the game will crash and you will get exception code/error code 0xe06d7363, relating to KERNELBASE.dll in Event Viewer.
  
  To disable DEP, scroll to DEP > Select "Override system settings" > Ensure the toggle is set to "Off".

Now FFXIII should run on your system! If it doesn't, check the Windows Event Viewer to see what went wrong and try to look up the exception code.

DXVK, error code 0xc0000409, relating to ucrtbase.dll.
If you want to use DXVK, you should install all of the Visual C++ Redistributables from Microsoft. I will provide a link below, however you should find them from Microsoft directly. I do not know which one in particular you need, but after installing them all, DXVK works for me. If 32-bit DXVK doesn't work for you, try the 64-bit .dll, that's the one that works for me.
download redistributables.