This game is fucked up.

I only ever played Rayman 2 & 3, and I thought "Hey, why not play the whole trilogy." Rayman 1 looks real cute.
Nope, get fucked idiot. You just started playing a game that doesn't care about your feelings.

Let's get the visual and audio stuff out of the way first. The game looks and sounds amazing, especially considering it's 1995 release date. Some of the tracks send you on an out of body experience, if you won't play it listen to the OST, you won't regret it.

Gameplay is slick. You can shmoove in this game and you will have to. Oh you will have to my friend.

This game might be one of the hardest commercial releases I have ever played. This is coming from a person who played and finished a good chunk of the NES and SNES library. There are some MAJOR difficulty spikes in this game. At times I was questioning whether or not I was playing a romhack.
This is all paired with a brutal lifes and continue system.

There is nothing frame perfect in this game but some stuff felt too damn close.

This all being said I loved it all the way through up until the final boss which was underwhelming to say the least.

Definitley worth your time.

"Welcome to the Salty Spitoon. How tough are you?"
"How tough am I!? I beat Rayman 1!"
"Yeah, so?"
"Four times. On four different consoles including the weird Game Boy Advance port with the small screen and that one Game Boy Color version no one remembers that actually has a Mr. Dark boss battle."
"R-Right this way!"

Vou fazer algo que não queria fazer, mas chegou a hora, Rayman é visualmente incrível um dos jogos 2D mais lindos da 5º e 6º geração, sua gameplay é muito boa, muito suave e fluida, a fluidez é assustadora de tão impressionante pra um jogo de 1995, é claro as inspirações de Cuphead no visual e movimentação. Porém esse jogo tem um problema seríssimo com dificuldade, Rayman é um absurdamente difícil, mas não o desafiador, o injusto mesmo, depois das primeiras fases, você é punido pelo mínimo erro, e muitas vezes em situações ridículas onde não tinha o que fazer. Mas o que realmente mata esse jogo é o fato de você ser OBRIGADO a fazer 100% do jogo, sim você leu certo, OBRIGADO! é necessário pegar todos os coletáveis do jogo, repetir fases varias e varias vezes pra ir atrás deles, e muitos estão em lugares extremamente improváveis, que ninguém imaginaria que iria estar, as vezes acontece de um coletavel spawnar no começo da fase, depois que você avança e você ter que fazer o caminho de volta só pra pegar ele, sem falar que muitos deles, tem risco de 90% de morte, o que não seria um problema, se você não tivesse vida ilimitadas, que te fazem voltar 3 FASES ATRÁS, é ridículo.

Sei como é um jogo de extrema importância pra indústria, e para a historia dos videogames, e eu ja estava com 80% do jogo feito, mas realmente não dá mais, eu passava muita raiva jogando, e não me divertia em nenhum momento, depois das primeiras fases é só tristeza.

One of the most iconic yet tragically forgotten platformer franchises. What Ubisoft has reduced Rayman to, is something to be ashamed of. Once among the most iconic video-game mascots, now reduced to a cameo within another forgettable game franchise. What made Rayman so iconic that it's still talked about today, over two decades later? From its cartoony artistic design that looks like the produce of someone who has consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms; to its pleasant and vibrant colour world. Rayman is unique. And all of the visual aspects are complimented by the incredibly soothing and relaxing soundtrack created by the late Rémi Gazel. It may sound corny to say, but Rémi truly lives on in the hearts of thousands. His body may have died, but through his work he continues to live on. The legacy of Rayman is something to be remembered. The cheerful music he created; reminding me of a beautiful summer. It's something that has left a profound impact on me. "Deep Forest" takes my mind to the days of my childhood, to those simplistic times; remembering how me and my father first picked up Rayman from our local VHS rental store. There's so much emotion behind his work, behind the music; and it absolutely resonates with me as someone who has enjoyed this game for so many years. I know I've mostly talked about music and of how pleasant this game is, but don't be fooled. Rayman is very much a challenge. Platforming is punishing and unforgiving. You may take a beating and you live to see another day, but god forbid if you take a mistaken step and fall you'll pay a severe price. And there's multiple stages that take advantage of this fact. Band land was an absolute nightmare as a child. Musical instruments with malice intent. That's all I'll say! Mind you, Rayman is not flawless in its design; it's far from perfect. Rayman is a platformer, a good platformer; but at the end of the day.. I don't look at Rayman as that. Or I should clarify, not only as that. I view Rayman as an art-piece. Because that's what it is. And Rémi Gazel's legacy is proof of that. Rayman is one of those games that stick with you throughout life. And for all the right reasons.

I know it, you probably know it, probably anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the Rayman series knows that the first game is really hard. But as someone who grew up in the 8-bit era where games were brutally hard by default, and who generally enjoys playing rage games like I Wanna Be The Guy, this game got me wondering what it is about some hard games that filters me more than others.

