u/Small_Addendum4852

Girls are way more insecure than guys on average and need constant validation to drown their insecurities out...

Do with this information what you will ; )

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said what I said.

MOM gets treated like the black sheep that killed the franchise. People act like it was an irredeemable disaster that deserved to be buried and forgotten.

But here's the truth: it's the most underrated game in the entire Crash Bandicoot series BY FAAAR, and it's time someone said it properly.

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Let's start with what nobody talks about: Mind Over Mutant is structured like a

3D Metroidvania.

Instead of the traditional 20-ish linear platforming levels, you get eight distinct locations all seamlessly connected. As you progress, you gain new mutant abilities that open up previously inaccessible areas, which is textbook Metroid design. For a Crash game, it was a bold departure from the corridor-racing gameplay of the Naughty Dog era, and it genuinely works.

Sure, it's not as tightly designed as a game like Super Metroid, but the sense of discovery and awe when you come back to an old area with a new Mutant and use one of their abilities to unlock a whole new AREA of the game is something no other Crash game has attempted and I wish we got more of this.

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There's something about the vibe of Mind Over Mutant that sticks with you. The brief section in the Doominator's ruins with its rhythmic industrial clanking and dimlitted creepy feeling. The desaturated grays of Mount Grimly. The way the skybox shifting from light blue, to then sickly green to bruised purple as you approach the final confrontation with Cortex

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This game isn't afraid to be creepy. Walking through the decayed ruins of familiar locations, hearing the mournful ambient tracks; It's melancholic and detailed in a way that few platformers have the guts to be. It's not full horror, but it's... unsettling, and that atmosphere is a huge part of why the game lingers in memory.

Also while we're at it, can we talk about the music? Because this game has one of the most bizarre and beautiful soundtracks in any platformer or game in general, and almost no one mentions it.

The composer, Marc Baril (who also worked on the 2 previous Radical games), took a completely different approach here. Instead of the big-band, percussive crash-bang of the original Naughty Dog games, Mind Over Mutant leans into atmospheric electronics, industrial drones, and haunting melodies.

The main hub theme (Bandicoot Sanctuary) is this slow-ish, clumsy pulsating synth piece that feels like you're walking through a dream, or rather a redundant mundane nightmare with it's strings and Bassoons mixed with unique sounding synths that seems too good to be true, since the last time you started a Crash game and Cortex wasn't immediately involved in Crash 2... Shit hit the fan.

The Ratcicle Kingdom theme is built around a mournful music box melody that slowly gets corrupted by static and low-frequency and a sick beat rumbles as you descend deeper. The Wasteland theme is pure desolation: droning strings, wind samples, and a distant, off-key horn that sounds like it's crying.

There are MANY MANY awesome tracks in this game that receive little to no reaction and it's an absolute shame, no track in this game overstays it's welcome and it adds BREADTH and feel into every location they play in.

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Visually, the game is a fascinating technical achievement.

On the PS2, it looks surprisingly good for a game released in 2008, knocking games like God Of War 2 out of the park graphically. The character models and environments are acceptably detailed, with better animations than Crash of the Titans. The lighting engine is solid, and the particle effects work well. It's clear that the PS2 version was a downport from the lead Wii version, but even then it's a respectable effort.

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The main issue for many was the drop in quality on HDTVs, with "jaggies" popping up everywhere, but that was a problem with the console itself at the time, not the game's design. Considering the hardware, the fact that it runs as smoothly as it does is a minor miracle.

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Yes, the combat is simple. I'm not going to pretend it's le Devil May Cry. But the joy of Mind Over Mutant isn't in complex combos but it's in the sandbox.

Every Mutitan feels unique. The Ratcicle can freeze enemies with a sneeze, creating new traversal options. The TK has telekinetic powers that let you solve puzzles and reach new areas. The RhinoRollers let you smash through obstacles. The Snipe can shoot things from afar, The Sludge can... vomit. The Grimly can slow down time; They all look SO much better and lively this time around.

You can store a Titan in your pocket and switch between your current and stored mutant at any time and they can finally JUMP this time around. You can level them up by collecting mojo, unlocking new attacks. The system is surprisingly deep for a game that looks so simple on the surface.

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Okay, I need you to understand something.

Mind Over Mutant came out in 2008.

Before YouTube poops were an art form. Before "reanimated collabs" were a thing. Before every fandom started stitching together 50 animators to rotoscope over existing scenes.

