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!

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.

From my own personal experience, there aren’t too many good things that I can say when it comes to the company Ubisoft. I haven’t played too many of their games, as a large amount of them don’t really hold that much appeal to me, but even as an onlooker, I can tell just how soulless and mind numbing a lot of their titles are just by glancing over them, seeing them put little effort into making these games different from one another, or let alone putting any real quality into any of them whatsoever………….. it also doesn’t help that the company itself is one huge piece of shit, but that’s a story for another review at another time. With that being said though, if there is one thing that I can praise the people at Ubisoft, specifically Ubisoft Montpellier, for doing, it would be giving the world the gift of the Rayman franchise, a series that has been on and off (mostly off) ever since the mid-90s, and has more often than not delivered some truly amazing platforming experiences that few other games can replicate, especially with Rayman Origins and Legends, being not only some of the best games that Ubisoft has ever made, but also some of the best platformers OF ALL TIME, if you ask me. However… I can’t lie and say that this series is absolutely flawless, because that isn’t true in the slightest, and you can easily see why when you go back to revisit the original game that started it all, Rayman.

This was actually the very first Rayman game that I ever played, which makes sense, seeing as my chronology mindset won’t let me do anything out of order in the slightest. I recall seeing other Rayman games plenty of times before that point, thinking that they looked neat enough, and I had heard enough great things about them to where it made me want to give the series a try at some point. So, I went ahead and downloaded the original title off of the PSN, booted it up, and proceeded to go through one of the biggest rude awakenings I have ever had whenever playing any video game whatsoever. Any of you who have played the game for yourself know EXACTLY what I am talking about, hence why I rated this game as low as I did. Rayman for the PS1 is one of the most conflicting games that I have ever had the “pleasure” of playing through, providing plenty of enjoyable and downright INCREDIBLE elements that one could ever find from a platformer at the time, but at the same time……….. GOD DAMMIT.

The story is one we have all heard in some form or another, where in the mystical land of the Valley (wow, what a great name), everyone is living in peace and harmony thanks to the efforts of the Great Platoon, a magical artifact that protects the inhabitants of the world, but all of a sudden, the evil Mr. Dark (wow, what another great name) appears to steal the Great Platoon, defeating the guardians of the Valley and sending all of the Electoons living in the land to be imprisoned for all eternity, so it is up to Rayman to set out on a journey to save the Electoons, defeat Mr. Dark, and return the Valley to its normal state once again. It is a fairly simple plot, but what makes it work here is with how it is presented, not only helped by the game’s visuals, but also with cutscenes detailing the events of what goes on in the game in a simplistic, yet effective manner. I mean, come on, when you see the Electoons crying the cages, you can’t help but want to go save as many of them as you can.

The graphics are absolutely phenomenal, being one of the best looking platformers to ever comes from not just the early PS1 era, but from any game in general at the time, having plenty of beautiful environments to go through and wonderful designs and animations for all of the characters, the music is fantastic, having plenty of wonderful tracks to vibe to all the way through, from calm and pleasant tracks like this one, to more jazzy and upbeat tracks like this one, and the gameplay/control is pretty simple enough, with you being able to get a grasp on it pretty easily a good amount of the time, but then you get further along into the game and……….. sigh, we’ll get there soon enough.

The game is a 2D platformer, where you take control of Rayman, go through a set of six worlds, each with a unique theme that separates them not just from each other, but from plenty of other games as well, run, jump, and punch your way through plenty of different enemies while avoiding some pretty deadly hazards and traps, gather plenty of different items to make you slightly stronger and to heal yourself, while also saving as many Electoons as you can, and take on plenty of whimsical and entertaining bosses, who range from being pretty simple, to making you wanna TEAR YOUR FUCKING-.......... inhale, hold off on it, Mega, we will get there….. sigh, but yeah, for the most part, you got a pretty basic platforming adventure here, nothing too unique from what we have seen before, but the visuals, soundtrack, and unique aspects of gameplay alone make it stand out from any other game released at the time, and it makes it very fun to play through…… for a good while.

From the beginning, you get accustomed to how this game plays pretty quickly, walking around and jumping through these colorful lands, while also gaining plenty of abilities to help you along the way, such as the ability to glide with your hair, or even to… punch and hang from ledges. Because apparently Rayman is a fucking idiot who can’t do those things on his own. However, as the game goes on, it will introduce plenty of new ways to switch up the gameplay, not only to challenge the player in new and creative ways, but also giving a new gameplay style that you will have to experiment with. Even in the first world alone, there are levels where you will be planting plants to help you ascend up this canyon to avoid the water rising from below, and there’s another level where you will be flying on a giant mosquito that you just previously beat the shit out of! Like with Donkey Kong Country, this game knows how to keep the player engaged from start to finish, making sure to make each level feel unique and different from each other in some way, making you want to see what it all has to offer….. for a good while, anyway.