The answer I arrived at ended up being pretty simple: the best hard games find a way to be fun anyway. The best rage games get really creative with their trolling and don't punish death too harshly, making you want to keep playing. Games like Qwop and Octodad make it ridiculously hard to do the simplest tasks, but also make your inevitable failures hilarious. Road Rash 64 had plenty of cheap jank but was gloriously chaotic and offered you incentives for causing chaos, so you could lose a race and still have a good time.

Unfortunately Rayman has very little to balance out its unforgiving difficulty. Every gimmick, from the tiny slippery platforms to the darkened rooms to the reversed controls to the autoscrolling sections (which don't give you any warning when they start!) to the long waiting sections interspersed with instant-death hazards, are obnoxiously unfun and strung together in gauntlets that drag on for way too long. It even takes a leaf out of Fantasia's book by being a collectathon with extremely obtuse requirements; in order to unlock the final stage you need to find and break every single hidden cage in every single level. And the problem is the requirements aren't so much puzzles as they are completely arbitrary, like "walk to this completely unremarkable corner of the map then walk left and suddenly the cage is there!"

It's not all bad: the visual style is really great, Rayman is a cool wholesome little dude, and the setpieces/bosses that aren't obnoxious are actually quite creative and memorable. But this was unfortunately one of the games that crossed the Bullshit Event Horizon where the isolated "bullshit" moments were so plentiful that they became my main experience with the game.

I'll get to the sequels eventually once my trauma wears off, and I promise I'll bring an open mind!

Rayman is an absolutely incredible game, filled with a ton of charm. So if I love it so much, why have I rated it so low? Well...

Let's start with the Good Bits: I love how Rayman and the other limbless characters move and animate. Mama in particular does all of these cool spin attacks which must have been a pain to animate. The soundtrack is INCREDIBLE. Right from the very first stage you're hit with these beautiful tracks that can be anything from jaunty and encouraging (which suits the first stage of a platforming game), to tense and pulse-pounding, to atmospheric and eerie and back. This orchestral soundtrack gives soundtracks like Donkey Kong Country 2 a run for its money. The power-ups are relatively clever and fun to use; figuring out how to use the power-ups in conjunction to access secrets and hidden Electoon cages is satisfying. The levels are visually interesting, and you feel rewarded for getting to the next world to see what gorgeous landscape you get to see next.

But then we get to the Bad Bits, and this is going to take more than a sentence or two to explain. The short and easy answer is: difficulty. The story goes that there was a shortage of QA testers, so nobody working on the game actually had a realistic idea of how difficult the game was. That's the story, anyway, and I believe it. That a game like this dared to have something like limited Continues (5!!) is a testament to poor planning and a total lack of awareness. Rayman starts with only three hit points until death, which can be increased to five by grabbing special power-ups, but death resets this to three. And you will be dying a LOT. Despite the initial controls being almost pixel-perfect in execution of jumps, the game quickly introduces slippery platforms that remain throughout the game. Enemies ultimately get replaced with unkillable environmental hazards. The camera isn't completely broken, but more often than not you'll be expected to simply guess what lies under you and whether or not you'll die attempting a jump, especially in certain sections of Band Land. The Run power is imprecise and hard to stop when you're trying to land on a certain spot and not overshoot, but at times you're required to use it.

If you're thinking of playing this game, I have two pieces of advice: one, look up the infinite lives code for your region. Maybe you feel like you won't need to use it, or it's cheating. All I'll say is, go ahead, but have that code written down nearby just in case. The second piece of advice is to look for a video of the Caves of Skops level "Eat at Joe's", with deaths included. That should give you some idea of how broken this game can be at times.

you can tell it wasn't playtested. it's like a video game based off the design philosophies of parents who see their kid complain about school and go "yeah whiny pussy? you think THAT'S tough?? when i was a kid we had to eat buckets of rusty screws and clown wig hair and we had to host worms in our bodies... heh, you've got it easy." a real 'suffering builds character' type of game with levels that, technically, were at least a little designed at some point all hiding behind a few initially fun stages, some cute aesthetics, and a nice soundtrack.

Games I Dislike That Everybody Else Likes

An aesthetically dazzling 2D platformer ruinously plagued by common flaws of the genre (i.e. occasional bad platform hitboxes, trial and error bullshit, arbitrary difficulty spikes, leaps of faith, repetition, etc). The advanced (for the time) mechanics feel surprisingly good to pull off but some of these levels are the actual spawn of Satan - I'm all for a challenge but a lot of this feels like a 9-year-old's shitty Ultimate Chicken Horse level: random hazards thrown everywhere with no rhyme or reason at all to the point of feeling at least partially incompetent. It seems like you have to break the game speedrunner-style just to get past basic obstacles, and at a point it begins to blend in with the lot of these that were hot in the 90s despite starting out with such promise. Still, its vibrant personality is just too strong to reckon with even then. Pains me to report this but... not as good as Gex.