Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat
1~50
52. Blasphemous 2 (PC)
53. Max Payne 3 (PS3)
54. Lemmings (SFC)
55. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyu 3 (SFC)
56. Crash Twinsanity (PS2)
After having so much fun playing through the other Traveler’s Tales-developed Crash game earlier in this year, I was really excited to see that this game released in Japan as well! This was a game I recall renting as a kid, but I could never get past the last world, so I’ve never finished it. I decided to finally finish was younger me could never do, and I managed it just fine last weekend~. Over about 5 hours and 45 minutes, I beat the Japanese version of the game with 95% completion (getting all but 14 diamonds).
Crash Twinsanity is the story of Crash and the evil scientist Neo Cortex, but not in their usual dynamic. After another failed attempt on Crash’s life by Cortex, they’re assailed by two strange beings calling themselves the Evil Twins. Coming all the way from the tenth dimension, they’re here to destroy N. Sane Island and especially Cortex, and it’s up to this unlikely duo to stop them! The game has a very silly tone, and it really leans into the comedy of the series in ways that have held up surprisingly well. There are some less than politically correct depictions of the “native people” of N. Sane Island, but outside of that, there’s nothing that should be particularly off-putting to modern tastes, and the Japanese localization manages to keep just about all of it intact as well.
Twinsanity was a game that had a pretty turbulent development, and a *lot* of this game had to be left on the cutting room floor, and that’s something that really shows with how the narrative can make some strange leaps between logic and location at times. Even still, being a comedy, this hardly matters in the grand scheme of things, and the game’s pacing manages to make that never a serious enough problem as to ruin what the game has going well for it. While it’s hardly the most narrative-focused game on the PS2, Twinsanity has a lot of really fun, silly ideas (from new character Nina Cortex to even the slight reimagining of Neo Cortex as a more childish, bumbling fop) that make this game an entertaining and memorable entry in the wider Crash series.
Mechanically, Twinsanity takes even bolder leaps than the storytelling does. Rather than a set of linear stages taken on from some sort of hub area like all the previous crash games were, Twinsanity experiments with a more contiguous, puzzle-focused open world design. There are four hub areas with their own optional diamonds to collect (and puzzles to solve to get to them), and then each of those hub areas has three mostly linear levels that you’ll play in sequence. These three more linear levels are interwoven together much more seamlessly than the discrete stage separations of earlier Crash titles, but they also often have rather different methods of play, with each stage having one or two central gimmicks you’ll need to navigate to complete it (along with its own set of six optional diamonds, of course).
Some of these various gimmicks will be quite familiar to those who have played previous Crash games. You’ve got sections following Crash from the front as well as the back (running away from something, of course), as well as auto-scrolling snowboarding stages and even a return of the roller ball sections from Wrath of Cortex. The new platforming sections are mostly based around Crash and Cortex working as a team, with Crash able to throw Cortex around to get to out of reach areas, swing him at enemies with extra range, or guiding him along to safety as Cortex runs along at his own pace. You even have some Bionic Command-esque sections playing with Nina Cortex’s grapple arms! It’s a well-paced, fun assortment of things to do, but it’s generally hampered by one issue: The camera.
In a problem not unfamiliar to many not-so-10/10 platformers, a claustrophobic camera will be your greatest foe far more than any particular stage obstacle or boss enemy. Not all stages have this camera suffering divided evenly though, thankfully. Easily the worst offenders for me were the auto-scrolling sections towards the camera. It’s never zoomed out enough, so you often have barely enough time to react to obstacles ahead of you compared to earlier Crash games’ versions of this particular platforming gimmick. The other main offender of the camera is the perspective on Crash when you’re doing mid-air jumps between platforms. Crash’s shadow is far too faint and is often simply not visible at all, so actually judging what you’re above to properly platform onto it is far harder than it needs to be.
Your main saving grace for these issues and all of the game’s more challenging sections is thankfully a very robust and forgiving checkpoint system. The game dishes out check points and hard save points very liberally alongside big piles of extra lives as well. They’re honestly plentiful to the point that I question why the game even needs extra lives in the first place, but I’ll take heaps of extra lives very willingly as a consolation to that. My only other meaningful complaint is that the hub areas are very unintuitive to travel between at times, and a big reason I didn’t go for 100% completion being that I couldn’t figure out how to get back to the game’s first handful of stages to reattempt collecting their diamonds ^^;. As much as some sections are kinda janky in their platforming and the camera can often be a burden, these checkpoints keep the game from ever getting meaningfully frustrating 99% of the time (a couple of those snowboarding parts can rot though XP).
The big star of the show though, at least for me, is the presentation. The graphics and FMVs are fun, for starters. Crash and company (especially Cortex) are animated with a wonderful amount of cartoonish silliness, and it helps to enhance the wacky comedy a lot as a result. The music, however, is absolutely inspired. The *entire* soundtrack is a cappella, and it fits the zany nature of Crash and his world *so* well that whoever thought of this deserves a medal for how well it works. While I showed a fair few friends the game, I shared so many more just the soundtrack, and I can hardly think of another game I can say that about (that isn’t an insult, at least X3).
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I enjoyed this game a lot. Between the fun comedy and great music, it’s a game that I have a hard time thinking about and not breaking out into a smile~. That said, between the janky camera and platforming and various bugs that differently trouble the respective releases of this game, I think your mileage will really vary as to how well you get on with this game. Twinsanity is a work that is really more than the sum of its parts, but I would not blame anyone for finding it far more trouble than it’s worth to put those component pieces together into something really enjoyable.
