Systemic Changes

When I started working on what became FF8 Crystal back in 2016, I only intended to make some changes to kernel.bin – the file that holds data about character and weapon stats, magic, item, and ability data, etc. – to accommodate a self-imposed challenge playthrough idea I had; I don’t remember whether I even intended to release it publicly back then. Needless to say, the scope of the mod ballooned, but it was always rooted in the idea of each character being restricted in certain ways. My inability to enforce these important tenets of the mod through the game itself has always bothered me, and needing to keep track of who can use what is a hassle for players.

So, with 2.0, I’ve done away with all of that – no more self-imposed restrictions, and all GFs are available for use.

For the most part, GFs are obtained in the same manner as vanilla FF8, with two important differences:

• With one exception (see below), any GF that you needed to Draw from a boss in vanilla is now awarded automatically upon defeating that boss.
• Diablos, Alexander, and Doomtrain are obtained in different ways from vanilla. Players of previous versions of Crystal can likely guess where and how they're obtained.

I made each GF's ability list with the goal of allowing for unique roles and ability sets even when Junctioning every GF the player owns among the active party, with late-game GFs coming with more comprehensive ability lists to allow the player to more easily divide their GFs among every character for the final bosses. As a result, you'll find that GFs' ability lists are a bit shorter and, in some cases, more front-loaded compared to vanilla and previous versions of Crystal.

Junctioning is still de-emphasized in favor of better stat growths upon leveling up, but Elemental- and Status-related Junctions are still available as before. The characters' statistical strengths and weaknesses are similar to previous versions of Crystal, though I've made various changes to account for all the different ways you might distribute your party's GFs and abilities. For example, while Selphie is still a lot better off as a magic caster, making her a physical attacker is a bit more realistic than before should you really want to for some reason (admittedly, this is easier later in the game).

On a related note, Irvine's weapons are now linear upgrades like the other characters', with an emphasis on increasing his critical hit bonus; his starting weapon has a higher crit bonus than most characters' final weapons, and the bonus increases with each upgrade. While I think trying to give each weapon a unique use case wasn't a bad idea in itself, weapons in FF8 just don't have enough parameters to differentiate each meaningfully. I clung to the idea out of stubbornness, but it's gone now and the mod is better for it.

2013-Steam ↔ Remastered Parity

The 2013-Steam version of Crystal has always been the best one because there were things I was able to change in that version’s executable that I couldn’t figure out how to change in Remastered. I’ve managed to port the following changes over for 2.0, bringing the two versions much closer together:

• Reduced Darkside's damage multiplier from 3x to 2x
• Removed Cover's damage reduction
• Increased Return Damage's effect to 1/2 of damage taken
• Increased the Draw cap from 9 to 15 (the way it works in Remastered is a bit different, but the result is similar)
• Made the MiniMog command functional regardless of MiniMog's status/whether the player has acquired a Mog's Amulet through Angelo Search; Chocoboy now sells Mog's Amulet in Chocobo Forests for 20,000 gil
• Reduced SeeD salary payouts

While there are still a few things I’d like to port to Remastered if possible, most of the important changes are there now.

Enemies

I did the bulk of the work on Crystal's enemies over the course of several years, and with 2.0 I've overhauled some of my oldest enemy designs as well as other enemies/battles that I felt were lacking in some way. Specifically:

• Sacred & Minotaur
• Iguions
• Edea (1)
• Oilboyles
• Fujin & Raijin (1)
• Cerberus
• Edea (2)
• Diablos
• Propagator (all)
• Behemoth (Aberrant)
• Fujin & Raijin (2)
• Ultimecia (1)
• Griever

All of these are enemies whose AI scripts I either completely or nearly completely rewrote. While the end user may not notice a great difference between the old version of enemies like Edea (1) and the new, the battles against enemies like Cerberus and the Propagators have new and different mechanics than before.

These changes aren't large enough to call an overhaul, but I've also added messages to the Aberrant Geezard fight to help the player better understand the fight's progression. In addition, I made some alterations to the enemy's AI to make the player's way of dealing with the boss clearer and more like how I originally intended.

In a previous version of Crystal I added a battle with the Mobile Type 8 when controlling Zell in the Lunatic Pandora but had to remove it because it turned out I wasn't able to fully resolve the softlocking issue it sometimes had. I believe I've managed to fix this problem and have added it back to the game along with new behavior unique to this battle. The Ruby Dragon that Laguna battles in the fourth dream now has unique – if a bit basic – behavior too.

The Scan info of some enemies now give tips and/or clarify mechanics. Unfortunately, however, "Aberrant" enemies as well as others like the worm Sorceress in the Ritual sidequest don't have unique Scan entries because they use the same .dat files as the versions you encounter normally. Enemies like Virtuous Weapon and the "Sorceress" recolor encountered in the Sorceress Memorial sidequest also lack "real" entries because the space allotted for their Scan text is very small due to replacing enemies that can't be fought normally (Garden Faculty) or encountered at all (Dummy).

Other Stuff

In previous versions I gave some existing choices a SeeD rank penalty, and in 2.0 I've added SeeD rank bonuses for completing sidequests. Some, such as the Winhill vase quest, award only a fraction of a rank bonus while others will award a full rank or two. The player will also receive a rank-up upon completing each Disc.

The Information section of the menu now contains a lot of Crystal-specific information on Commands, Limit Breaks, and so on. I hope it will clarify certain aspects of combat and allow players to make more informed decisions. Adding all this text created some minor issues with text in some seldom-used menu sections like the one for magazines, and there is one more serious but easily avoided issue players should be aware of (see the patch notes).

The 2013-Steam version now includes different folders for users of Roses and Wine and FFNx and the readme has been updated to include instructions on which folder to use.

Finally, the included document "FF8C Game Data" now contains Mug, drop, and Draw lists for every enemy and updated GF ability lists in addition to all of the information that could be found in the "FFVIII Crystal Info Doc" included with previous versions of the mod.

Future Plans

You may have noticed that there's no Switch version of 2.0. It's hard enough keeping up with two versions of the mod, never mind three, so I decided to drop the Switch one since it's the least popular by far. Keep in mind that you can still run Remastered's archives (the battle, field, etc. files) on the Switch, but it won't have changes like that to Darkside's damage multiplier and there could be issues not present in the PC versions. While I may go back and do a proper Switch version eventually, don't hold your breath. Also, while previous versions of Remastered included FFVIII_EFIGS.dll patches/files for older game versions, I'll only support the latest update version going forward.

There are a few abilities in the Information menu that can't be found in Crystal currently, such as Card Mod; these will be added in a future update alongside a new sidequest.

You can find more extensive patch notes, including known issues, here.