Not to mention, I can’t stress this enough, but the visuals that the game is sporting really makes it all that much more enjoyable to play through, not just in terms of how good they look, but also the creativity that can be implemented through them. You have your typical worlds here and there, like a mystical forest and some rocky mountains, but then you have other worlds that are made up of musical instruments, or ones that are made of art and craft supplies, and even ones entirely made up of candy! Sure, some of these could be seen as somewhat generic, since a lot more games have used these themes, but at the time, this had to be one of the most creative platformers out there just based on the worlds alone, and this is pushed even further with the enemies and bosses, as well as some of the obstacles, and the means you have to use in order to get through them, making it very fun to traverse through to discover just what else the game could be hiding around the corner……. for a good while anyway.

Ok, ok, now that we have alluded to it enough at this point, we should get to the real… meat and potatoes on my thoughts on this game. You see, I may have been praising this game for quite a while now in this review, talking about its wonderful visuals, creativity, music, and all that jazz, but let me tell you something right here and now……… I FUCKING HATE playing this game. Seriously, hand on my heart, swear to god, this is, without a doubt in my mind, one of the most frustrating, brutal, and UNFAIR games that I have ever played in my life! This may come as a shock to you who aren’t familiar with this game, or for those who have played any of the later games in this series, but all of you who have played this game know EXACTLY what I am talking about, but for those of you that don’t…. strap yourselves in, cause I’m about to tear this thing apart.

From the beginning, the game seems fairly simple, nothing too hard, but nothing too easy either, allowing you to get through the first world pretty swimmingly to give you a good taste as to what you will be in for. However, whenever you reach the second world, Band Land, that’s when everything starts to fall apart. Sure, Band Land itself isn’t too difficult, but you can definitely see a rise in difficulty here that you wouldn’t have expected this early on, with plenty of annoying segments and sections that you need precise reflexes on or else you will get hurt. Upon reaching the third world, Blue Mountains, that’s when all hell breaks loose, with the game taking NO MERCY on you, throwing many different obstacles at you, some of the most precise and bullshit platforming you can imagine, plenty of sections where just one wrong move will cost you a life, and some collectibles that can just FUCK RIGHT OFF with how aggravating they can be to get. The boss fights don’t get that much better either, especially with this one right here, which took me way too long to beat just because of how aggravating and unpredictable it is in general.

But hey, that in itself doesn’t seem so bad, right? It’s a hard game with plenty of BS, so what? I’ve played through many of these before and turned out fine, so what’s the big deal? Oh, I’ll tell you what’s the big deal: you have LIMITED continues. From the start of the game, you only get a couple of lives, and whenever you lose them all, you have to use five of your continues. That in itself doesn’t sound so bad, as plenty of games before that worked that way too, but what the problem is is that this game is actively making sure that you fail, with every single obstacle, enemy, and hazard that you come across on your journey far enough in meaning to get you killed in some bullshit way or another. That means that you will lose all of your lives and continues, meaning that you have to start the whole game over again. Sure, there are codes you can use to get around that, but FUCK THAT SHIT! Why should I have to use a code in order to actually feel safe and comfortable when playing through a video game?! It should be like that from the beginning!

And if that wasn’t bad enough, having to go through all of the bullshit challenges in this game, dying over and over again, and needing to restart the game because you lost all of your continues, there is one final nail in the coffin that seals this game’s fate in my eyes: you HAVE to 100% it. In order to reach the final area of the game, the Candy Chateau, you have to free all of the Electoons from the cages throughout all of the levels, meaning that you physically cannot beat the game without 100%ing it. That alone takes the game’s already high difficulty and ramps it up by 10. Sure, there are plenty of Electoons that can be rescued pretty easily, especially in the first world of the game, but most of the other ones are ridiculously hard to get, all because of the game’s tendency for putting in bullshit level design and enemies to screw you up, making you feel like you went through Hell and back just trying to rescue these damn things, all in the process to just beat the game. Not to mention, I HATE this trope in games, wherever you are playing along, just having a good time, and then the game tells you you can’t beat it unless you get everything. Some manage to handle this trope better then others, but if the game deliberately tells you you have to get all of the previously-optional collectibles in order to actually beat it, that is when it ends up on my shit list.

Now, you may be wondering, how did any of this happen? Was the game just deliberately designed to be as frustrating as humanly possible, or was there a point to all of this that can somehow make it all the more understandable? Well, surprisingly, it’s actually the latter. You see, during development of a video game, there is this wonderful little thing called “beta testing”, where beta testers will interact with everything that possibly can in a video game, not only to point out certain glitches or bugs that need to be worked out, but to also suggest altering things around in order to make the playing experience that much better for the consumer. Rayman on the PS1, unsurprisingly, had ZERO beta testing done on it whatsoever, or at least, it was very little compared to how much is usually given to a game. That alone completely clears up why this game is such a pain in the ass: they went ahead and programmed an entire game full with plenty of bullshit moments and challenges, and nobody tested it enough in order to tell the designers to go back and make it more manageable to play through. I would be mad about that, but after all of the ranting I have just done, I gotta say…… that’s just fucking depressing.

