Crystal Rave
What kind of a badass would I be if I did not kill you now!?
—Crystal Raver
Crystal Rave is a Forum Adventure by the MSPA forums member user Dexexe1234. It follows the tale of The Crystal Raver, your Friendly Neighbourhood Amnesiac who just so happened to wake up in a prison cell with a missing eye and a large amount of voices in his head nagging him to do stuff. It just so happens that you, the readers, are these voices.
It may sound simple at first, but it is not. the characters are interesting, it takes place in a completely fleshed out and interesting universe, and the art could even be considered eye candy to the easily distracte—oh, shiny.
Has retroactively gotten a bad end.
After a while the creator got bored with working on crystal rave, claiming that it was simply a "Test." This is understandable since it was his first of these adventure things, and to him it became a test that grew too much. From this, he decided to do a cosmic reboot where we are turned back to a "what-if" situation of the whole story. This new iteration is called "Mineral Caper," which seems to be a pun on Crystal Raver, with a crystal being a mineral, and a caper is also a type of dance like the rave is.
In Mineral Caper Crystal Raver is now a digger, who recently hit a good amount of Taranium Crystals. He is digging with his brother who is named Wedge. Who is not happy for that name for some reason.
The story starts in this thread, then continues here. The current thread is located here [dead link] . It's also been rebooted here.
It is a rather hefty read, so it is recommended to read the mirror.
It has actually stopped updating on it's forum, instead it has begun running on Dexexe1234's website Dexworks.net where you can go to the latest page and command. It is updating daily.
- Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny:"This Form also seems to be able to travel over specially marked "Paw Prints" that only you can see! That is very nice!" CR: "Ooh, whats that? Oh! This is exciting!" "...ARE YOU EVEN PAYING ATTENTION?!?"
- In that particular scene, Crystal Raver had fusioned with his pet ferret SUGARLOAF and gotten its twitchy nature, so its only natural.
- Aliens Speaking English: Crystal Raver is a species known as a Monochrome, converses with Fire Sprites, goblin like creatures, giant armored beings and a human, all in perfect logical English.
- Always Night: Day haven't been seen yet in the story, just the night sky. The sun might rise at some point, but we still don't know if it will.
- Anachronic Order: Like all MS Paint Adventures (and the MS Paint Forum Adventures) Crystal Rave sometimes just dolts into the past to show something from a different characters sight.
- Animation Bump: Since the beginning of the story, the animation quality has just kept rising. And it is still going.
- Anime Hair: Crystal Raver has completely white hair, but due to being a Monochrome, it might be normal to its species. Feather Dove on the other hand have two giant whips hanging from both sides of purple hair.
- Arc Number: The author has stated that the arc number for his entire universe is 1536. It still haven't shown itself in any way in Crystal Rave.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: There is a small black creature (which was quickly named Clarence) that directly "Took" the focus of the viewers, granting it the "voices" help to get out of a prison cell.
- Authority Equals Asskicking: No royal warriors have been seen yet, but Madame Wranx, the "endboss" of chapter 1 seems to be some sort of royalty to the Fire Sprites.
- Baby Planet: Or rather, tiny moons. The two moons seen so far are not very big, and seem to circle a much larger planet.
- Convection, Schmonvection: Lampshaded. Crystal Raver wonders why he doesn't feel the heat from all the lava he's standing right next to.
- Apparently, it's his scarf. It protects him from feeling hot or cold in hot or cold environments. But he still takes damage from fire and ice attacks. Makes total sense, right?
- Curse Cut Short: "Huh. This is odd. Your RAVE MENU have clearly updated itself, but your STATUSVENTORY is still an old piece of shi-wait. What is that?"
- This particular quote could also go under Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny
- Divide by Zero: Literally -- a typo on the statusventory screen once caused Crystal Raver to have 140/0 MP (It was later fixed).
- Elemental Powers: Crystal Raver can control carbon. Which may seem pretty useless at first, if it is used creatively it can screw people over pretty badly!
- Well its not entirely useless! His ability to control carbon actually makes him able to lift carbon even with himself standing on top of it. Through this he can create his own sky surfboards! Also the graphite shields he can create have already served as some excellent defense.
- Eye Beams: Ramblax.
- Horrible Judge of Character: Crystal Raver is currently on a quest to free a powerful being. This turns out to be the Big Bad of the entire setting!!
- Lethal Lava Land: The first moon that Crystal Raver visits is a giant dark red rock filled with lava, fire elementals and lanky creatures called Fire Sprites.
- Mismatched Eyes: Crystal Raver gets these after getting his Bionic Eye. It's blue, while his normal eye is yellow.
- Nightmare Sequence: Crystal Raver has a flashback to the day his parents were murdered in one of these after falling into lava, yikes.
- There was also the sequence where Crystal Raver gets ready to deal the smackdown to Bazalorage (a giant fire elemental/skeleton thing,) when he suddenly breaks down and simply stop thinking correctly. This ends with a character shift, and when you return to Crystal Raver, he is locked inside a giant crystal.
- Oh Crap: Several times when fighting Ramblax.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Just being covered in soot is enough to make all of the fire sprites mistake Crystal Raver for a fellow fire sprite. Named Veronica. Veronica eventually becomes playable. They look nothing alike.
- What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?: Dude... It IS DRUGS!
- But seriously, even though there is a giant overtone about rocks and crystals, a lot of the comic's designs are pretty trippy, and sometimes the adventure's art kind of looks like something out of a drug trip, the author has said otherwise about where he gets his ideas.
Tropes found in Mineral Caper
- Alternate Reality Episode: Or rather, alternate reality story, since this is pretty much a "what if Artimeus did not have influence on Crystal Raver?" story.
- Crowning Music of Awesome: The first run of Crystal Rave did have some music, but none that was really memorable. Mineral Caper starts with an 8-bit like starting screen (Which was retroactively added to the story no less) and also starts Chapter 1 with a haunting refrain of wind and chimes. It is all pretty glorious.
- Loading Screen: By the end of the Prologue, we are left with a loading screen with a quote and a tiny simple sketch. This is a little unusual in an interactive comic, but not as unusual for the stories on the MSPA forums.
- Mascot Mook: From what we have seen of the fan-art made of this story, the Hobo Imp is quickly becoming this.
- The Noseless: The Monochrome race doesn't seem to have either noses or ears. This first became majorly evident in Mineral Caper, where we meet other Monochromes for the first time.
- Tomes of Prophecy and Fate: A mysterious book is being carried by a shadowed figure in the intermission between the prologue and chapter 1. The book details a weird story that may not have an impact on anything. At least not yet.