Penta Penguin

"Penguin yay one?"

- Penta

Penta Penguin is a character in the Crash Bandicoot series. He's based on the penguins in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back who walk aimlessly and then take a moment to spin. Similar penguins also appear in Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex and Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure.

Penta first appears in Crash Bandicoot: Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken as a minor character. He was later included in Crash Team Racing and the Nitro-Fueled remake of that game as an unlockable character via a secret button combination in the main menu. Aside from the N. Sane Trilogy, this is the only game where the name Penta appears.

While the original version leaves the name unstated, the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy remake of Warped implies that the penguin that appears in the boss fight against Dingodile is Penta.

Crash Bandicoot: Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken
Penta's first appearance is in ''Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken''. He tends to be very greedy since most of the time he's a merchant selling items for high prices. He has a girlfriend named Gurin and is head over heels for her and will do anything to win her affections. He is first seen in chapter 5 of volume 2, ''Merrily at South Pole! ♥'', where Crash Bandicoot and Cortex encounter him in Antarctica. Crash asks to take a picture with him, but Penta demands to be paid for the privilege. When Gurin gets a crush on Crash, Penta is insanely jealous, to the point of almost letting Crash drown just to get him away from her. He later wins back Gurin's affections by complimenting her cooking, and forgives Crash when he helps Penta set up an ice-cream stall in Tasmania.

He is later seen in the final chapter, ''GO! To Outer Space on a JetPack!'' selling jet packs in his shop "Grand Penguin Store", when Crash and Cortex decided to go into space to find the Power Stones much faster. Crash has very little money and jet packs aren't cheap, so Penta puts Crash, Cortex and Aku Aku to work in his shop for months to pay him back for the jet pack.

Crash Team Racing
Penta is only unlockable via cheat code. If players hold down R1 and L1 and press down, right, triangle, down, left, triangle, and up, at the main menu, he will become a playable character(for Xbox players playing Nitro-Fueled, R1, L1, and triangle are RB, LB, and Y respectively). Intended to be a "joke" secret character, he is the only racer with maxed out stats. In the NTSC-U version of the game however, Penta has the same stats as Polar and Pura, being good at turning but not having much speed. When winning a cup, he shows off his spin attack in the typical fashion of Crash 2's penguins, between jumping with joy. After a loss, he slowly rotates himself on his back instead. Penta vocalizes in the usual birdlike screeches and squawks of a penguin.

Because Penta was added very late into development and was largely untested, he appears in a rather unfinished state, with noticeable glitches and oddities involving him. When using the mask power up, Uka Uka shows up in the item box, but Aku Aku appears when the power-up is used. In addition to his normal penguin noises, Penta can also utter the placeholder lines "Penguin Yay One" and "Penguin Yay Two", uttered in a monotone voice by the programmer Gavin James. The voice glitch is fixed in other versions.

Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy
Penta is referenced in a PlayStation trophy in Warped earned when Dingodile is defeated, called "Penta's Revenge". It is unclear whether the penguin seen in the cutscenes before and after Dingodile's defeat is actually Penta, as it uses the standard model for all penguins in the trilogy and lacks his distinctive scarf.

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
Penta appears in the Nitro-Fueled remake of CTR as a locked character, much like in the original version of the game. To reflect his perfect stats from the PAL and NTSC-J versions, he is now a Speed class racer with max speed but poor acceleration and handling.

Penta is unlocked by using the same cheat code as in the original game, being the only character who may only be unlocked via code. His design recycles the penguin model from Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, albeit with Penta's trademark scarf.



His overall appearance comically alludes to the glitches associated with him in the original CTR. He retains the "Penguin Yay One" line, but now speaks it in the same voice he speaks his other lines. As a reference to the mask glitch from the original game, the mask protecting him frequently switches between Aku Aku and Uka Uka, (both masks also give him instructions in adventure mode and are often randomly switched) and Penta himself switches between looking kind and cutesy, to occasionally rubbing his hands with a shifty look to justify him being able to use both masks. The "Penguin Yay One" line is also adapted into a wordplay when winning a race causing Penta to say "Yay penguin I won!"

Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time
Penta makes a cameo appearance in the levels Snow Way Out and Ship Happens. He can be found frozen in an ice block in the first section of platforms moving downstream. He shares the same model as other penguins in the level, but is distinguishable by his purple scarf.

Crash Bandicoot: On the Run!
While Penta himself doesn't physically appear in On the Run!, a Penta-themed skin for Crash was added in Season 5: 25th Anniversary!.

Personality
Penta's personality in ''Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken'' is portrayed as rather greedy as stated above, but also could be proceeded as very intelligent as he has created jetpacks and sold them and in said manga he sells them to Crash. He also seems to do anything to impress his girlfriend as well.

In Crash Team Racing, Penta doesn't show much personality aside from spinning like a Penguin enemy from Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back in his winning podium animation, and as such, there isn't much added to this character's background.

In Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, Penta is shown to have a sinister side, which alludes to Penta either pretending to be nice to hide his true motives, or him having a split personality. When winning a single race, he celebrates by making evil grins and clasping his flippers, and his winning podium animation has him mockingly laugh at the other racers before realizing what he's doing and ceasing this behavior temporarily. His losing animation has him pretending to be dying while making cute faces in between. This change in personality, alongside the fact that Penta can have both Aku Aku and Uka Uka as his Invincibility Mask, is a reference to the original NTSC-U version of Crash Team Racing, which erroneously shows Uka Uka to be his Invincibility Mask, but turns out to be Aku Aku when used.

Physical Appearance
In his first appearance in ''Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken!'', Penta is a small penguin. He's pretty cartoony and doesn't seem to be based on a specific species, but resembles a chinstrap penguin. He has big, round eyes, a small pointed beak and a winter scarf wrapped around his neck. The colours of his scarf and other details were unknown at this point in time due to the manga being printed in black and white.

He mostly retains this appearance in CTR, only now his colouration is shown. He's a black penguin with a white belly and face, purple scarf, and a somewhat chestnut-shaped head. His eyes are closer together and icy blue, and his beak is smaller. His podium model reuses the standard penguin model instead, being dark blue, lacking the scarf and having a different body shape.

In Nitro-Fueled, his appearance has a few small changes. He gains some purple colouration to the tuft on top of his head, he's slightly slimmer and taller, his beak is bigger, his eyes are smaller and further apart, and he now has black claws on his feet. He also now retains a consistent design on and off the podium.

Appearances

 * Crash Bandicoot: Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken
 * Crash Team Racing
 * Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy (cameo)
 * Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled
 * Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (cameo)
 * Crash Bandicoot: On the Run! (cameo)

Gallery
See: Penta Penguin/Gallery

Trivia

 * Penta is one of the only two characters players cannot be raced against as a computer controlled character in 8-player races (along with Fake Crash). Ripper Roo, Papu Papu, Komodo Joe and Pinstripe are computer-controlled as boss characters and N. Tropy is simply computer controlled as a ghost in Time Trial mode.
 * Penta Penguin is one of five racers not to reappear in Crash Nitro Kart, the other four being Papu Papu, Pinstripe, Komodo Joe and Ripper Roo. Also, Penta is the only one of the non-returning racers who wasn't a boss (however, all of them are secret characters).
 * In the original CTR, Penta is the only secret character to have Aku Aku as a mask during a power up.
 * He is one of the three characters who can use more than one mask (Aku Aku and Uka Uka) in CTR Nitro-Fueled, the others being King Chicken and Iron Checkpoint Crate (the latter two using any of the five masks randomly).
 * This does not include Sparx or Apo-Apo, who protect all characters when racing on Spyro Circuit or Megamix Mania, respectively.
 * He is the only character that can use multiple invincibility masks not to use all five only using Aku Aku and Uka Uka.
 * Earlier versions of CTR claim that Penta became a weather forecaster, and kept predicting another Ice Age.
 * Penta makes an appearance in the CTR intro, when Polar is reading the "How to Drive" manual (behind him), though he's hard to spot as he's very small. He also appears racing in Coco Park, just as Oxide is about to begin speaking to the racers of Earth.
 * Penta's appearance in the intro has been expanded upon in Nitro-Fueled, where he notices Polar reading the manual upside down, and smacks him to get him to read the manual up right.
 * Japanese sources don't distinguish him from the normal penguins.