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I don't remember if Crash Bandicoot does it, but this technique lets you drop textures from models far away from the camera and they still look ok with just vertex shading. Spyro does that for instance. And you also can do palette swaps trivially, like the various colors of man-eating plants.

I have a write-up for Banjo-Kazooie alfredbaudisch.com/experiment-l... It's also pretty extreme, with some places having only alpha textures and everything is defined by the vertex colors themselves

No such thing as "lighting" here; it's just two different methods for coloring 3D objects, multiplied together The different views here are through noclip, a model viewer; in the original game the two steps likely happened at once, no interim visuals to see

Yes, and in this case shadows and color as well because a large portion of those surfaces would be gradient colors anyways. All you have to do is to give each vertices a color and let the shader interpolate.

Levels and view toggles provided by noclip.website (thanks @jasperrlz.bsky.social for the amazing website!). Captures and editing made with Multi-GIF Studio.