Site reader jimaki sent me an email with his piano rendition of Krystal's Theme from Star Fox Adventures. If you guys like it, let him know in the comments and he'll work on it some more to improve it and create music sheets.

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Jimaki also sent in a link to his sheet music for SNES Star Fox's Cornerian theme.

The interview mentioned in the huge Star Fox 2 info dump a few days ago has been translated from Japanese to English. Shigeru Miyamoto, Takaya Imamura, and Tsuyoshi Watanabe talk about their experiences developing Star Fox and Star Fox 2. Much of what's in the interview was already known from previous interviews, but there were a few tidbits.

The decision to include Star Fox 2 with the SNES Classic was made by the producer of the SNES Classic, not Miyamoto. It's almost as if that producer read the interview about Star Fox 2 being finished and decided "why not?"

We had known that several of the characters in Star Fox were based on the personalities or mascots of various dev team members, but apparently, Andross's character was based on Imamura's boss at the time. No idea who that might be, though.

The crazy detailed diagrams of the Arwing transformations were made for the instruction manual, not for the purpose of making toys or something.

Read the interview.

Here's the Japanese version of the Star Fox Assault Katina Briefing scene. You can see actual shock and surprise on the faces of the characters, unlike in the English version. Krystal is super cute in this one.

When we combine the Japanese animation with the English voice acting, you can see some severe lipsyncing issues, especially from Slippy and Beltino. Wow is the lipsyncing off!

This week's Star Fox Assault cutscene is the Katina Briefing scene from the English version of the game. Here, General Pepper reveals that he knows the true extent of the Aparoid threat. Fox is sent to investigate a distress signal at the Katina Outpost. Krystal wants to come along, but Fox want her to stay in the air with the rest of the team. Once again, this is in beautiful 4K and fixed audio.

YouTube user Captain Frezhor has posted a video showing how to make a Krystal-like Mii for the Nintendo Switch. The Mii is similar to what one could make for the Nintendo Wii and Wii U. Try it out if you want to have a Krystal-looking character in your game of Miitopia or for your own profile.

The podcast stream is going live in a few minutes. Join me.

Site reader NJFox sent in a video showing progress on his Krystal fangame, Star Fox Adventures 2. Taking place on Sauria, Krystal travels the land upgrading her Staff, fighting enemies, and even flying with a CloudRunner. Her goal: find the missing Arwing parts to repair her Arwing. The game is still in the very early stages and needs a lot more work and polish. However, given how difficult a 3rd person game is to develop, I'm pleasantly surprised at how far he's gotten in a few months of effort.

There are also videos showing the locations of all the staff upgrades and demoing the Krazoa side quest.

If you want to try the game yourself, NJFox has uploaded version 3 of the Windows Unity3D game to Google Drive. The demo in the video above is from version 4, which has not yet been released.

I'm sure NJFox will give us more information in the comments about his progress and future plans.

Heads up, guys! Tomorrow afternoon, at 3PM (central time) on September 3rd, I will be doing the next episode of the Krystal Archive Podcast live on YouTube. While we've done video podcasts before, this is going to be somewhat of a testing ground for me, as I will be incorporating live video through OBS, a separate camera, and other things that I think will make the podcast more entertaining to watch.

Episode #39 will be more of a catch-up episode. We haven't had a Krystal Archive Podcast since December last year and so much has happened since then! As a result, I will only be talking about news and events that have happened since then, along with questions from the live chat. After this episode, we'll have a more frequent podcast where we will do interviews, email questions, and talk about new projects.

Hope you all will join me.

Krystal Archive Podcast #39 YouTube Event

Modder Scaeling (formerly TheAggrivator) has just released version 1.0 of his Krystal over Fox mod. We posted about this as a work in progress a while back. Since then, Scaeling has switched from using the Adventures Krystal model to the Assault Krystal model. Scaeling says that college has been taking up much of his time, and though he wants to do a lot more with the mod, he wanted to release a working version 1.0 so that people can use it now. He notes numerous problems he couldn't fix in the time available, such as finger resolution and Fox's odd rigging proportions when applied to Krystal. Perhaps one day he'll be able to address these limitations.

You can download version 1.0 on the Project Release Page.

Thanks to TheAggrivator and Smokey for the heads up.

Early this morning, Nintendo of Japan posted a lot of stuff about Star Fox 2. And I mean a LOT! There was an interview with some of the Japanese developers, and both the Japanese and English Star Fox 2 Official Manuals. The manuals are website-based, but otherwise follow a similar format to classic game manuals, complete with story, controls information, character bios, and much more. Plus, we got to see some development documents, detailed Arwing schematics, and original concept art for the Star Wolf team. The character page includes mobile wallpapers, and notes that while Star Fox 2 was completed back in the 90s, promotional materials were not. As a result, Nintendo brought back one of the original artists from the game to make the brand new artwork we're now seeing for Star Fox 2. I guess that answers the question about the artwork!

I still haven't had a chance to go through everything yet, but there is much more here, including instructions for actually playing the game. I hope they translate the interview too! If you guys find anything else interesting, or find the translated interview or development documents, please let me know in the comments below!

• Star Fox 2 Developer Nintendo Japan Interview
• Star Fox 2 Official Manual (Japanese)
• Star Fox 2 Official Manual (English)
• Star Fox 2 Aircraft Schematic Drawings
• Star Fox 2 Game Design Documents
• Star Wolf Concept Art

Thanks to N J FOX for the heads up.