Somehow I missed this during the time it was released, but here's a neat little animation showing some of the test footage Nintendo did when making Star Fox Zero: The Battle Begins. It comes from an interview explaining the behind-the-scenes of the animation.

Technicolor Cosplay recently informed us that the Ice Krystal variation featured in Twitter photoshoots lately will now be featured in a Canadian Cosplay Magazine, Cosplay Double Double Magazine. Technicolor Cosplay's Ice Krystal will be in the Spring 2021 issue, which has just shipped. Digital PDF versions will be available later. To my knowledge, this is the first time a Krystal cosplayer has been featured in print media (though there might have been some Japanese ones I'm unaware of).

Congrats to Technicolor Cosplay!

We've been preparing for the campaign launch of this new Star Fox-inspired game by the makers of Race the Sun, Flippfly. The game is called Whisker Squadron! It's a rail shooter game with procedurally generated levels and bosses, so no two playthroughs should be identical. It features a minimalistic, painterly, polygonal style with bright colors and feline characters. The campaign launched today, and is already well on its way to being fully funded. Check it out! The team is aiming for launch on PC and consoles in 2022.

Psicoyote, a storyboard artist and animator, has been doing a lot of Krystal fanart in the last year. He posts speedpaints to go with them so you can see the process from design to finished, colored artwork. Check them out!

• Assault Krystal Taking Fire
  • Art
  • Speed Paint
• Adventures Krystal Flying Strike
  • Art
  • Speed Paint
• Adventures Krystal Hanging Out with Dinos
  • Art
  • Speed Paint

Fun fact, the promotional images of Krystal from Dinosaur Planet helped inspire Psicoyote to start drawing anthro characters.

As always with these videos, viewer discretion is advised for flashing lights, loud noises, and general silliness.

Yes, I'm extremely late posting this. I'm working on catching up. For those who haven't seen it yet...

TerminalMontage has done it again! As a subscriber special, he presents an absolutely fantastic parody video with Speedrunner Mario, Melee Fox McCloud, Christian Kirbo, Super Chilidogs, and many more... "interpretations" of Smash Bros characters, recounting the events (sorta) of The Subspace Emissary story from Super Smash Bros Brawl. If you've played that game, you know Fox McCloud has an important role there, and we also get to see other Star Fox team members. Not Krystal though. Not yet. (Something About Star Fox Adventures when?!)

Update: Eagle-eyed Jimaki pointed out that Krystal DOES appear at 10:47, for like 2 frames.

The Krystal Archive team always keeps an eye on the web development trends. One of the newer features is dark mode styling, which provides a theme suited for dark environments like your deepest regrets.

With that in mind we are practically crying with pain to announce the new styling and branding. The Kursed Archive will now cater to the darkness that's inside us all. If we're still around next week, we'll look into making the edges even edgier.

Art by UndyingNephalim, who incidentally will be changing his name to DyingNephalim soon.

Update: You know, on second thought, maybe this is a little TOO dark for a dark mode. We'll switch back to the old theme for now, but we do plan to have a dark mode option in the future. Just... you know, without so much edge. Want to see what the new theme looked like? Check out this screenshot.

So, some backstory:
Problem: Gamers online often debate what game developers were thinking when they made certain choices for games they love. They often do this with absolutely no insight into the thought processes of those developers.
Solution: A gamer who can translate Japanese made a website called Shmuplations.com where he finds old interviews with the actual developers themselves, posting their translated words so gamers can understand the actual thought processes.

A few days ago, the site posted an interview from the November 2002 issue of Nintendo Dream, between Shigehisa Nakaue and Takaya Imamura, discussing things about the Star Fox series development and Star Fox Adventures specifically. Shigehisa Nakaue co-developed the Star Fox Adventures Prequel Manga, and would later join Nintendo himself. Takaya Imamura, for those who don't remember, just retired from Nintendo in January, but over his career he was known for character design of the Star Fox characters and helping manage those games. The entire article is worth a read.

Read the Interview Now!

