YMMV / Crash: Mind Over Mutant

• Alternative Character Interpretation: What if Crash knew all along that Crunch is no longer under the effect of his NV? Considering all the trouble he made him go through, some payback must've been in order (even though it ended up being slightly disproportional).
• Anti-Climax Boss: Compared to the resilience of Crash of the Titans' opponents, none of the boss battles in this game are that difficult, not even the final one, especially when you take control of him, although he can be hard if you refuse to and fight him by just spinning.
• Awesome Music: The game's soundtrack is often regarded as one of its best aspects. Once again composed by Marc Baril, MOM's music sounds like a revisit of ideas from COT, being overall more atmospheric and cheerful, but also tenser and grittier when needed. Special mention goes to The Wastelands and Grimly Music.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Cutaway Gag involving the mime before the final boss fight is bizarre even by this game's standards.
• Broken Base: If the entire game isn't this, then the Art Shift cutscenes most certainly are. Some enjoyed the Affectionate Parodies and thought the differing cartoon styles coloured the story nicely, others thought they were a shallow, badly dated attempt to be relevant, especially compared to Titans' (comparatively) more earnest story direction and impressively made in-game cutscenes.
• Character Rerailment: Zigzagged. Cortex, while remaining even more deranged and campy than ever, reasserts himself as Big Bad and even maintains the role of Final Boss for the first time in a while.
• Contested Sequel: While pretty much all of the post-Naughty Dog Crash games are this by default, it's somewhat of a point of contention where the game stands next to even its immediate predecessor, Titans; some think MOM is far too easy and the free-romping did more harm than good for game progression while a lot of fans appreciate the heightened platforming elements.
• Continuity Lockout: A weird example where this involves a different version of the same game; some things in the DS version don't make a whole lot of sense unless you played the console or PSP versions, and even then, their placement is questionable at best.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: More often than not when this game is brought up, it's usually because of the cutscenes which have an odd variety of styles and make it feel like a legit Crash cartoon we've never gotten. While divisive due to some lowbrow humor, a majority of fans did enjoy them and cite it was one of the usual reason to keep playing the game. Heck, most who don't want to play the game are more than happy to just watch the cutscenes on YouTube.
  • The treatment of Cortex leads to fans thinking about this trope specifically for him in this game, since he is more badass story-wise than gameplay-wise.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Even though he was already popular before, N. Brio instantly shot up more than a few fans' favorites lists with his depiction in this game.
  • A lot of fans were happy Coco was playable, and for once, wasn't inferior to Crash. Her redesign seemed to help in the matter. Sadly, hardware limitations means she isn't playable in the PS2 version or the PSP version.
• Fanon Discontinuity: This game and Crash of the Titans are often ignored by fans due to the heavily contested changes to things like the visual style, characterization and gameplay. The fact the game played a part in the series' years-long hiatus certainly didn't help.
• Good Bad Bugs: You can revisit the Scorporilla arena later in the game's story, and be met with an optional battle against two respective titans. Finishing it rewards you with 5 golden mojo placed on a side of the arena. The catch is that these mojo are glitched, and will respawn every time you revisit the area, should you collect at maximum four of them. If you return to this area with a 20x multiplier, these mojo become a very convenient way of maxing out titans without much grind. This is especially useful for Scorporilla itself as this titan is infamously difficult to level up under normal circumstances.
• Harsher in Hindsight: This was the last major Crash Bandicoot game for a long time, only bouncing back in 2017. Less than a year later, Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier proved a Franchise Killer for the Jak and Daxter series, and it has yet to see a new game. Both series were started by Naughty Dog, and both died in the hands of other developers.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "I created ___________! Stop _________ing them because they're mine!"^ExplanationBased on one of N. Brio's more popular quotes: "I created Slinkies! Stop playing with them because they're mine!"
• Nightmare Fuel: While most of the soundtrack is cheerful and fun, some tracks, such as Mount Grimly, are surprisingly unsettling.
