Since the very beginning, one of the Holy Grails of the Krystal fandom was the desire to play through Star Fox Adventures as Krystal. It was known for a long time that a certain ActionReplay code could allow Krystal to be playable, but it was very glitchy, only some areas could be accessed without crashing the game, and Krystal couldn't use her Staff. In the last few years, research by BvqR zxi5 showed that getting Krystal to appear and be somewhat usable in other parts of the game was possible with some more heavy-duty code modifications. Unfortunately, his research wasn't widely known, and that's partially my fault because I never got around to posting about his work until years after first finding it. In the meantime, several different people independently started working on exploring Star Fox Adventures' code with the goal of getting Krystal playable. It all came to a head with at least three of these researchers joining the Krystal Archive Discord to collaborate in a shared space. A lot of things have been discovered just in the last few months!

Which brings us to the big news. RenaKunisaki has released his mod:

Star Fox Adventures: Amethyst Edition

In addition to allowing Krystal to be playable throughout the game with minimal issues, it offers lots of little quality of life improvements and options. Here's just some of the features:

• Swap between Fox and Krystal
• Climbing ladders and walls is faster
• Option to jump down from walls
• Ability to fast-forward the game with a 3rd controller
• Much more detailed and complete Sound Test Mode
• Map size and transparency controls
• Ability to do free movement anywhere
• Warp between areas, even some test areas
• Auto-saving option
• Increase or decrease game speed
• Increase or decrease camera field of view
• Reduced menu screen voice acting
• Removed confirmation on the manual save option
• And many more features useful for debugging and further development

RenaKunisaki and the others will continue to develop and improve on this mod. If you want to try it yourself, you'll need to either have a legitimately obtained copy of Star Fox Adventures (version 1.00 only, not the Player's Choice version) to use with an emulator, or a modded GameCube system. From there, it's a relatively simple matter to apply the mod patch to the original game's code using software detailed on RenaKunisaki's site.

I want to put extra emphasis on this last point: Do not illegally download or share game software. Do not ask how to do it or help others do it. There are legitimate methods for making your own copies of your own software, so only use those methods with legitimately obtained software.