YMMV / Crash Tag Team Racing

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • When it looks like Willie Wumpa Cheeks is about to be outed as the culprit, he looks worried about the prospect, only for him to angrily confess when the others mess up the deduction completely. Seeing how he bragged about stealing the gems afterwards, it's possible that he would have enjoyed reveling in the fact that he's the mastermind after being exposed, and just couldn't stand the suspense.
  • Also, did Coco and the others really think Crash was the thief, or was it just a clever ruse to make the real mastermind confess.
  • Who's the true villain of the game anyway: Wumpa Cheeks or Von Clutch? The former stole the power gems and the latter's life support, and seems a huge Jerkass, but the thing is Von Clutch, while being nice to the heroes, is a Pointy-Haired Boss who likes "schpeed und violence", a cheapskate, Cortex's fanboy, is possibly an ex-Nazi, keeps a highly dangerous amusement park and most of the mini-games there involve hurting or killing someone (his employees included!). So, this means that all Willie did was rendering an already dangerous park unfunctionable, attempting to kill a criminal and escaping without hurting anyone else. While murdering a defenseless old man is still a crime, is it possible that Willie was actually trying to help Von Clutch's employees and customers out, but the wrong way, and the heroes basically saved the bad guy?
• Awesome Music: Say what you will about the gameplay; the soundtracks in this game are excellent.
• Broken Base: This game in nearly every aspect is polarizing, especially due to being Oddball in the Series:
  • Is the gameplay sound and based on a winning combination of platforming and racing, or a bland mess with neither of the highs that previous installments with both had?
  • Are the game's jokes and characterizations funny or not?
  • Spiralmouth returned to do the music after their work on Crash Twinsanity, but with Radical's own songwriter Marc Baril on the team this time. Aside from those who didn't like Twinsanity's songs, even those that do wonder if Marc made their work better or worse.
  • In regards to the previous Crash racing game, Crash Nitro Kart, does this game manage to be better due to doing more than just recycling the look and feel of Crash Team Racing or is it inferior due to being too different from previous titles?
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Pasadena, pretty much the instant she flirted with Crash and showed off her confident and fairly off-kilter mentality. A large amount of fans wanted her return, getting their wish with Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled and the Neon Circus Grand Prix.
  • Von Clutch is also fairly popular thanks to his zany personality and comical German accent. He returns along with Pasadena thanks to Nitro Fueled.
  • Chick Gizzard Lips and Stew are pretty beloved due to their tried-and-true Ham and Deadpan Duo shtick (in inverted respective). They, too, were brought back for Nitro Fueled, initially as the reporters for CTR TV during each Grand Prix, until they were eventually brought on as playable characters during the Winter Festival Grand Prix.
• Fanon: Due to Von Clutch being a Cortex fanboy, fans generally agree that he created his own Evolv-O-Ray and used that to create Pasadena, Chick and Stew, and Willie Wumpa Cheeks.
• Fridge Brilliance: Everyone believing Crash was the thief at first makes a lot more sense when you take into account Crash's more violent and mischievous personality in this game. As such to the other character's perspective, it wouldn't be out of character for Crash to steal Von Clutch's Gem.
• Fridge Horror: Outside of a a cameo, this is currently the only Crash game in which Aku Aku doesn't make an appearance. Now take into account how Crash is more of a Heroic Comedic Sociopath in this game. Is this coincidence, or has Aku Aku been something of a Morality Pet for Crash all this time?
• Game-Breaker:
  • N. Gin's Rocket Launcher is the most overpowered weapon in the game. It destroys almost everyone in one or two hits, and is pretty much a guaranteed win if you're doing Rolling Thunder, where it's pretty hard not to go way above the requirement. It gets even more OP if you fully upgrade it to tier 3 - the explosions are even bigger and it can blow up most cars in one hit. If you decide to use anyone else other than N. Gin in a race, you're probably going to get blown up by him at least once, though thankfully the CPUs don't use the upgraded weapons if you choose to upgrade them.
  • As if that weren't enough, one gameplay mechanic a lot of people gloss over when clashed is that you actually get a completely different set of powerups as a gunner. Two of them are simply projectiles that One-Hit Kill a single driver, but then comes the piano, the submarine, and the cow — they all work exactly the same way, where you throw them either ahead or behind you and cause an explosion. Said explosion lasts for almost 2-3 seconds and is a One-Hit Kill to anyone who drives past it for that whole duration. You can still obtain these even in first place too, effectively ensuring nobody has even the faintest chance of touching you except with a fireball. Oh, and if you throw it forward, the explosion doesn't even have an effect on you, so it doesn't even have any downsides with little strategy involved.