The cutscenes are each done in a completely different 2D animation style. One is a cheesy DBZ-esque anime styled piece. Another is a black-and-white noir piece. There's a puppet show. There's an infomercial parody. They're pastiches of everything from South Park to Japanese Noh theatre to Dragon Ball.

You can argue about the quality of the gameplay, but you can't argue with the ambition. The idea of making a video game where every animated interlude is a lovingly crafted homage to a different art form was incredibly forward-thinking, especially for a late-era PS2 title. It showed a level of care and creativity that most AAA games today don't even attempt.

And yes, this predates the "reanimated collab" trend by nearly a decade. While internet fandoms were still figuring out how to coordinate, Radical Entertainment was already treating each cutscene like a mini-festival of animation styles.

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I need you to understand how wild the humor in yo MOM is, especially for an E10+ game.

Stuff like Coco calling Crash a goyim, or N. Gin saying he wants to 'eat' Coco, or that he hasn't shaved and you're not supposed to 'see him like this', stuff like this will never get old, this game somehow blends childish Nickelodeon humor with adult jokes seemlessly and superfluously.

The entire game is filled with lines that feel slightly too adult for its rating. The Brat Girls yelling "revengicide me". The entire premise of the NV device being a clear parody of the iPhone and corporate control. N. Brio being the author of the fucking Holy Bible. The game is funny, in a way that feels like it was written for adults who happen to be playing a kids' game, and that's a rare and valuable energy, especially for a game that heavily marketed itself towards a younger demographic as much as MOM did (It has a whole fucking collection of kids drawings in it for crying out loud), this game makes me laugh out loud at times and it's stuck in my memory with moments such as "11 thousands De Niros", I'd go as far as to say this game is funnier than fucking TWINSANITY, and that's a massive achievement on it's own.

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Everyone who hates Mind Over Mutant always brings up the backtracking. It's the go-to criticism, and I think it's overblown.

Yes, you traverse the same areas multiple times. But new things appear every time. Enemy placements change. New pathways open. Your first time through the Ratcicle Kingdom, you're on foot and vulnerable. The second time, you have a Ratcicle of your own, letting you hover over gaps and freeze enemies. The third time, you have the RhinoRoller, letting you smash barriers. Each one of these traversals has new enemies spawn and faster ways to complete 'em

You're not just repeating content. You're recontextualizing it, which is the entire point of Metroidvania design. The game teaches you its geography, and you learn to move faster. The first trip might take a while; by the third, you're blasting through in minutes. The developers were well aware and decided to cut having to go to the Junkyard onfoot through the Wasteland after defeating the Hero Spike.

The one portion that actually sucks? Going back to Uka Uka after collecting his bones. That trek is a long, enemy-free hallways of Mount Grimly with nothing new in it. It's pure padding. But it's maybe 12 minutes out of a 6+ hour game, and it's largely isolated. The discourse treats it like the whole game is a slog, which is simply not true.

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Anyways yo MOM is goated and any other opinion is invalid, adios.

Like... Do males just spawn into existence for these women? This is something I noticed for basically my whole life, you can see women getting married at 20 but a man being a virgin into his 40s... What the fuck is going on?

I'm constantly reminded that I'm stuck in a rigged game with no way out; Economically, socially, mentally, biologically and physically.

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It's super fucked UP and hilarious that all it would take for all of us to ''ascend'' is literally just 3 INCHES, fucking 8 CENTIMETERS, a MIDDLE FINGER'S worth of length, is all it would take... And it is forever out of sight, because we can't control our dumb bodies to gain them.

Think about it: Going from 5'7 to 5'10 is absolutely and utterly LIFE-CHANGING, meanwhile going from 6'3 to 6'6 is just... 'eh'

If you've got a 4 inch dong, that's considered a sign of failure... But if you add fucking 3 INCHES, just 3, you get an elite c00ck.

ONE. MIDDLE. FINGER.

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You want to talk about bullshit? Let's talk about the putrid, saccharine, intellectually bankrupt fantasy at the rotting core of Invincible, a show that spends every waking moment gleefully rubbing your face in the absolute worst of humanity only to turn around and whisper, "But actually, love wins" while shoving a saintly housewife in your face like that fixes everything. The Viltrumite arc is a coward's lie. Debbie Grayson is a propaganda puppet. And the entire narrative is a misanthropic fever dream that can't even commit to its own contempt.