  • The Chimera, the final boss in the Nintendo DS version, is a nightmarish amalgam of various Titans with a few original parts thrown in, played dead straight with no comical bits whatsoever. It doesn't help that it's fought in front of a swirling background.
  • The normally cute Coco gets thoroughly corrupted by the NV device, with her growing longer teeth and freakishly large claws. Mercifully, it doesn't last too long.
• Porting Disaster: The PSP port of the game suffers from low-quality graphics (especially in the in-game cutscenes) and sound effects and several long loading times thanks to most of the map being split into parts compared to the console version. And while the port is far from unplayable, it's still a massive step down from other Radical games' PSP ports which are considered to be flawed yet decent.
• Scrappy Mechanic: "Free-Romping" quickly became more of an annoyance than a plus to more than few players due to the excessive backtracking that often resulted from it.
  • The game improves on some issues involving the titans from the previous game, most prominently allowing them to jump now, but introduces other issues as well. You can now have two titans at once and switch between them, but you cannot switch back to on foot Crash without ditching a titan, and many of the titans are now more specialized and gimmicky, making them very useful in certain situations but useless in others. Certain puzzles and platforming areas also require specific titans to get past, which can force you to have to backtrack if you do not have the necessary titan with you.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The game is far more manageable than Titans due to the vastly lessened and easier combat (Crash can take more hits and enemies are in smaller groups), the ability to pocket Titans and jump with them, and infinite lives.
• Sequelitis: Contested Sequel as the console version may be, the DS version is pretty unanimously agreed to be much worse than the DS (and even GBA) versions of Titans, due to its repetitive gameplay and playing nothing like the previous DS installment.
• Special Effects Failure: The game makes significantly less sense playing as Coco alone, as all the dialogue and cutscenes are designed solely to feature Crash.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • So Cortex rehires N. Brio and abandons N.Gin, leaving the guy to fend for himself, clearly showing that Cortex doesn't care about N. Gin. Sounds like the perfect opportunity for N. Gin to team up with the bandicoots as an act of revenge against Cortex similar to what Brio did in Crash 2, right? NOPE! Instead, N. Gin has barely anything to do with the plot, is simply just spying on the heroes just so he has the hope Cortex will reward him, has no involvement with Cortex's actual plans, just appears in 3 measly cutscenes, and then he just vanishes completely from the story after being told by Aku Aku to get off the island.
  • Ironically, N. Brio himself only fares relatively better. Despite implications of Teeth-Clenched Teamwork between him and Cortex (Brio repeatedly grumbles over Cortex stealing his work beforehand), the two have no interactions after betraying Uka Uka, with Brio sent packing similar to N. Gin after Crunch is defeated, leaving Brio The Unfought and Cortex handling the rest of the scheme solo.
• Underused Game Mechanic: During Crunch's boss fight, you are actually able to "jack" and control him, thus marking the one time the character is fully playable throughout the series. However, after recovering him, rather than having him available as a "Titan" for unique teamwork with the player, he remains idle as a host for mini-games.
• Unfortunate Character Design: Ratnicians have gotten an overhaul for this game, growing beards, wearing towels on their heads and using exploding coconuts instead of test tubes as weapons. While this is meant to show that they've gone semi-feral, all these features are commonly associated with something else. The fact that they can blurt out "Afterlife incoming!" if killed doesn't help.
• Woolseyism: In Russian localization of the game Coco refers to Cortex's blog specifically as a LiveJournal page, saying "ЖЖ" ("ZhZh", an abbreviation of LiveJournal's name in Russian) instead of the proper "блог". This decision was made because of LiveJournal being the dominant blogging platform in Russia during 2000s, to the point that its title was more familiar to an average person than a proper term for blogs. Funnily enough, this caused the localized version of the game to become an Unintentional Period Piece, since LJ stopped being nearly as relevant for runet during the 2010s.