Rayman 1 (AKA Rayman Forever)

We've waited entirely too long to see Rayman in a game again.

I still have UPlay stuff to get through… I’ve been thinking about playing more Ubisoft games for the blog, seeing as I have so many waiting on that platform alone… I mean, I own 17 games there and only played/reviewed two of them. I’m long overdue for a themed month. Well, the title gives it away: I’m gonna review some Rayman in the coming weeks. Besides, with the announcement of Rayman being added in 2023 to the Sparks of Hope DLC for Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle, I feel this series of reviews is justified.

Nice, I'm already 25% through!

When I said I got all of my UPlay games for free, I lied actually; I bought three games, all three of which were pretty inexpensive. Those are Rayman 1 (also known as Rayman Forever), Rayman 2: The Great Escape, and Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc. For all the time I spent talking about the Rabbids (both the game and all associated media), it’s a shame I spent so little time discussing their parent franchise.

The three games I mentioned are the genesis of Rayman, his humble beginnings as a new platforming mascot from Ubisoft. His first outing in 2D, followed by two adventures in 3D. We know what happened next: Some spin-offs and secondary adventures (Hi, Hoodlum’s Revenge), a long series of mini-game titles (hi, Rabbids), and finally a few highly-stylized titles (hi, Origins and Legends; by the way, if the month is going well, I might tack Legends to the list as I have that one on Steam).

So, today’s game is the one that started it all. Rayman 1, also nicknamed Rayman Forever on Ubisoft’s platform, originally released on September 1st in North America for the PlayStation. The version I’m playing was released on UPlay in 2016, and includes Rayman Designer, a level maker, as well as Rayman by His Fans, a pack of 40 fan-made levels. But what is Rayman 1 like? Oh, you’ll see…

First steps

Alright, so upon starting the game, I get a DOS box screen. This game isn’t feeling old at all! I had to tweak the options for the best experience; I personally settled on using the arrows to move, Z to jump, X to attack and C to taunt. Oh, and the screen?

This small! This isn’t a goddamn GBA, this is a monitor! I feel like playing it in full screen wouldn’t be much better, though! And Rayman is kinda big on the screen, too; Look at the image right underneath, I feel like I don’t see enough of what’s coming up. Would it have hurt to size things so that we had a better view within a level? Is that too much to ask?

It does look pretty, though.

Considering the difficulty, I could’ve used that bit of extra help! One of the first things I discovered while researching this game is that Rayman 1 allegedly wasn’t playtested, which means that it wasn’t played by someone outside of the development team in an attempt to be balanced or fairer. As a result, the platform game’s difficulty is through the roof, starting somewhat peaceful and easy in the first two or three levels, only to pick up the pace and become ridiculously hard for no good reason from the second world, Band Land, onwards. All of these go-to hard platformers that people talk about: Super Meat Boy, Kaizo Mario, I Wanna Be The Guy? Rayman may well be the father these games never knew they had. Dude’s gotten around.

Gonna charge this one punch just for the little
crap on the mini-platform there. (Did I mention
that water is instant death in this game?)

This is an accurate example of a video game where, to progress, you must learn where the traps are (by falling into them), how to avoid them (by trying over and over, and losing all of your lives in the process), and what you need to do to get through (generally involving strategies that speedrunners would invoke later in the history of gaming). Sink over and over, until you swim!

Wait, where were the first steps in that?

First steps (for real this time)

This story, as I learned through the Rayman wiki (as the intro movie describing this is only available in the PS1 version), begins in the valley of the Glade of Dreams. The mystical Great Protoon, source of harmony in the world, is stolen by the unsubtly-named Mr Dark, who also defeats its guardian, Betilla the Fairy. Electoons, tiny creatures living around the Protoon, are captured and caged across the land. Thus the world asks Rayman for help.

When "punching", "running" and "grabbing to ledges"
are considered powers...

"Skill learned! 'Holding on for dear life'".

What can Rayman do, at first? Well, he jumps. He taunts. That’s it. Yeah, he’ll mock the opponent. In-game use of that move? Almost nonexistent. Our protagonist thus starts out defenseless, until he meets Betilla who grants him the amazing power of… punching. Oh, it does come with a bonus: You can charge a punch and Rayman’s attack will both be stronger and reach further ahead. Betilla will appear occasionally to teach a new move to Rayman, such as holding to ledges, grabbing items from afar, or his famous helicopter hair. Past the world of the Blue Mountains, thanks to Betilla, Rayman ditches the taunt for the ability to run, also letting him jump further.

