Have you ever wanted to play a Half-Life 2 Star Fox mod that replaces Alyx Vance with Krystal? Well, that's exactly what modder Gagnetar is creating. His new Half-Life 2 Krystal mod swaps out Gordon Freeman's sidekick for the blue staff-wielding fox from Star Fox Adventures, and he's managed to secure the original voice actor's participation as well.
What's the story behind this Half-Life 2 Star Fox mod?
The modding community for Half-Life 2 is going strong, with major user-made mods like Overcharged and G String setting a bar for quality. For other users, however, they just want to see their favorite characters interacting with Gordon, Barney, and the rest of the Half-Life 2 cast, and that's where modder Gagnetar's Half-Life 2 Star Fox mod comes in. It replaces Alyx Vance, Gordon's sidekick and friend throughout Half-Life 2, with a model of Krystal, the secondary protagonist from 2002's GameCube game Star Fox Adventures. Perhaps most interestingly, though, the original voice actor, Estelle Ellis (who voiced Krystal in Star Fox Adventures) is returning to fully voice this version of Krystal.
According to Gagnetar, he's been "talking with [Estelle] off and on for years now". He decided to get her a microphone for recording and persuaded her to voice Krystal for his mod. Gagnetar says that Ellis will be voicing every single piece of Alyx's spoken dialogue in Half-Life 2, as well as Episode One and Episode Two. Half-Life 2's dub is already finished, but both episodes are still yet to be done. The process wasn't without hiccups, though; Gagnetar says that at one point, Ellis requested that he tone down the, ahem, jiggle physics on Krystal. You can see that change by comparing the work-in-progress video demos of Dr. Kleiner's lab and Eli Vance's hideout.
What can Krystal actually do in this Half-Life 2 Krystal mod?
Per the mod's download page over at the Krystal Archive fan site, Gagnetar is using a high-quality model created by a user called Warfaremachine. Krystal has full facial animations and tail physics, and she can fight, too, using her gatling gun and blaster, as well as her staff in place of Alyx's EMP tool. She'll also appear on TVs where Alyx would normally have been. Her models are all taken from various sources; the blaster model is from an online resource, the staff model comes from user Mikiel2171, and the gatling gun model and sounds were ripped by the modder himself.
This is just one of many crossover mods adding characters from one universe to another. Earlier this month, a Terraria mod adding in characters from Pokemon was announced, and if you want to play Guilty Gear Strive with the characters from Dragon Ball FighterZ, there's a mod for that as well. Of course, both of those games are 2D; a heck of a lot of work must have gone into incorporating a model as detailed and lifelike as Krystal's in Gagnetar's Half-Life 2 mod. You can check it out here, but bear in mind that the version with full voice acting from Estelle Ellis isn't out yet. Gagnetar is targeting Star Fox Adventures' 20th anniversary for a full release of the mod, which, going by the North American release date, would place the mod's launch at September 23rd.