In the interview, a discussion was had about Krystal. Among the points, the following Krystal and Adventures facts came to light:

• Fox ultimately used Krystal's staff instead of a gun, sword, or whip because it was a more blunt weapon and would get around content problems related to cutting/slashing.
• Imamura's favorite character in Star Fox Adventures is Krystal.
• He personally did a lot of Krystal sketches and pushed for her to remain in the game as it was changed from Dinosaur Planet to Star Fox Adventures. (It was already known that Krystal was possibly going to be cut during the transition.)
• Some of those sketches took influence from a risque vampire character named Vampirella, from a comic series of the same name.
• Both Imamura and Miyamoto both thought Krystal should have more sex appeal.
• Miyamoto always saw Star Fox as a serious sci-fi story, not a campy or humorous one. Part of making Krystal more sexy had to do with this desire for the series. Mature elements without going too far.
• Katt Monroe might have been a previous attempt at this, but Imamura thinks that Krystal handles the role better.
• Krystal is the first female Rare character that Shigehisa Nakaue really liked.
• Imamura considers Krystal the heroine of Star Fox Adventures.
• Imamura tried to make Krystal's design stand out to Japanese people specifically, while also making her look like she belonged with the rest of the Star Fox characters.
• Nintendo was already working with Namco on the next Star Fox game, so there's some discussion about that, as well as interest in making another Star Fox Adventures-style game.

AustinMcConnell, a YouTuber who makes weird and wonderful videos about just about everything (but mostly about storytelling and movie-making) posted a video today. In it, Austin goes over the simple facts about how copyright works, or rather, doesn't. And how basically all fanart is illegal.

In the process, he interviews several people, including Matthew Gafford, aka Fredryk Phox, aka, the guy who makes the fan animation series "A Fox In Space." These animations feature a more deadpan parody style one might find in an Adult Swim type show, with Matthew doing most of the voice acting and animation himself. I personally like these shorts, though I can't post about them here much due to their style of humor being just a tad too much for my intended audience.

Give it a watch. It's an interesting subject, and an interesting perspective on copyright and the specific nature of an ongoing problem that someway, somehow, needs to be solved. I vote for some kind of iTunes Store-like simplification for fans to pay small amounts to gain a simplified license to use a character or IP in their fanart, fanfiction, or whatever.

PS - Subscribe to AustinMcConnell while you're at it. He has a good channel. I was already subscribed to him, which is how I discovered this video so quickly.

It's been a little while since Esphirian dropped his first experimental trailer for a reimagining of Star Fox Adventures in Unreal Engine. 2020 really hit him hard, but he was finally able to put out a new trailer. This one was done is a more epic, cinematic style, with voice acting and a wide variety of play-styles. We get to see more enemies, bosses, cutscenes, voice acting, racing, Arwing dogfighting, new characters, and more.

This is clearly an open-world game, with Fox and Krystal working together in many scenes, sometimes Krystal is player-controlled, sometimes it's Fox. There are a lot of interesting ideas here, as well as much more polish than the first trailer. During the first announcement, it was hinted this was a private fangame and wouldn't be released. However, Esphirian mentioned in the description that he plans to be more open with the development as time goes on, so hopefully that indicates that he'll be willing to release it too. Fingers crossed.

Surprising news this morning. The archival group Forest of Illusion announced that they had obtained a copy of Dinosaur Planet. The build of the game is clearly in a much different state than the E3 demo version. This one has Fox McCloud partially implemented, but other characters still call him Sabre and Krystal is still playable for large parts of the game. The build file lists a creation date of December 1st, 2000.

They had obtained a disc from a private game collector in Sweden which contained the build of the game.

The build is playable. Streamers are already starting to play through the build on their channels. It has glitches and issues, and many hackers will no-doubt work on it to fix and complete the game as they have time to look at it.

All this news caused Dinosaur Planet to briefly trend on Twitter.

Obviously, this is huge news. Dedicated fans and archivists have been waiting for something like this to happen. People are excited. Unfortunately, I must throw a little bit of cold water on this and say that these files aren't authorized and possibly stolen. Nintendo, Rare, or maybe even Microsoft might come down hard on people distributing or streaming the game. Please exercise caution. It is for this reason that I can't even link to the original post because it contains a download link.

For now, though, I'm still in shock that something like this happened after all these years. This is kinda like the Playable Krystal Mod for Star Fox Adventures that was released just a few months ago. So much interesting stuff is happening now, of all times.