A few weeks ago, I ran across a sketch by artist Pruh that captured my imagination in spite of it's status as but one of many small doodles on a page full of other Krystal sketches. It shows Krystal, with a serious expression, wearing a lab coat, hands in her pockets. Somehow that combination is just epic.

So I contacted Pruh and proposed a commission in which she would finish the art as a colored commission. She agreed, and what you see above is the product of that. This is the full size version without the watermark. Last week, Pruh released a smaller version with a watermark that you might have seen already.

Having looked at it in full color, I've developed a head-canon that this is the version of Krystal that maxed out psychic abilities instead of staff combat. She can probably levitate and can fling enemies around with her mind without needing to move her body.

Thanks again for the excellent work, Pruh!

Jo Lumaya has made another reanimated cutscene from Dinosaur Planet featuring Kyte and Krystal. Check out the previous reanimated cutscene if you missed it!

This is the cutscene in which the ghost of the Queen CloudRunner says goodbye to Kyte and warns her of what is to come. This cutscene was apparently missing from the leaked game demo, so this is a reconstruction mostly from voice lines. As with the previous animation, this uses a combination of old, new, and custom models with voice lines from the leaked Dinosaur Planet code to create this video.

The composer of Star Fox Adventures' soundtrack, David Wise, demonstrated a Korg Wavestate Synthesizer by recreating the initial ambient portion of the Krazoa Palace theme in just a few minutes. During the video, he talks a little about the process of creating the song for the GameCube hardware. Very technical, but very interesting.

Some friends got together recently and each got a different TerminalMontage-style character tattooed, one of them being Krystal. Kimi got Cloud Strife, Ej got Link, and Isiah got Krystal. The specific design is from TerminalMontage's video "All Super Smash Bros Ultimate Characters Drawn in the TerminalMontage Style" which you can watch below.

Recently, Xplay sat down with former NOA president Reggie Fils-Aimé. In part 1 of the interview about his time at Nintendo and his recent book, Disrupting the Game, the interviewer brings up Star Fox Adventures, to which Reggie responds:

Ah there you go, which is a very good game! Under-loved, under-appreciated!

I have to agree, Reggie. And not just because it brought Krystal into the world. For its time, it was a technical masterpiece and a genuinely fun game. It just had the misfortune of being very far from what some fans expected.

GoNintendo gave a rundown of this and other stuff in the interview. Thanks, very cool.

A couple of you found her already, but it looks like Estelle Ellis, Krystal's original voice actress from Star Fox Adventures, is now ready to announce to the world that she has a Twitter account. Her Twitter handle checks out. I can personally confirm that yes, this is really her account. She introduced it with a fun little custom video featuring animation and the model from the Half Life 2 mod. In it, she teases that she may work on other Krystal-related projects, and also, that Command isn't Canon (oof).

She'll be interacting with people through this account, so feel free to follow her and say hi. I hope to do some projects with her in the future myself.

twitter.com/RealKrystalFox

Site reader Doğancan recently did a presentation for his artificial intelligence class, and decided to include some automatically generated Krystal artwork. This was shown during class as one of the multiple examples of using artificial intelligence networks with sample data to generate new imagery that has never existed before. As you can see, these systems can generate pictures that clearly depict Krystal's likeness, though they are still having a little trouble detecting jewelry. (Inspired by that bottom-right one, an artist is currently working on a fanart of Krystal with a third eye in her forehead.)

With the success of his presentation, Doğancan is preparing his presentation research as an academic paper. It's still in the review phase, but it may be published later if accepted. That's right, there's a good chance that Krystal will have a place in published scientific research!

AI image generation has progressed a lot in recent years. Just 3 years ago, in early 2019, the state of the art in generating anthropomorphic portraits was... let's just say a valiant effort, but would never fool anyone. Check out this video by CodeParade for a rundown of one attempt to do this in early 2019.

The AI image generation used in Doğancan's presentation is from the AI website ArtBreeder. The idea is that many people upload their own tagged images and the site adds them to its ever-expanding library of data. From there, you can search for specific things and get tons of generated variations of it. Further, you can combine images together to create even more images, combining the aspects of each. This is the "breeder" part of "ArtBreeder". I searched for Krystal myself on this site and found tons more images. Krystal can be generated pretty well, as you can see in Doğancan's presentation, but of course there are many other things named "Krystal". Now, if you search for "Renamon", almost 100% of the results look like Renamon, most of them have no weird glitches either. Amazing! I'm told furry artists are already using this tool as inspiration for their own works or to help with the creation process itself, allowing the AI to do some of the heavy lifting.

For additional furry AI stuff, check out This Fursona Does Not Exist.

MidnightPremiere recently finished a commission for me. As is my custom with my commissions, she was encouraged to draw Krystal in her style and be creative with the pose. She made two variations, one with text and one without. She even made a short animated version, which animates the text like an in-game dialog. Thanks so much, MidnightPremiere!

There are two variations, available at full resolution:

• Without Text
• With Text

Summerset Banjo (or Sunnyside) has been posting a bunch of video content from the leaked version of Dinosaur Planet, including voice line audio from various characters in the game. Recently, he has posted Krystal's lines, along with a bunch of behind-the-scenes concept art. Unfortunately, I can't embed it at this time. Have a listen. You'll be able to hear a bunch of plot points and clear references to the fact that Fox McCloud had already replaced Sabre in the dialog, as well as mentions of Andross.

LuckyFox has begun work on a mod for Cave Story+ (from Steam or Epic game stores) which will replace the alternate story mode in Cave Story with Star Fox characters, visuals, and sounds. For those who don't know, in Cave Story+, you could play the game from the perspective of Curly Brace instead of Quote, which is largely the same as the regular mode, except that dialog sequences are a little different. You can see concept art and the work in progress version of the in-game sprite in the image above.

In the mod, Krystal replaces Curly Brace, Fox will replace Quote, the Blade weapon will be replaced with Krystal's Staff, and the Spur weapon will be replaced with a Blaster. LuckyFox is also working to remix some of the game songs to be more Star Fox like while still retaining the Cave Story style. LuckyFox sent a sample remix song of Mimiga Village.

LuckyFox is working on the dialog portraits now, but this is still pretty early in the mod's development. Right now, the modded mode is called "Krystal's Story", but in the end, it will probably be called "Krystal's Path". You can follow LuckyFox at @AizaFoxy on Twitter for news and updates on the mod.

Best of luck on this endeavor, LuckyFox!