I've always been a big fan of the Crash Bandicoot franchise, that's where the Crash in my name comes from, and so when I found out that there was a short manga based on the franchise I had to read it immediately. I didn't went into it with big expectations, things like this are generally decent at best, but even then this manga managed to disapoint.
Crash Bandicoot Dansu! loosely follows the plot of the second game, in which Cortex convinces Crash to grab the Power Stones for him and that's basically the whole plot. Each chapter Crash, Aku Aku and Cortex find themselves in an adventure to find the Power Stones, although more often than not the actual Power Stones aren't present. It's a simple episodic plot that can be excused having in mind the source, plus it's full of big and little references to the game it's based on, which is always nice.
But no matter the amount of nods, nothing really matters if the characters don't feel like the ones from the games, and I think this is the manga's biggest flaw.
Crash Bandicoot is a simple character, a silent goof, good natured but not really that intelligent. I wouldn't think it would be hard to translate him to paper, but they still manage to fail miserably. The first problem was probably giving him a voice, but I'd be able to forgive that if Crash wasn't a annoying character here.
Here he's a selfish, lazy and dumb character who works only for his own self-interest which is basically eating and there's also that thing where's doing all of this because he wants girls to be interested in him, but besides the first chapter it's only talked about a couple other times in the story.
You don't feel like Crash is the "hero" of the story here, and you will more likely hate him than love him.
Aku Aku and Cortex are, for the most part, acceptable variants of their game coutnerparts though.
The second biggest problem with this manga is that, for a gag manga, more than half the jokes just fall flat. And they don't stop, it's like everything is either a joke or a set-up for one.
And finally the other big problem is that it's incomplete. The manga was cancelled, maybe due to it's mediocrity, but that leaves us without a proper conclusion or much development at all. To be fair I wouldn't know if I'd want it to continue much more as bearing through 14 chapters was already tiring, but it does leave you with a bit of a bad taste when you reach that last page.
All in all, it's hard to reccomend this manga to even the die hard fans of the franchise. Yes, it's a novel little extra in the series, but not even with that in mind is this all that enjoyable. If you still want to give it a try after knowing all this, please go ahead, but consider yourself warned.