• Gameplay Derailment: Heavily accused of this. The focus on clashing and gunning ends up being a little too important to the gameplay, and the AI rarely takes advantage of it so many players have noted it's best to just stay clashed the whole race and shoot anyone who comes your way. Because you're gunning instead of driving, this ends up meaning racing takes a total back seat to the experience despite being billed as a racing game. It arguably is completely unimportant in the grand scheme, because you won't have a fighting chance of winning unless you shoot everyone in sight. To alleviate this a little, the game has several other racing modes where clashing cannot be done, though nearly all also without opponents, such as Time Trial, Crashinator, and Stunt Arenas.
• Ham and Cheese: Nolan North's portrayal as N. Gin. It'd be one thing if he had just stuck to N. Gin's typical Igor impression, but North went one step beyond and made N. Gin sound like he had all but one screw come loose, with some rather hilarious lines to boot.
  "Reset your car so I can do that again."
  "You are just trying to make me angry, aren't you? ...WELL, YOU'VE SUCCEEDED!!! Get me that costume! I know your weakness, Crash: Bullets!"
  "Crash, have you seen my sense of morality? ...Oh, well."
  "Sanella would like to thank her supportive husband. Who picks her up... AND BENCH PRESSES HER DAILY!!!"
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Naughty Dog had parted ways with Crash in 1999 after his first racing game, replacing him with Jak and Daxter. In 2005 — the same year Crash Tag Team Racing was released — Naughty Dog released Jax X Combat Racing, a Vehicular Combat game.
  • Von Clutch is a war veteran that must most likely have been on the side of Axis. In 2019, he makes his return for Nitro-Fueled, a game that's published by Activision, a company that handles a certain series with World War II in it.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Several fans and reviews criticized its short size and fairly easy difficulty.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Pasadena behaves like a stereotypical Southerner, while Von Clutch is a comical German soldier. Both are beloved by US and German fans specifically because of their unbridled patriotic enthusiasm.
• Porting Disaster: The PS2 version runs only at 30fps and lacks multi tap support, meaning no 3-4 player races. The PSP version suffers further cosmetic downgrades due to its more limited hardware. To compensate, both Sony consoles can link up to each other to gain extra tracks and costumes not available in the Xbox and GameCube versions.
• The Scrappy: Willie Wumpa Cheeks is seen as an overly weird character even by the game's standards and his rhyming can get grating. Also, he doesn't quite live up to the preceding racing game villains Oxide and Velo, since he has no boss fight despite being the gem thief who's meant to be a Hate Sink.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Many enjoy the games' alternate modes over the standard racing, such as the collectathon platforming and the bowling minigames. Even some of the alternative racing modes are preferred over the standard one, since the lack of clashing makes some of them more intuitive. It helps that nearly all of these earn crystals however, and you only need a certain amount to progress through each hub world, meaning you can finish the normal non-100% story without even doing one normal race.
• Spoiled by the Format: Given he's the only non-playable character out of the list of suspects, it isn't too surprising when Willie Wumpa Cheeks is revealed to be the gem thief.
• Squick: Willie Wumpa Cheeks getting zapped and melted into a puddle by Cortex's ship in the game's ending. Even the protagonists have this reaction.
• That One Level: For an otherwise easy game, Labrea Carpits stands out for various factors such as opponent racers making use of the unlockable shortcut unlike how it is for every other one, your clashing partner's noticeably dumb AI which constantly rams into walls, and the geyser section which can easily veer you off course and cost you the race in the final stretch.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The characters' personalities get this from time to time, as noted under Broken Base above. Making matters worse is that some of these changes would carry over into Crash of the Titans and Crash: Mind Over Mutant, also developed by Radical Entertainment.
  • Many fans accustomed to the precise racing focused gameplay of CTR and Nitro Kart were put off by this game's more battle-heavy gameplay.
• The Woobie: The Park Drone in Tyrannosaurus Wrecks who describes himself as a "starving postgraduate student". He weakly requests Crash for coins in exchange for a Power Crystal, but says that he'd also accept something as measly as macaroni, and when talking to him more without the proper payment, he acknowledges that you're making things worse for him, but just feebly accepts the fact. Not to mention, when cursing his student loans, he accidentally spits in his mask.

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