In all levels, you can collect orbs known as Blue Tings, which are like coins in Mario; gather 100, and you get an extra life. However, here it’s poorly implemented: When you lose a life, your number of Tings resets to 0. Add to this the difficulty and the fact that Tings aren’t actually that common, and you’ll be lucky if you ever get an extra life that way outside of grinding for them in the early, easy levels. You also need to pay 10 Tings to another character, the Magician, in order to enter bonus stages.

Tings: There's not nearly enough of them.

I dread what's awaiting past the checkpoint.

Levels are split into segments. Would be fine, except it makes the levels quite lengthy. Hell, some segments are pretty long on their own. Thankfully, the game is somewhat lenient: If you lose a life, you come back at the beginning of the current segment or, if you encountered one, you reappear at the last checkpoint. (Those are represented by a photographer who takes a picture of Rayman behind those “hunk guy at the beach” cardboards. Say what you want about the game, it’s at least inventive. Thank God for checkpoints, but the photographer's presence means you won't like what's coming up.)

Good thing we can crawl, too!

Speaking of, Rayman always starts with a Life Counter at 3, with the 0 included. If all 4 lives are lost, you get to a Game Over/Continue screen. You have 9 Continues (counting the starting one, that’s 10), so that's 40 lives total before bonus ones found in levels or obtained from Tings. Even if you lose all of your lives and select Continue, Rayman will resume at the start of the level segment he last died in. You can only save your game on spots on the world map that are dedicated to this; you can save between levels at any time as soon as you unlock one (by beating the first level), so it’s not that bad. What IS bad, though? The save point keeps track of both your number of current lives AND continues, so if you’re in a tough spot with only a few lives left and no continues…

There are power-ups in the game: The Speed Fist makes Rayman attack faster, while the Golden Fist makes him deal double damage to enemies. Additionally, he can find floating P circles of two types: One will heal his HP back to max, the other will boost his maximum HP to 5. All powerups last until Rayman loses a life.

You can almost feel the spike down Rayman's back.

You create flowers like the one on the right
in order to move up and avoid the current.

Several levels contain pretty unique sequences; auto-scrolling levels are common, and so are parts that play with mechanics. As an example, in an early level, Rayman gets a magic seed that he can plant with the taunt button to instantly create flowers as platforms, which he uses to climb up a stage and escape rising water currents. In another, he gets a firefly that lights up a pitch-black cave, but he has to keep it in his fist; so he can light the way and see what’s coming by punching forward.

Oh, and if you want to further torture yourself with an extra quest, you can go around and look for the caged Electoons; 6 cages are hidden in each level. The catch? Most cages will appear only if you fulfill their requirement, some of which are fairly obtuse or tricky to do. Oh, and breaking all 102 cages is mandatory to open the final level, Mr Dark’s Dare. But there’s only so much I am willing to tolerate in regards to difficulty, I’m struggling badly enough to just get to the end, no way I’m doing the 100% completion side-quest on top of that.

Will say this, though: Along with how pretty the
whole game looks, enemies and bosses are very
well-animated and cool to watch.

Thank God for cheats.

Fuck this, I’m cheating

Yeah, once the game started getting unbearably tough for no good god damn reason, this became my mindset. As soon as I enter a level? I type “raypoint” to get the max number of HP from the get-go. About to get a Game Over and spend a Continue? Just a little “raylives” and I’m back to 99! I very quickly grew into “Fuck it” mode once I got fed up.

Rayman is having entirely too much fun
being chased around by a goddamn golem.

Spikes. Spikes absolutely everywhere.

This is why I liked Rayman Origins so much in comparison; a Game Over was basically impossible, you had infinite lives. No stress about being on your last legs, you knew you could keep going and there was no potential threat of having to start the entire thing over or with too few options to actually progress. Origins is by no means an easy game, for the record; but it knows it’s hard and won’t add that extra stress onto players, and as a result is more forgiving than its protagonist's first outing. Really, what’s the difference between a game where lives are already infinite versus a game where you basically HAVE to cheat hundreds of lives into your save file if you want to get to the end in a reasonable amount of time?

Keep in mind that I think of cheat codes as something that do give players a lot of help with a game, but not something that’s meant to be the “intended way” to play, so to speak, hence why I hate that it feels like the game would be nigh-impossible without them. In order to have even the slightest fighting chance, you need to learn expert gaming strategies like landing at the very edges of platforms, needing pixel-perfect precision for a lot of actions and movements)...

Yikes! Who knew art could be so dangerous!

Rayman, you must have lost over 300 lives so
far, how can you be laughing this much?

