Crash Bandicoot 2 improved on the first entry in almost every way. It perfected the controls, it increased the location variety as well as improving the level design. It introduced some new gameplay concepts that each worked very well. It's just such a great game and my second favorite game of the PS1 era (number one should be obvious). 

Let's start with the graphics. 1 still holds up great graphically, but the style just seemed a little off. The technology was there, but many of the character and enemy designs would often be a little too wide or thin, or maybe the colors weren't just right. 2 fixed all of that, everything looked perfect. In fact, this game was so good looking that when the Dreamcast came out, I thought the system was on par with the PS1 because I didn't see that much of a difference over the Crash Bandicoot games.

The locations they send you to are also a huge improvement over 1. It does reuse a few levels too many times, but being able to jump straight from a jungle level to a snow level to a sewer level offered much greater variety than 1 had. These areas all have their own fun gimmicks as well, snow levels offer some ice bits, jungle levels have arena segments, and swamp levels have very cool jet ski bits. It's what 1 was missing, once you started a level, you'd get the same thing the whole way, while 2 would throw all kinds of twists to a level.

Crash staples return as well in different forms. Hog rides are replaced by bear rides complete with a cute, fuzzy polar bear. Boulder chases are back as well which are capped off with riding a polar bear to escape a giant bear (AWESOME). There's also some weird levels like one where you have to avoid bees and one where you have a jetpack (and as you know, I believe everything can be improved with jetpacks).

Cortex also became a lot more fun. In 1 he was just the guy at the end, but here he was more like a cartoon villain. The intro especially had its fun with Cortex, he had a few goofy moments while still being an evil guy. The conversations with him later each had him being delightfully evil, not so much the evil. He just had a little more to him than Bowser or Robotnick, and I dug that.

Crash was also the first game where I felt I was really good at. Whenever we'd play it, we'd always pass it around after every death with a rule that once we get down to zero, pass the controller to Casey. It would give me shit if I still got a game over, but most of the time it meant I could get us to the end (often with a gem) and then we'd go back to the early levels and farm for extra lives. I have every single level in the first section memorized by heart because of this.

I've played this game over half a dozen times and I'll play it plenty more times. It's one of my all time favorites and Crash would only get better next year.