I’ve always found old games having differences between regions to be interesting. I believe for Spyro all copies are optimal in NTSC-U (PAL has some neat music changes though!). Crash, however, is nearly different every game:
- Crash 1 Any% – NTSC-U
- Crash 1 100% – NTSC-J
- Crash 2 Any%/100% – PAL
- Crash 3 Any%/105% – NTSC-U
Crash 1 had some interesting changes between regions being that NTSC-U lets you die during a level to skip the box cutscenes, greatly shaving off time every stage. NTSC-J changed some level and gem orders and shortened at least one of the levels making backtracking far less prominent in that version. PAL ends up just being the slower version. [Details]
Crash 2 with the frame rate difference in PAL lets Crash’s movement perform certain actions faster/higher than NTSC, which unlike in Crash 3 makes a huge difference due to the tricks and skips used. [Details]
Crash 3 is somehow inversely different to 2 in that NTSC-U has the upper hand due to frame rate and loading times. NTSC-J, even with SFX off to bypass Aku Aku hints, has slower load times. [SFX, Details]
And that’s that, the speedrunning tl;dr on each games preferential versions. Another fun fact harkening back to my Spyro comment, Spyro 3 never released in Japan. Not until Spyro Reignited that is, when they finally got the true versions of all three games (they were bad).