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If you’re a Star Fox fan, it’s hard not to be aware of Star Fox Adventures. It was many things; the last game Rare made for Nintendo, the first game to feature Fox outside of the cockpit of an Arwing, arguably the game to end Rare’s run of massive hits.
And one of it’s biggest additions to the Star Fox canon was Krystal; a blue fox that basically just wound up as a frequent love interest to Fox. And essentially rampant furry bait ever since.
But we’re not here to talk about Star Fox; at least, not really. It is related, though, because some madman (Gagnetar) decided to make a mod of Half-Life 2 where Alyx is replaced with Krystal. And a recent update for the mod just so happens to have gotten the character’s original VA to voice her in the mod.
This is actually a bit of a big deal. Aside from voicing Krystal, Ellis did some other work for Rare around the same time frame, before fundamentally retiring from voiceover entirely after 2005’s Perfect Dark Zero. And despite that, she apparently nails her lines in the mod, almost as if she’d never stopped acting. Not much of a surprise, though; she managed to get through those… kinda terrible Saurian lines like a champ. A conlang that’s literally a letter substitution cypher is sort of a massive albatross to drop on your actors.
According to Krystal fansite KrystalArchive (yes it’s an actual thing), Gagnetar actually went the extra mile to make sure the lines weren’t an awkward, 1:1 match for the original Alyx lines.
For that extra bit of polish, Gagnetar even took the trouble to rewrite some of the lines to fit better with Krystal as a character in the game world, rather than simply doing a word-for-word recreation.
As for how Gagnetar managed to get Ellis to do all of this, he explains in a comment on the Kleiner Lab video:
I’ve been talking with her off and on for years now, decided to just get her a decent microphone and we worked from there.
Notably, Ellis requested a reduction to the sexualization of the character, which is kind of noticeable in the Kleiner Lab demo. Notably a reduction to the “chest physics”, which Gagnetar agreed to and is featured in the Eli Lab demo above.
The mod, however, isn’t finished yet. Gagnetar promises a new version with even more features sometime this year; specifically around the 20th anniversary of Star Fox Adventures (September 23rd as far as North America is concerned). Those features, however, are a secret until it releases.
Source: PC Gamer
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