Video Game / Crash of the Titans

Bring on the Titans!

Crash Of The Titans is a Beat 'em Up/platformer hybrid, developed by Radical Entertainment, as part of the Crash Bandicoot series, released for the PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, PlayStation Portable and Nintendo Wii in the fall of 2007. It was Radical's second game for the series following Crash Tag Team Racing.

The game was the first of a light reboot of the series, with massive aesthetic and gameplay changes. The characters received their most radically different redesigns yet, both in terms of appearance and personality, occasionally to the point of bearing only a passing resemblance to their older selves. The gameplay, while still having a focus on platforming, put in a much greater deal of combat by allowing Crash to punch and kick enemies, block, and more. The game's main gimmick is the use of "Titans", large mutants that are far more powerful than Crash himself and often must be taken control of by Crash by "jacking" them.

The game's story centers on the discovery of a substance known as "Mojo", which Doctor Neo Cortex plans to use to turn the inhabitants of the Wumpa Islands into an army of loyal mutants known as "Titans". Crash must stop Cortex by using the technique of "jacking" to take control of and destroy Cortex's Titans while collecting the mojo.

Versions of the game for the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance were also released, but differ quite a bit from the console versions both in terms of gameplay and plot. The former put in a greater emphasis on platforming and a generally greater number of cues from the Naughty Dog installments of the series, while the GBA version is more of a straight Beat 'em Up.

A direct sequel was released a year later, called Crash: Mind Over Mutant. Like this game, there are console and Nintendo DS versions and each one is slightly different from the other.

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This game contains examples of:

• 100% Completion: Getting 100% requires obtaining a Gold Idol in all 20 levels (for which you must beat a level by killing a certain number of minions, performing a certain amount of combos, and destroying all 3 Spybots), killing enough of every minion type and jacking enough of every Titan type to unlock their respective costumes, obtaining the Hidden Dolls (which unlock concept art) hidden in every level, and beating every level's Mojo Room Challenge.
• Ability Required to Proceed: Certain blockades can only be destroyed by a specific Titan's attack; acid walls need to be destroyed by a Sludge's vomit, remote switches must be shot by a Snipe, etc.
• All There in the Manual:
  • One of the promotional cartoons played as an origin story for Carbon Crash, who Cortex cloned from Crash to defeat the original. Being identical to Crash, it went as well as could be expected.
  • Before time constraints got in the way, Word of God stated the game also originally intended to have a backstory concerning Mojo and how it effected some of the new character depictions. Tiny's design and intellect upgrade would be due to being experimented on by Mojo, while Crash's tattoos fabricated from interacting with it.
• Animated Adaptation: Sort of. A handful of 3D shorts were released online to promote the game.
• Bat Out of Hell: Battlers, giant, anthropomorphic bats with seriously nasty combo attacks and whirlwind specials.
• Bears Are Bad News: The Goar is giant bear with huge boar tusks, and the first "heavy" Titan you meet. It can paralyse enemies with its roar.
• Big Bad: Nina usurps her uncle to become the main villain for this game.
• Big Brother Instinct: Crash is adamant to save his sister Coco. Uka Uka even gets a cheap shot from this, threatening to off her the moment she's no longer a use to him. You rarely ever get the resulting look from Crash.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: Several translations in other languages seemed to have missed the puns in the Titans's names, going with literal translations instead. Most notable is the Yuktopus, as no translations seems to have picked up that the "yuk" in its name is a combination of "yak" and "duck", and not an expression of disgust.
• Blow You Away: The Battler's special attack consists of it gathering wind with its wings and releasing it in the form of several small whirlwinds that are shot large distances and linger for a while.
• Body Surf: "Jacking" Titans mostly amounts to this.
• Character Development: Both Crash and Nina get a huge personality boost in this game, having only been silent vessels for Cortex in Twinsanity:
  • Crash is noticeably less moronic than the previous titles, and is more attentive and serious about stopping Uka Uka's plans than before. He's also gained a huge Big Brother Instinct on top of it.
  • Also Nina, who spent her previous roles as a Bratty Half-Pint cohort of Cortex, is conveyed as far more ambitious and devious, willing to usurp her uncle to lead the conquest on Wumpa Island herself.
• Characterization Marches On: Cortex comes off a lot more Laughably Evil and less put upon than in previous instalments, delighting in his rivalry with Crash instead of his usual honest hatred. He is also more willing to talk back to Uka Uka, foreshadowing usurping him outright in the following game (even if Uka becomes wary of this here and tries to replace him for it).
• Chekhov's Gun: Coco's Transpalooper (aka. "the purple thingy"). When Cortex first invades, Crash stashes it in his pants. After the final boss, he hands it to Coco to disarm the Doominator, which Cortex immediately lampshades.
  Cortex: How long have you had that thing in your pants?
• Combos: Getting big combos in the stages are one of the requirements for Gold Idols, which are required for 100% Completion.
• Continuity Snarl: This game introduces Mojo as the main power source that Cortex intends to harvest, completely disregarding the Crystals and Gems from the previous titles as a result. It also retcons the characters' personalities and appearances so much they might as well be entirely different individuals. It would qualify as an entire Continuity Reboot if it wasn't for the fact that Tiny breaks the fourth wall to reference how he wasn't in the previous game.
  • A smaller one is the Bandicoots suddenly living on Wumpa Island instead of N. Sanity Island like in previous games.
• Cosmetic Award: The Halloween (complete 50% of the game) and Valentine (get all 20 Gold Idols) costumes give no gameplay benefits unlike the others.
• Damsel in Distress: Crash is left to rescue Coco and Cortex of all people.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to Radical's previous installment anyway, with a more climatic story and the menacing Titans. Being Crash of course, it's still thoroughly humorous and quirky.
• Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: A series first, the game lets a second Crash join in with the ability to leave at any time.
• Easy Exp: Mojo is effectively forced onto Crash, thanks to many places where you need to destroy objects in order to progress, or fight off a large number of titans in a somewhat cramped arena. If you play the game normally, without any deliberate grinding, you can easily acquire all 27 upgrades before unlocking the Doominator episodes.
• Enemy Chatter: The minor enemies in this game love to talk, and they love cheesy references. Indeed, if the player remains unseen long enough in certain areas, nearby enemies will engage in surprisingly long dialogue that may or may not be relevant to the plot.
• Essence Drop: Defeated enemies drop Mojo, as do crates and most destructible props. There are Mojo orbs that double the Mojo you get for a limited time, and large orbs that drop big Mojo orbs by sacrificing a Titan to them.
• Experience Points: Mojo functions as this, as Crash gets new attacks and various boosts by collecting more of it over the course of the game.
• Fartillery: The Stench. This is perhaps best exemplified in the cutscene introducing it, where it knocks out a baby fox with its noxious gas.
• Forced to Watch: Inverted; when Nina usurps Cortex and takes him hostage, she tells him that she won't let him watch the destruction of Wumpa Island, which greatly upsets him.
• Final Boss: Nina in her Arachnina.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: Displayed by the boss Titans as their special attacks: Yuktopus shoots a Wave-Motion Gun from its cannon-arm, Uka Uka shoots a barrage of highly letal Eye Beams, and the Arachnina turns into a spider and shoots a long laser from its eyes.
