YMMV / Crash: On the Run!

• Breather Boss: Compared to the fights with Oxide from the entirety of Season 4, Pinstripe’s fight in Season 5 is much more manageable. His attacks are easier to avoid, and he leaves more opportunities to hit him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Back during Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled's run, Twitter user NitroNeato drew Coco in her N. Sane model design wearing her Twinsanity attire. A datamine for Season 5 revealed said look as a new skin.
• Memetic Mutation: The Spyro design in this game has Spyro with a massive nose, and frequent jokes are made about how it makes him look like a purple cow.
• That One Boss: Seasonal gang bosses could give Twinsanity's Dingodile a run for his money:
  • N. Tropy is the first really difficult boss in the game. Her main attack is a wave that must be jumped over, but Nitro crates appear during the attack and are carried by the wave, forcing you to pick certain lanes. She’s also the only boss who can heal herself. It only worsens with her return appearances, where she becomes more strategic and harder to avoid with her attack patterns.
  • It seems like Gnasty Gnorc took a huge upgrade as well. Now he has a shield that will block all attacks, forcing you into a Tennis Boss scenario as you try to dodge his shockwaves and magic blasts while hitting him in a desperate bid to get through his shield. The only good part is Gnasty has only five hit points.
  • Oxide is particularly tough due to his (fittingly) fast paced attack patterns, nearly all of which cover two of the three routes, meaning you need lightning reflexes to avoid him. To worsen things, many projectiles are hidden on high up routes, necessitating more platforming skills in this case.
  • When Tiny came back for Season 5, fans were expecting a simple fight like in Season 2. They were wrong, as Tiny got a new, brutal attack which he frequently used. This attack saw him place four to five tridents in each lane, but the tridents had electrical currents running between them, forcing players to jump between each lane and avoid the current, which was easier said than done. Tiny could also mix up his shockwave attack with this, ensuring players might take a hit.
    • It's possible to slide under the currents, making it slightly easier since you can maintain a slide.
• That One Attack: Oxide's most notorious attack is considered to be when he charges directly at the player. It takes up two lanes and it isn't clearly telegraphed which lane is free, leaving the player with only a second of reaction time. It doesn’t help that the fourth version of Oxide uses this attack very frequently, and the path sometimes shortens to two lanes during branches, making him impossible to avoid if he picks his lanes correctly.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The April 2021 update made getting killed on a battle or collection run a penalty, locking you out of checkpoints if you insist on restarting. There is no way to use checkpoints without watching ads. It used to penalise you with a countdown and return to a prior checkpoint, with an option to watch an ad or use crystals to keep what you get when you retry.
  • The May 2021 update increased the game speed for Collection Runs, meaning not only do the animations on everything looked as if they were stuck on fast forward, it meant the speed for Crash and Coco increased two-fold, which made jumps feel less weighty, which in turn made it harder to get items because you needed to think a lot faster than previously, and those who knew the courses would initially be thrown for a loop, as the new speed meant timings for what appears down the track on a given circuit was thrown out the window. Essentially, it screwed over players' muscle memory for the sole benefit of making Collection Runs last a shorter amount of time in a session, when the bulk of the complaints about collection runs is the fact you're forced to do them to proceed, not the fact they take so long. This update was reverted when the June 2021 update landed to make the game go at the original speed while doing these runs, and also shortening the first main loop to be directly in front of the first path split on the track. A few months later, this feature would be reinstated, but only after the first loop round, which inspired the same complaints.
  • Then things took a turn for the disastrous on the March 2022 update, when the game removed several Collection Runs and replaced them with cut and paste endless modes that not only severely decreased objects to collect but also ensured they could no longer utilize steps, as you have to die to end the run. Needless to say, this was when fans finally left the game on mass, and the point where the game never recovered.
• Unexpected Character:
  • One of the first bosses to arrive via the game's soft-launch turned out to be Scorporilla, from the Titans-focused entries. What makes her presence all the more surprising is that the last time a modern Crash game had any content from those games, it was only via scattered references and a pair of skins, not any of the actual Titans. Not to mention, the only other two Boss villains in the soft-launch were Dingodile and Doctor N. Brio, both of which are more standard for the franchise, making Scorporilla stick out more.
  • The Elementals are back as Uka Uka's minions. The last time anyone saw them was their debut in Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex.
  • Mr. Crumb's only prior appearance was on the obscure Tiger Electronics-exclusive Crash 99X, though this is a bit mitigated both by the fact that the developers confirmed that he would be in the game via a pre-release interview and the fact that Mr. Crumb was becoming a rising fan-favorite request back during Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled's lifespan. What isn't mitigated however is that he was later followed by the equally-unused Thorn Thing and later Grumbler, two of the other Crash 99X bosses who weren't nearly as requested as Mr. Crumb.
  • Even more surprising than Mr. Crumb is the Pink Elephant. At first it seems like an odd out-of-nowhere Dumbo reference, until you find out that pink elephants were a cut enemy from Crash Twinsanity, from the also-cut level Gone a Bit Coco, even carrying over the same sailor hat and heart-shaped marking on his stomach.
  • The Iron Checkpoint Crate reappearing as a mini-boss took many fans by surprise, since there was little to no hints of it having any sentience in Nitro-Fueled.
  • Geary of all characters was put in as a mini-boss for the game.
  • The Noid, Domino's pizza mascot from the 1980's, who made a surprise appearance as a henchman boss in the "Running Outta Time" season: a choice completely out of left field as additional characters goes.^note Granted, he did previously get a tie-in NES game by Capcom, but still. Especially considering how the Noid was mostly retired at the time, and his appearance in On the Run was used as a direct tie in to the announcement of the character's official reinstatement into Domino's Pizza's advertising.
  • N. Tropy showing up is a given, but his female alternate universe self from Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time doing so before him? Not so much.
  • Spyro being added as a crossover character isn't too surprising, given the franchise's history of crossing over with it. Dark Spyro being added as a boss and separate character from Spyro? A bit more surprising, but not too out there considering he was also in Skylanders. His stage outright referencing Dark Aether? Now that caught a lot of people by surprise, considering that part of the Spyro franchise was long considered to be dead.

---