Story-wise, past the Dream Forest, we get to Band Land, a world led by Mr Sax, who uses music to fight. Beyond that point are the Blue Mountains, where Mr Stone resides. Then, we walk into Picture City, a very artistic sector of the Glade of Dreams led by Space Mama, an opera singer. Once Rayman is past the City, Mr Dark captures Betilla; so Rayman has to go through the Caves of Skops and defeat Mr Skops at the end. Then it’s the Candy Ch-

Wait, that's right. To unlock the Candy Château, you have to break all of the Electoon cages in the prior levels, 6 per level for all 17 levels. Considering how grueling and ball-busting the prior levels were? Hell no. I neither have the time, patience, will nor desire to go through this again for 100% completion. Is there a code to unlock all the cages instantly?

Oh, there’s a code alright! …It’s only in the GBA version, and I’m playing the PC version, so there's no way to do that here.

I give up. This game has beaten me. Know when to fold ‘em.

And it’s sad because… (final thoughts)

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
(For the record, this happened solely because I
couldn't catch one ring I had to grip in order
to swing onto the platform.)

Obviously, you already know exactly what my biggest critique of the game will be: Difficulty, difficulty, difficulty. There’s no difficulty curve here, only a very steep and sudden rise and then it’s pretty much tough all throughout. It’s constructed where you can’t always know what the traps are until you fall into them, later levels are littered with instant death pitfalls, spikes either cost one life point or kill you instantly, you never know until you hit them, and a single misstep will spell your doom. The programming can’t seem to figure out whether Rayman has mercy invincibility after taking a hit or not, as it frequently won’t activate even when it should. Unless you cheat extra lives and hit points, a large number of segments are so punishing that you can easily waste 40 lives in one place. If not more. The game wasn’t playtested by people outside of a dev team made of hardcore gamers and it shows, because they would have otherwise likely been told to tone it down a fair bit.

Oh hey, I made a cage appear!
Still need to find another 90 or so.

And that’s a shame, really, because everything else is really great. The sprite art is gorgeous; the environments are lush and vibrant, the characters are very detailed, and it’s overall a treat to the eyes. The music? Also quite great; each area has its own list of tracks that it cycles through, with a different feel in each world (as an example, Picture City, befitting its artistic nature, has music that sounds like classical compositions). The story? Passable, but it’s not exactly meant to be the focus here, so I can accept an excuse plot. That said, the details we learn about Rayman’s world are enjoyable.

The firely fist, at the beginning of Eat At Joe's,
hands down the most infuriating level of all of
them. Fuck that stage.

In spite of the difficulty, my favorite aspect of Rayman 1 is its evolving gameplay. Rayman gains new abilities as he goes through the levels, which has two upsides: You feel you get better as you progress, and you can revisit previous levels once you’ve gained new abilities in order to seek out more Electoon cages. In hindsight, a lot of these skills should not be unlockable, like running or throwing the fist. Also in hindsight, an issue is that the game then assumes you’re instantly an expert at using every single one of these skills, hence putting you into stages where mastery is required.

Several levels also shake the formula, by including new, temporary skills; I already mentioned the magic seed and the firefly fist, but another temporary power-ups lets Rayman fly with his helicopter hair rather than just glide. Levels are designed with an event system; if Rayman passes at precise points, events will trigger, be it the appearance of platforms, enemies, a hidden Electoon cage, and so on. Part of the challenge when hunting the Electoon cages to unlock the Candy Château is to figure out how to trigger them into existence. The Magician’s bonus levels are safe but nonetheless tough platforming challenges in which you must collect all the Tings in a set amount of time.

Another damn near impossible section of the
goddamn Eat At Joe's stage. Seriously, that
level was fucking insane. Just the worst among
a collection of the craziest, unbearably tough,
challenges in the history of gaming.

Skops was one of the rare instances where the boss battle was
easy, but the scene before the battle was the tough part.
Fucking hated that bit. (By the way, have you kept track of
the number of lives in all my screenshots?)

Boss-wise, most battles are very creative, if very tough; every boss is encountered a first time outside of a battle, usually in a platforming section or as a mini-boss, before being fought as a proper boss. These fights can get very creative; as an example, to damage Mr Stone, you have to punch a totem pole into him. All the bosses gain new tricks after you’ve damaged them, so battles stay fresh (if, as usual, punishingly hard). Also of note, bosses and their pre-fight sequences are removed from their respective levels and cannot be redone after they're beaten.

So, good game? Yeah. But if you try it and rage quit from the sheer difficulty, you can’t say I haven’t warned you. But by all means, if what you’re seeking is a challenge – do try it out. Be prepared, though, as it will have your ass handed to you several hundred times. On the plus side, if that’s exactly what you want, the UPlay version includes the level designer and Rayman by his Fans.

Rayman 1 (AKA Forever) is available on UPlay for 13.49$ CAD, currently down to 3.37$.