The idea that Viltrumites, a species of genocidal eugenicist conquerors who have spent millions of years purging weakness from their bloodline through unspeakable violence, can be taught "humanity" by spending a few decades on this mudball planet is the kind of treacly horseshit that would make a Hallmark writer blush. Omni-Man, a man who pulverized thousands of innocent people into wet smears on a subway platform, who called his own wife a pet to her face, who used his son's body as a battering ram to murder a train full of commuters, this creature supposedly develops a conscience because he got sad and missed his family. Not because he confronted the moral weight of genocide. Not because he grappled with the screaming ghosts of every man, woman, and child he turned into red mist. No, he felt lonely. He felt regret. And the narrative treats this as a profound, beautiful evolution of character rather than what it actually is: a lazy, insulting, morally bankrupt handwave that asks you to forget the mountain of corpses so you can enjoy the big strong alien's redemption tour.

Love didn't fix Omni-Man. The writers fixed Omni-Man by pretending that the very human emotion of attachment, something he spent thousands of years suppressing as a weakness, suddenly flowered into a full moral compass because a few decades of playing house with a mortal woman were apparently more powerful than an entire civilization's eugenic doctrine. It is a child's understanding of moral psychology. It is the fantasy that the love of a good woman can domesticate a monster, and it is every bit as patronizing and reductive as that sentence sounds. The Viltrumite empire, a regime so brutally dedicated to strength that it culls its own population, crumbles not under military assault or ideological revolution but because a handful of them got laid and decided genocide made them feel bad. The comic and the show both act like this is a triumph of the human spirit. It is not. It is an insult to every fictional victim and every real-world understanding of how deeply evil becomes embedded in a culture. It is the arrogance of a species that thinks its capacity for sentimentality outweighs millions of years of biology and indoctrination. The Viltrumites didn't learn humanity. The writers just declawed them, slapped a "redeemed" sticker on their foreheads, and prayed the audience was too busy crying to notice the stench of narrative cowardice.

And who is the vessel for this supposed transformative humanity? Debbie Grayson, the most overidealized, propagandistic, inhumanly perfect character ever vomited onto a screen. Debbie exists for one reason and one reason alone: to be the human counterweight that makes 6'2 muscular Omni-Man's redemption look plausible. She is not a character. She is a walking, talking narrative argument dressed in a cardigan. She discovers her husband is a mass murderer who views her entire species as insects, and what does she do? She grieves quietly. She raises her son with patience and wisdom. She eventually forgives the genocidal monster enough to reconcile with him because the plot needs her to be the bottomless well of compassion that makes humanity look worth saving. Real human beings would be shattered, bitter, paranoid wrecks after what she endured. A real wife would struggle with decades of self-loathing for not seeing the monster sharing her bed. A real mother would be consumed by the fear that her son carries that same viltrumite poison in his veins. But Debbie cannot be real, because this story doesn't want a real human. It wants a saint. It wants a propaganda cutout who can stand in the desecrated graveyard of Omni-Man's crimes and deliver a quiet, dignified speech about forgiveness so the audience feels good about rooting for the redeemed mass murderer.

The show parades Debbie around like Exhibit A in the case for humanity's worth, but she is completely, laughably unrepresentative of the species she's supposed to champion. Her patience is infinite. Her capacity for forgiveness is bottomless. Her moral clarity never wavers, even when every conceivable trauma is heaped upon her. That is not a human being. That is a religious icon painted by writers who need you to believe that humanity is special so their entire "Viltrumites can change" thesis doesn't collapse under the weight of its own stupidity. If Debbie were an actual person, she would tell Omni-Man to rot in hell. She would resent Mark for bringing this chaos into her life. She would crack. She would be ugly and messy and unforgiving, like the humans the show so eagerly splatters across city streets for cheap shock value. But the show can't afford that. It needs Debbie to be the untouchable, sanctified Mother Mary of the narrative, so it protects her from any characterization that might resemble actual humanity. She is the propaganda minister of a story that secretly loathes humans but needs one shiny example to point at when the nihilism gets too uncomfortable.