• Gotta Catch Them All: There is a red Voodoo Doll hidden on each level, which unlocks concept art of that level. There is also the Mojo Room voodoo dolls which allow you to replay the corresponding Mojo Room, and the enemy costumes which perform a One-Hit Kill on the corresponding enemy and are unlocked by killing enough of those enemies (in the case of minions) or jacking enough (for Titans).
• Humongous Mecha: Nina's Arachnina, a robot armed with a circular saw which can switch between bipedal and spider form. The plot also revolves around Nina forcing Coco to complete an even more humonguous Mojo-powered mecha called the Doominator, which is crashed on Wumpa Island at the end, barely missing the Bandicoot home.
• An Ice Person: Ratcicles, whose Special attack consists of hitting their claws against the ground, creating a stream of ice that freezes anyone caught into it, leaving them open to attacks.
• Improbable Weapon User: In addition to the fart attacks noted previously:
  • Koo-alas, Tiny's pack of koala hillbillies, will try to whack Crash with chicken drumsticks. They'll sometimes take a big bite of the chicken and burp at Crash for heavy damage.
  • Brat Girls, Nina's mutant rat minions, will sometimes whip out megaphones and start prattling at Crash. This does hefty damage and temporarily stuns the bandicoot.
• Kill Enemies to Open: At several points there will barriers with Uka-Uka's face floating in them. requiring you kill all enemies in the room (or hijack the last survivor).
• Large Ham: Nolan North clearly had a lot of fun voicing N-Gin.
• Long-Range Fighter: While the vast majority of the titans are built for close combat, a few of them instead fight with projectiles while being miserable up close. Also worth mentioning is the titan Sludge, which is the disjointed variety of this trope; although a Melee fighter, it has much longer-ranged attacks than the others.
• Loophole Abuse: When Uka Uka threatens to replace Cortex, the latter defiantly claims he can't; his initials are on the company stationary, and he'd have to pay to replace it all.
  Uka Uka: Cortex, you couldn't be more wrong. Allow me to introduce your replacement; Nina Cortex!
• Magma Man: The Magmadon is bipedal turtle which lives in lava, being the only enemy able to withstand it without being damaged. Its Special attack consists of stomping on the ground to create a moving wave of rocks.
• Maniac Monkeys: The Scorporilla, a gigantic gorilla with a scorpion tail and the strongest Titan in regular levels. Oddly enough, it's refered to as female in its data page.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Goar (bear+boar), Snipe (fox+bird), Stench (skunk+vulture), Rhinoroller (rhino+armadillo), Shellephant (elephant+crab), Scorporilla (gorilla+scorpion), and Yuktopus (yak+duck+octopus) for a really weird one.
• Mook Debut Cutscene: Several Titans in the game have one.
• Mighty Glacier: The Goar, Rhinoroller, Shellephant, and Scorporilla Titans are all very large and slow but very powerful. The Scorporilla in particular is the strongest non-boss Titan, and its punch+tail swipe combo can knock out any enemy with its two hits, with its wide range allowing it to hold its own even against large hordes.
• Moveset Clone: The Stench is just a slightly faster, slightly stronger Snipe. Subverted with the Ee-Lectric, whose Special targets 5 targets instead of 4, and attacks from above, making it much harder to avoid.
• Musical Assassin: The Yuktopus can play a bagpipe tune that stuns all enemies in range.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Aku Aku now has the power to control other's bodies by setting himself as a mask on their faces. He can even control robots and his brother Uka Uka, who is also a mask. Granted this power was already implied via Uka Uka in previous games, who recurrently took over Cortex's body for gags.
• No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom: After a couple of games toying around with this concept, this title returns to the series' staple linearity. The main layout itself is rather wide open, though.
• Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: The costumes you unlock for defeating smaller mooks and for jacking titans allow Crash to one-hit kill/stun them.
• One-Hit Kill: The Free Jack Mask serves as this. While it's active, Crash's regular attack changes into a kick that makes minions fly into the distance, and stuns Titans in one-hit (being spent at that point). Wearing a enemy's costume gives the same permanent effect against that type of enemy only. Finally, beating the game on Hard Mode unlocks the Free Kick attack with the same effect but works against every enemy and it's permanent.
• Pity the Kidnapper: Coco won't stop bantering with Nina throughout the duration she is captured. Nina makes a point of venting her distain for putting up with her before facing Crash.
  Nina: And you, just shut up, because you're annoying! AND STOP TALKING ABOUT PANCAKES!!!
  *Coco rasps at her*
• Poisonous Person: The Sludge is a pig-like Titan with a body made out of an unspecified toxic sludge. It can hide under the ground to attack by surprise, and its Special is vomiting toxic waste all over.
• Rhino Rampage: The Rhinoroller is a rhino Titan which can roll into a ball like an armadillo for 10 seconds, destroying everything it touches.
• Shock and Awe: The Ee-lectric is a bipedal electric eel that can shoot blasts of electricity or call lightning from the sky to attack distant targets.
• So Proud of You: During the ending, Cortex expresses to Nina that he's proud of her for betraying him, as it's the most evil thing she's ever done.
• Spikes of Doom: The Spike is a giant hedhehog/porcupine covered inspikes whose Special attack consists in making giant spikes raise from the ground.
• Spin Attack: Of course, but unlike in past Crash games, you don't start the game with it, and Crash goes dizzy after spinning for a while. As you collect more Mojo, it's upgraded to last longer, and on its last upgrade, Crash can now reamin spinning indefinitely, making it trivial to obtain high combos against large hordes of minions.
• The Starscream: Nina overthrows her uncle, Neo Cortex, as Uka Uka's Dragon. He was very proud.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The game's trailers completely spoiled the fact that Nina overthrows Cortex as the Big Bad for this game.
• Undying Loyalty: N Gin wavers over sticking with Nina, though decides he cares about Cortex too much, and willingly gives Crash and Aku Aku information so they can stop Nina and rescue him.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Uka Uka threatens to do this to Coco once the Doominator is finished just to rile up Crash.

