The idea for the engine sprang from Square Enix's desire to have a unified game development environment in order to effectively share the technology and know-how of the company's individual teams.

Crystal Tools is a unified game engine by Japanese developer and publisher Square Enix that combines standard libraries for graphics rendering, physics processing, motion control, cinematics, visual effects, sound, artificial intelligence and networking.

The individual authoring tools are connected over a communications server called GRAPE2 which reads all the different data formats, processes them and gives an instant preview of the final game.

Although Crystal Tools allows for easier cross-platform development, the differences in the target systems' video memory and microarchitecture still necessitate fine-tuning adjustments in the games, for example concerning texture sizes.

[1][5] As a video game company with different production teams, Square had wished for its employees to efficiently share their know-how and technology even before the merger with its competitor Enix.

[3] Murata and his colleagues added new functions to create a unified preview and cutscene tool tailored to the game's fully polygonal 3D graphics.

[1] After the Square Enix merger, however, the individual teams still continued to program and customize their own tools for each game, which would eventually go to waste as only their respective creators knew how to use them.

With the amount of assets and tools required by the in-development Final Fantasy XII and the impending advent of the seventh console generation, a common data format for the company was proposed in 2004.

Select staff members from different company divisions teamed up to work on the project on a voluntary basis, but their loose organizational structure failed to yield results.

[6][7][8] In order for the company to stay competitive in a multi-platform environment, support of the engine was extended from the PlayStation 3 to the Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows, both of which were successful in Western markets.

[3] In 2008, Murata said that Square Enix might license the engine out to other companies at some point in the future, although the limited documentation and the impracticality of supporting licensees posed great problems in doing so.

[16] Writing for RPGFan, Stephen Harris called Crystal Tools an "impressive software" that "powered the jaw dropping visuals in Final Fantasy XIII".

GameZone's James Wynne saw Crystal Tools as a means of "combusting money" during its development, and said it was "fairly out of date" by the time it had matured enough to be used for the company's projects.

[18] GamesRadar's Ashley Reed faulted Crystal Tools for leading to extended delays in the company's release schedule and even lowering the quality of some games.

[17] RPGFan's staff writer Derek Heemsbergen said that Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII could be seen as "a desperate attempt to squeeze one last game out of the aging graphical engine".

[20] Wynne equally panned Square Enix's alleged decision to drop Crystal Tools in favor of the newly developed Luminous Studio engine.