Crystal Tools

• 1. The Engine Behind the Crystal

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  Crystal Tools is a game engine created and used internally by Square Enix, the Japanese developer and publisher behind some of the most recognizable role-playing games in history. It began life in August 2005 under a different name entirely, and its story is one of ambition stretching far beyond what any single team could handle. At the center of everything was a simple tool built to solve a frustratingly mundane problem: artists on a 1997 game could not see what their work actually looked like until it was transferred from a personal computer to a PlayStation console and displayed on a television screen. That gap between creation and result drove one programmer to build a faster solution. Two decades later, his solution had grown into something that would both dazzle critics and be blamed for delaying some of the biggest games Square Enix ever made.

• 2. From Vagrant Story to a Vision

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  Taku Murata was the programmer who built that first instant preview tool during development of Final Fantasy Tactics in 1997. The game was made during a transitional period from 2D to 3D production, and artists needed a fast way to verify how their work would appear in the final game. The data transfer from PC to console was too slow to be practical, so Murata bypassed the step entirely with a custom tool. When the developers of Vagrant Story, released in 2000, needed something similar, they chose to reuse and expand Murata's tool rather than build from scratch. He and his colleagues added new functions to produce a unified preview and cutscene tool suited to that game's fully polygonal 3D graphics. Square Enix's 2001 PlayOnline service represented the company's first push toward common software across all its divisions. After the merger of Square and Enix, however, individual teams still built and customized their own tools game by game, knowledge that vanished once a project ended. A common data format was formally proposed in 2004, intended to replace general-purpose formats like FBX and COLLADA. Getting competing teams to prioritize company-wide goals over their own proved nearly impossible. Volunteers from different divisions tried working together, but the loose structure produced no significant results. Murata later called this group effort a first step in the right direction. In 2005, he was appointed general manager of the newly formed Technology Division.

• 3. White Engine, New Ambitions

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  Following a strong public reaction to the Final Fantasy VII Technical Demo for PS3 shown at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2005, Square Enix decided to release Final Fantasy XIII on the PlayStation 3 rather than the PlayStation 2 as originally planned. That August, the Technology Division began building what it called the White Engine, a PlayStation 3 engine initially meant solely for Final Fantasy XIII. Eight months in, the scope widened. The engine would need to support Final Fantasy Versus XIII, later reworked into Final Fantasy XV, and the massively multiplayer Final Fantasy XIV. Staying competitive in Western markets required adding support for the Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows as well. This expansion marked the official start of a company-wide engine project. The Technology Division was restructured into the Research and Development Division in September 2006, with Murata continuing as general manager and now commanding a full-time dedicated staff. The engine's developers surveyed which tools the company's flagship titles actually needed most. The answer that kept coming up was extensive use of character close-ups, which led the team to conclude that the Final Fantasy series placed exceptional weight on what they called the "anime-like coolness" of its characters. Accurate physics took a back seat to attractive visuals. A post-processing filter for additional lighting, blur, and visual effects was built to achieve that stylized look. Version 1.0 of the engine was completed in September 2007.

• 4. Crystal, Not White

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  After version 1.0 was finished, the code name White Engine was retired in favor of Crystal Tools. The new name was chosen both to better represent the company and because the refractive properties of real crystals were seen as a symbol of the engine's flexibility. Over the following months, the team advanced the engine to version 1.1 and added preliminary support for the Wii. When Final Fantasy Versus XIII director Tetsuya Nomura and his team replaced Crystal Tools with a proprietary action game engine in September 2011, they supplemented it with the lighting technology of Square Enix's newer Luminous Studio engine. Other teams continued using Crystal Tools: the staff behind Final Fantasy XIII-2 kept refining it, and for Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII the engine was adjusted to better accommodate games with open-world design.

• 5. Delays and a Difficult Birth

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  While Final Fantasy XIII was in production, Crystal Tools created serious problems. Murata's team tried to accommodate feedback from multiple game projects simultaneously, an effort that proved virtually impossible and kept the engine's specifications from being finalized. Because separate groups built the individual tools, no comprehensive software documentation existed to ensure usability or compliance across the work. The Final Fantasy XIII team eventually had no choice but to begin creating game assets to keep to their production schedule, only to discover those assets were incompatible with the unfinished engine. The decision was eventually made to treat XIII as the engine's primary focus. The two teams then cooperated more closely. The Wii received only preliminary support and the console never fully supported all of the engine's components. In 2008, Murata acknowledged the possibility of licensing Crystal Tools to outside companies, but noted that limited documentation and the difficulty of supporting external licensees made that prospect impractical. Two years later, producer Yoshinori Kitase said that building a game engine from scratch while simultaneously developing a new title may have been a mistake and a likely cause for the long gap between Final Fantasy XIII's announcement and its release.

• 6. Critics React

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  At the time Final Fantasy XIII released, Crystal Tools drew praise from the press. Richard Leadbetter of Eurogamer described it as an "excellent 3D engine." Nate Lanxon of Wired UK wrote that it produced "some of the most breath taking cutscenes and 3D graphics" seen on the Xbox 360 and that it made "lengthy cutscenes more movie-like than ever." Stephen Harris of RPGFan called Crystal Tools an "impressive software" that "powered the jaw dropping visuals in Final Fantasy XIII." As time passed, the assessment shifted. James Wynne of GameZone characterized the engine as a way of "combusting money" during its development and said it was "fairly out of date" by the time it could actually be used for the company's projects. Ashley Reed of GamesRadar blamed the engine for extended delays across Square Enix's release schedule and cited it as the cause of a "catastrophic meltdown" for Final Fantasy XIV. Harris himself noted that Final Fantasy XIV simultaneously "met and completely shattered" visual expectations, calling certain graphical features "resource hogs" and criticizing the "steep" hardware requirements Square Enix recommended to run it. Derek Heemsbergen of RPGFan described Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII as "a desperate attempt to squeeze one last game out of the aging graphical engine." Dragon Quest X, released in 2012, became the last major title built on Crystal Tools, bringing the engine's game count to five released products across a span from 2009 to 2013.