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The portable version contains examples of:

• Academy of Evil: If the game is beaten a second time without achieving 100% Completion, it's revealed that the entire plot of the game was part of Nina's evaluation by the Evil University.
• Body Surf: Players are encouraged to swap mutants constantly, as each additional jacking gives a bonus to the mojo multiplier.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: There is exactly one Piganna in the game, and it's faced in the room right before the final boss. It's a large-sized mutant that hits like a truck and can tank most of Crash's hits. To make matters worse, the only Titans nearby that can be possessed are Plugs and Blow Joes, which are just as frail as Crash himself.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • Cortex does so at the beginning of the game to guide players through the tutorial.
    Cortex: "Oh, brother... Not another tutorial!"
  • In Nina's take-home exam, one of the criteria she had to meet was "escape at the last second in order to set up the sequel".
• The Bus Came Back: Dingodile was brought back for the DS and GBA versions after being unexplainably absent in Crash Tag Team Racing.
• Call-Back: The opening is a throwback to Crash Bandicoot (1996), with Crash ducking to avoid the game's title as it flies into the screen.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Nina decides to turn against her uncle at the beginning of the game on the basis that he "has gone soft". Before the final level, she strikes a truce with Crash to stop Cortex's Humongous Mecha, only to betray the hero as well and attempt to mutate him into a baby once they have her uncle cornered.
• Covers Always Lie: The DS version shares the same cover with the Console versions, even though the Titan that is prominently featured in it, the Ratcicle, is not playable.
• Denser and Wackier: The Crash games got progressively goofier with time upon being handled by different developers, culminating into the jokefest that is the console version of this game. Even then, the DS game manages to upstage its Console cousin by removing Uka Uka from the narrative and giving every Titan comedic one-liners. Additionally, Cortex's final weapon is changed from a fairly generic mecha into a giant disco robot.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: The any% ending of the DS version is light, with Nina turning herself into a baby and Crash beating Cortex, then returning to the island to tell Coco about what happened. The 100% Completion ending, on the other hand, ends far differently. Nina turns Crash into a baby due to the latter's slow reaction timing, and Nina proceeds to beat Cortex herself. She then tells Cortex's minions to take over the islands for her.
• Final Boss: Neo Cortex, unlike the mainstream version, is never deposed by Nina and remains the main villain for the whole game.
• Guide Dang It!: The power crystals necessary to beat the game are placed in some pretty asinine locations depending on the level. In N. Gin's Factory, for example, it's hidden out of view in a platform behind the level's end goal, with the only hint being the easily missable climbable ledges above the final door. The masks can also be a pain to collect, but thankfully they are only required if the player wishes to unlock the Bad Ending.
• Inconsistent Spelling: The Titan Piganna obviously had its name mispelled while the game was being developed. It resembles a cross between a pig and a piranha.
• Laugh Track: The cutscenes feature synthesized laughter whenever the characters quip or get injured.
• Lighter and Softer: The Titans are smaller and goofier, and make quips at you.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The enemies are mutated animals who have human-level intellect. Some of them also feature the combined physical traits of different animals, such as Polartooth (Sabretooth cat+polar bear), Whalephant, Spot (hippo+jaguar), Porcurilla, Phoenix (actually a griffin with fire powers), Brat (bat+rat), Pandebra, Piganna (pig+piranha), Spider Monkey and Rhinostrich.
• Moveset Clone: All small and medium-sized Titans share the same basic X and Y attacks. A few of them also have identical special moves, such as Spider-Monkey and Plug, or Whalephant and K. Modo.
• Nerf: Zig-zagged with Crash's trademark spin attack. It no longer one-shots enemies and is pretty much only useful when dealing with groups of the smaller titans, as the larger ones don't flinch when hit by it. On the other hand, it covers much more distance when performed in the air, making it invaluable in some of the tighter platforming sections.
• Promoted to Playable:
  • Nina has a few levels devoted to her own arc in the DS version. Her gameplay revolves around shooting at little animals to turn them into mutants.
  • While the console games only allow you to jack the titans, the DS version allows you to jack every enemy, including Nina, which you can use to turn mutants back into animals to damage her.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Titan Jawslehoff is a simultaneous reference to both Jaws and David Hasselhoff, and even sings the first few notes of the former's theme occasionally.
  • Spider-Monkey will sometimes say that his "senses are tingling", which is a reference to one of Spider-Man's catchphrases.
  • In Nina's take-home examination, one of the questions asks what has been responsible for thwarting her evil plans. Among the options, one can spot "a plumber".
• The Starscream: Nina, like in the mainstream version, tries to betray Cortex, though is less successful (in the any% ending, at least).
• Sudden Downer Ending: The 100% Completion ending for the DS version, where Nina turns Crash into a baby. After beating Cortex, she returns and orders Cortex's goonies to take over the island for her.
• Toilet Humour: The sound effect for Crash's Double Jump is occasionally replaced by a loud fart noise.
• Villain Episode: Nina's levels in the DS version are short segments after each boss battle where you must control Nina to mutate animals on the next island Crash visits.