Overall, despite how wonderful the visuals, music, and ideas in this game truly are, I personally cannot stand the original Rayman on PS1, with it being so blatantly difficult and unfair to the point where I never wanna touch it again in my entire life. Sure, I did give it a 2.5 out of 5, which is pretty generous for how I really feel about it, but it is just because those visuals and bits of music are just THAT wonderful, to the point where it is so much more pleasant to watch and listen to rather then it is to play. I would recommend this game ONLY for those who are massive Rayman fans, ones who just need to consume everything they can that the franchise has to offer, but for everyone else, I wouldn’t touching this game with a ten-foot pole…………… however, what I will tell you to do is to play Rayman Redemption instead. This is a fan-made reimagining of the original game by Ryemanni, and while I myself haven’t played it cause my scars haven’t healed yet, apparently it completely revitalizes the game, fixing all of the issues the original game had, and actually making it fun and not making you wanna pull your hair out! I do definitely wanna give it a shot at some point just to see how it really is, but from what I heard, it is definitely worth it, so go give them some love. Until then though, I will just move on with my life, wondering what the hell Rayman is supposed to be, and how he can function without any limbs whatsoever, as I always do…..

Game #610

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!"

Retro Yearly List #21 [1995: Rayman]

So this is where Dark Souls took inspiration from..

The first Rayman title can be described as "missed opportunity". In an alternate reality I could see this ended up as one of the greatest platformers ever, but something happened here.

Let's talk about what is right here, first of all, the graphics are beautiful, one of the best 2D arts I've seen in games, stages are colorful and alive, the design is pretty unique and unexpected, with a mix of different objects placed in a way that defies gravity, creating a crazy but beautiful environment.

The music is awesome, every track here has depth and soul, I could listen the OST for hours while doing some daily activities, in some sections there's no such music, but it's intentional, and fits the levels. Only missing point is that they do not have smoothy loops, so the songs will just stop and start from beginning again.

Game's lore is alright, nothing very far from platformers' usual, did not expect that much tho. Just want to point out Mr Dark's design, which is great, did not feel the same for some other bosses, that I found just.. ok.
Their battles are fun and diverse though, with exception of the crab and the final boss battles, with the last one being pretty underwhelming.

The controls are almost perfect, with a few weak points that caused me some trouble, like the helicopter sections, which are not that good, and others that seem to be intentionally messed up, which brings us to the next and focal point here.

So if everything seems to be nice, what is the problem? The game is. Idk what he heck they were trying to do here, but what seemed was some kind of Kaizo Mario or I Wanna be the Guy, game is hard as hell, levels design were made to make you suffer in pain and frustration, which positioning that requires almost pixel perfect movement, like a TAS gameplay, enemies popping out of nowhere from every direction, requiring inhuman reflexes, you're not supposed to beat this the first time, neither the fifth.
Also, game has NO life bar, finite lives and continues, and not being enough, to achieve the last stage and final boss you HAVE to do 100%, collecting cages spread among the hellish stages, where exploration attempts are punished instead of instigated, good job folks.
It seems there is now a fan made version correcting the bullshit from this game, I may check it out in the future.

I'm glad I have no problem in using save states and cheats, because I saved some years of my mental health here. Hope they've changed the direction from here on the series.

Other than the ridiculous difficulty, game is still gorgeous like no other. It's a piece of art, placed in a cursed and haunted museum fulfilled of grotesque creatures.

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.

The game that once introduced me to the Rayman franchise as a whole, and thus it has a special place in my heart. The game's visuals are mind-blowing for the time it released, and the soundtrack is amazing as well (Band Land is a highlight, of course). Controlling Rayman feels very responsive and satisfying in general, specially when you get all of Betilla's abilities. However, the game gets dragged down when it comes to the sharp curve in difficulty, asking the player for extremely precise maneuvers in many instances of the latter worlds, which would frustrate/confuse non-experienced players. Hell, even I who have played this game numerous times still struggle from the second world levels onwards. Not to mention that in order to complete the game, you have to break open EVERY SINGLE CAGE IN EVERY SINGLE LEVEL for the final boss level to be unlocked (essentially an obligatory 100% completion), which would be fine if it wasn't because you have to trigger specific secrets for a lot of them to appear, so good luck with that lol

Overall, it's a good game that is a visual, auditive and controllable treat, but that may not be for everyone due to it's previously mentioned, glaring difficulty issue.

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.