Rayman is an average platformer with a good visuals and sound. It is hampered by four major flaws:
- You have to get every single Electoon cage in order to beat the game
- Continues are finite and can't be replenished, meaning you have to grind lives
- Extra lives do not respawn, making live-grinding incredibly tedious
- The enemies all suck
If only one of these points were present in the game, it wouldn't be so bad, but all 3 of them compound together to make the game a lot more of a chore.
At the beginning of the game, you start with 5 alarm clocks. When you lose all your lives, you have the option of using an alarm clock to continue with a measly 3 lives.. I assumed that alarm clocks would replenish after you turn off the day. Failing that, I figured maybe you could get more alarm clocks hidden throughout levels; I was wrong. In my playthrough, I used all the clocks about 15% into the game, and afterwards I had to rely only on lives. It really makes me wonder why this system was even put into place. The function of the alarm clock is almost identical to having 3 lives, why did they choose to have limited continues instead of just starting the game with +15 lives?
Farming lives is awful. The most efficient way I found was to replay the 2nd level, Anguish Lagoon, which yields 86 orbs - so you have to play the level a full 7 times to get 6 lives... hardly efficient. In Donkey Kong Country 2, there was a level that has a +2 lives balloon hidden at the very start of the level. In that game, you could farm approximately 1 life every 5 seconds. In Rayman, it's closer to 1 life every 2 minutes (being generous). Not only is life-grinding in Rayman 24 times less efficient, but Rayman is a much harder game, which means you need to grind lives much much more.
In DKC, your life counter reset when you turned the game off, and you couldn't save until you had found the save station in that world - this means that it was risky to venture into a new world with few lives. While not everyone likes this, I feel it creates a sense of urgency; you have to tread through unknown territory and find a safe spot before your supplies run out. Rayman is the complete opposite of this because you can save between any level, and your lives persist between sittings. This means that as soon as you get all the power-ups in the game, you should sit down in Anguish Lagoon, take a few hours to grind to 99 lives, and hope that it lasts you till the end of the game.
Compare all this to Super Mario World, where life-grinding was not only efficient, but actually fun. Instead of making it a chore, they left you to come up with fun, inventive ways to gain extra lives efficiently - whether you wanted to wanted to replay the goal star minigame, or try to jump on 30 koopas without touching the ground. In SMW this is fun. In Rayman, it's slow, boring, and easily accounted for half my play time.
The enemies in Rayman range from dull to challenging, to annoying, to making you want to break the controller. One of the only enemies I liked was the golem who throws boulders at you: I died a lot to him, but it was always my mistake, and my timing was always a bit better than the last. The worst enemies are the bees and the hunters, primarily because it takes a different amount of hits to kill them each time. I'm not sure if it's random, or if it's based on their hitbox or animation (maybe they're more vulnerable after shooting, or only in the head). Some times I killed a hunter in 1 hit, other times it took me 7 hits. I looked closely to see what I was doing wrong, but I didn't reach any conclusion. Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention, but I feel like I put more thought in it than most players.
Now that that's out of the way, there are a good deal of things I enjoyed in this game:
- Difficulty
- Music
- Graphics
- Level design
- Boss Battles
- Abilities
Rayman is a game that a lot of people played as a kid, but no one beat. I've attempted this game twice before, at ages 8 and 15, but it wasn't until 23 that I managed to actually progress passed the first world. Rayman is hard. Harder than any 2D Mario or Donkey Kong. Harder than Castlevanias 1, 2, or 4, or Contras 1, 2, or 3. It's absurdly hard for a children's game, but nearly the perfect difficulty for someone who gets bored by the New Super Mario Bros games.
The boss battles were especially challenging and fun, with the exception of the final fight against Mr. Dark, which was surprisingly easy and anticlimactic. Most of the other battles took me 10-30 attempts, with each attempt getting slightly further and further.
The level design is surprisingly great. It has just the right amount of gimmicks, and just the right amount of secrets and backtracking. No complaints here.
I don't think punching enemies is quite as fun as jumping on them, but it makes the game stand out so much from other sidescrollers that it's a very welcome change.
Rayman really stands out from the crowd aesthetically. There are levels based on musical instruments as well as painting tools. Instead of having ice as the go-to slippery texture, Rayman uses sliding brass tubes and ink-spilled tiles. Even "generic" environments like forests and caves look crazy due to the bright color palette. If you like Earthworm Jim as much as I do, you'll appreciate the visuals here. The graphics are especially a pleasure since most of the platformers of the time were moving on to 3D. Most of the best sidescrollers are on NES, SNES, and Genesis, so it's always a treat to see fully realized sprite work on a ps1 game. The background and foreground effects are beautiful.
All in all not a bad game, but if it fixed all the nonsense with the lives, it could easily hold its own against some of the better 2D platformers. As it is, most people will discard this game after a few hours.
Also it only reads from memory card port 1, the magician is useless, and the ending sucks.