And let's not dance around what this propaganda is actually selling. Debbie Grayson isn't just a symbol of human goodness. She is a symbol of female sexual validation as the only currency that matters. The entire redemption of the Viltrumite race hinges on the idea that a powerful man's access to a good woman's bed and her bottomless emotional forgiveness is the supreme moral corrective in the universe. Omni-Man doesn't learn ethics from philosophy, from suffering, from witnessing the consequences of his actions. He learns it because he misses fucking his wife and hearing her say she loves him. The show frames his decision to abandon Viltrum as a triumph of love, but strip away the orchestral score and what you're left with is the most insultingly simplistic gynocentric fantasy ever written: the mass-murdering alpha male brought to heel not by justice, not by consequence, but by the magical, redeeming power of a woman's pussy and her willingness to keep a warm dinner plate in the oven. This is not a moral arc. This is a hostage negotiation where the ransom is paid in orgasms, and the audience is expected to stand up and applaud the power of true love.

Consider the alternative. A man without a Debbie. A man who, for whatever reason, cannot secure the devotion of a saintly woman willing to absorb his sins and reflect his goodness back at him. What happens to him in the world of Invincible? He stays a monster. He remains alone, bitter, unredeemed. The show's message is deafening in its clarity. Redemption is not an internal process. It is a reward granted by a woman's forgiveness. Without female approval, you are nothing but a villain. With it, you can paint the solar system in blood and still get a tearful reunion. This is propaganda for the sexual marketplace disguised as a superhero drama. It tells men that their moral worth is entirely dependent on being selected, loved, and rehabilitated by a woman who sees the good in them. And it tells women that their highest calling is to absorb male violence with grace and patience until the monster is tamed. It's regressive, patronizing, and genuinely grotesque, but the show presents it as the platonic ideal of human connection.

Then there's Atom Eve, the other pillar of this pedestalized feminine fantasy. Eve is Mark's reward for being a good boy. She waits for him. She supports him unconditionally, even when he's an indecisive, self-pitying mess who gets his previous girlfriend brutalized because he couldn't manage his own secret identity. Eve has no interiority beyond being Mark's emotional scaffolding. She is the perfect girlfriend, the sexually available confidante, the fertile future mother whose ultimate narrative purpose is to produce Mark's Viltrumite-human hybrid child and secure the biological victory of the "love redeems" thesis. Her superpowers are literally creation and reconstruction, a laughably on-the-nose metaphor for the feminine role as vessel and nurturer. She builds things. She heals. She exists to make Mark's life better and to prove that the right woman can make any man whole. It's not a character. It's a walking, talking participation trophy for the male hero who managed to be slightly less genocidal than his father.

The show's obsession with sex and female validation as the ultimate prize reaches its comedic zenith when you realize that the entire Viltrumite civilizational crisis is solved by finding compatible breeding partners. The empire's plan was always about reproduction, about spreading Viltrumite DNA across the cosmos. But the "good" Viltrumites don't reject this biological imperative. They just redirect it toward approved, human-sanctioned channels. The horrific eugenics program that defines Viltrumite culture isn't dismantled. It's given a wholesome makeover with love, marriage, and human women as the new breeding stock. The takeaway is that sex with the right girl turns a fascist eugenicist into a loving father, and that the entire engine of conquest and genocide could have been avoided if someone had just gotten these purple bastards laid properly a few million years earlier. It's a reduction of all moral complexity to the crudest possible biological transaction, wrapped in a warm hug and sold as a heartwarming conclusion.

Because let's not pretend this show actually likes humanity. Invincible wallows in human fragility. Its favorite pastime is showing how easily we are broken, how casually our bodies become abstract art, how utterly meaningless our lives are against the whims of godlike aliens. Civilians are not people in this world. They are special effects. They are the red paint that proves the show is for adults. Every episode reinforces the idea that humanity is weak, helpless, and only worth protecting because the main character happens to be half-human and feels guilty about letting the ants get stepped on. The show's entire emotional economy is built on the contemptible premise that human life has no intrinsic value beyond the sentimental attachments of the superhuman beings who deign to protect it. We are pets. Just like Omni-Man said. And the story never actually disproves him. It just swaps out one Viltrumite master for a slightly kinder Viltrumite master and calls it progress.

So which is it? Is humanity a pathetic, fragile infestation that exists to be pulverized for entertainment, or is it the magical font of emotional wisdom that can redeem a million-year-old fascist empire with the power of a good cry? You cannot have both. You cannot spend hours luxuriating in the splatter of civilian corpses and then pivot to a tender scene where Debbie's unwavering love proves that humanity is worth saving after all.