Darn! I came here hoping that I'd find answers....alas. The sad thing is I've played the beginning of the game on my old comp, and always wanted to finish it. This beach scene is killing me!

Tried every patch I could find, tried the windowed mode, don't even have dual core, just a simple single core laptop. No setting changes or anything have managed to stop the stupid woman standing there saluting an empty sky like she has OCD and can't stop until a seagull salutes back....

OH GAWD I DON'T EVEN OWN THIS GAME YET AND I'M ALREADY FRUSTRATED. The demo is showing the same bug, even with affinity to one core, win 98 compatibility mode, max power settings, and windowed mode :-/

EDIT / UPDATE: I disabled ALL of my CPU's sexy performance features at the BIOS level, including disabling the multiple cores. This didn't solve the problem, exactly, but it certainly attenuated it. "Slow motion mode" kicks in intermittently, but it's much less pervasive than before. Interestingly, the degree of slowness doesn't seem to have changed--it just happens less often.

EDIT2: I've seen people speculate elsewhere that speedstep might be the problem. Just for the record, speedstep is one of the features I've disabled. Problem is not solved, just attenuated.

I had the same problem, helped patch "XIII Unofficial Patch 1.4" found on this page: http://xiii.opaquit.com/downloads.php