Rayman Legends

After going through the three games that were the genesis of Rayman, it’s almost weird to skip forward to what is, so far, his last game. Ubisoft’s higher-ups have stated that their interest now lied in their copy-paste open-world franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry… y’know, the adult stuff. I sincerely hope that Rayman’s appearance in next year’s DLCs for Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle sparks new interest in the character. In the meantime, we have this title, which I really hope wasn’t the swan song.

A Wii U and a PC are very different beasts when it
comes to controls. There's one less screen, for one.

Rayman Legends was released on August 30th, 2013 in Europe and September 3rd in the United States for most versions (Windows, PS3, Wii U, Xbox 360, Vita), with later releases for PS4 and Xbox One in 2014, and Nintendo Switch in 2017. Notably, the game was originally thought as a Wii U exclusive, but a fear following low sales of other recent titles by the studio made Ubisoft yet again overdose with ports for every console available, forcing some Wii U-based gameplay mechanics to be adapted for other consoles. Thus, one critique of Rayman Legends when compared to its predecessor Origins is that gameplay has barely changed, with only the Wii U-based mechanics being proper new stuff. But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, shall we?

A Legend Awakens

Polokus, you look different from Rayman 2. ...New haircut?

Following the events of Origins, Rayman slept alongside Globox and the Teensies of the Glade of Dreams for a hundred years. …Geez, when I said they were heavy sleepers, I didn’t mean it that bad! This century gave Polokus plenty of time to have nightmares, and those manifested into the world, to the point of waging war at each other. They even captured the princesses of various overtaken kingdoms.

Quintuple trouble.

That's not all. The Magician, a Teensy who fanboys on Mr. Dark and who was the villain of Rayman Origins, is back. He has split himself into five, and those are overlooking the events, causing mischief, and – a franchise-wide tradition – captured Teensies in cages and scattered them across the Glade. Murfy awakens Rayman (...see what I did there with the subtitle?) and tells him the news. Time to go adventuring again!

...That’s it. Not like we need a deep story for a 2D platformer, this is enough. The hub of this game is an art gallery; on the right are the main worlds of the game, all five of them + a bonus one. On the left are all of the extras. The stages of the new worlds are paintings locked behind Teensy requirements past the first, so you need to focus on finding Teensy cages.

Going through worlds by entering paintings… Gee, where have I heard of that before…

One Teensy freed! ...699 more to go. @.@

The major changes: Lums have gone from being pieces of the Heart of the World to being abso-frickin-lutely everywhere. Rare and tricky to find in Rayman 2, here, you can collect hundreds at a time. The main stages also have ten Teensies hidden, some in cages, some tied to poles; eight can be found in the level proper, while two, a King and Queen, must be sought through hidden doors and saved at the end of little challenges. Other types of stages contain three. The total? 700 Teensies to find. Holy Hell, next time ask me to find a thousand, that’ll be a pretty, round number!

At the end of every stage, your score of collected Lums is tallied, and you get rewards. In regular stages, you can gather over 600 Lums, but it can be 100 or 300 in other types of stages. You can get a Bronze trophy, a Silver Trophy, a Lottery Ticket (in the form of a scratch card), and a Gold Trophy. The Gold Trophy is obtained by reaching the highest requirement for the level (the previously-mentioned 600, 100 or 300). You can obtain a second set of trophies for every stage, by freeing all of that stage’s Teensies. Oh, and by getting all trophies in a world, you get a Platinum trophy for that world’s painting. Trophies give points that form the basis of Experience towards your Awesomeness Level. The only real purpose of the Awesomeness Level was to unlock harder doors in the Challenges Mode.

Playing Murphy and Rayman all at once can be
a headache, but it's necessary to progress (and,
thankfully, it rarely requires keeping track of
both at the same time).

Rayman retains most of his abilities. However, a new ally has joined: Murphy is tagging along! “See you in Rayman 4!” He said, back in Rayman 3; well, that’s the closest we’re gonna get. In special dedicated levels (we can tell because he’s on that level’s painting), Murphy will come to assist the heroes on their quest. At the press of a key, he can cut ropes, raise or lower platforms, smack the eyes of large enemies or tickle others to distract them, leaving them open for an attack.

Murphy’s controls were designed for use with the touch pad of the Wii U, so they had to be adapted to be used on the other platforms as well. At times, you’ll also control Murphy rotating an item, and for this you’ll need two additional keys for left and right; this can make controlling your character trickier during those segments, but it makes for very inventive (and occasionally puzzle-based) gameplay.

Five worlds at war

This castle is gonna burn down once we're through, oh crap.

I recall, back in my review of Rayman Origins, how I loved that several worlds of the game were combinations of game world themes. Legends continues the trend, featuring new, peculiar combos. Today’s five worlds are:

Toad Story, are you a plant world or a high-flying
world? Make up your mind dammit!

-Teensies in Trouble mixes the aesthetic of fairy tales, featuring a town, a castle and an enchanted forest;

-Toad Story is based on Jack and the Beanstalk, so it’s a combination of a world high in the skies, a plant world and a giant castle;

-Fiesta de Los Muertos combines the Land of the Remembered from Mexican mythology with a world made of food;

-20,000 Lums Under the Sea is a underwater world, but it takes a detour into a giant submarine that resembles a mad scientist’s lair;

Luchadors, music-playing skeletons, and a whole
lot of cake. Yep, that checks out.

-Olympus Maximus is Greek mythology merged with mountains and volcanoes;

-The last, Living Dead Party, requires 400 rescued Teensies to unlock out of 700, and is composed only of musical stage: A new one, as well as “8-bit” versions of all six. Songs are remixed in chiptune, while the game messes with your view by employing camera tricks such as fish-eye lenses, screen static, pixelization or the like.

Every stage in the worlds of Legends (barring bosses and musical stages) comes with a special Invasion version, in which the enemies from one of the other four worlds “invade” the one you’re currently in. During an Invasion stage, you have to rescue three Teensies from rockets set to blast off at 40, 50 and 60 seconds; it’s a race against the clock to reach the little guys before the 40-second mark. Timing can be very tight, there are no checkpoints, and Rayman has only one Hit Point.

The bosses in Legends are goddamn impressive.
This is a freaking robotic sea serpent. With a laser.

After beating all the bosses, new Invasion stages appear featuring Dark Rayman. He will mimic every single move you make, and if you touch him, you die, similarly to his sole appearance in the Candy Chateau of Rayman 1. The challenge is to evade the hazards and kill the enemies while never coming into contact with the dark half.

In every world, there’s a stage that involves hunting down a copy of the Magician just as he’s kidnapped a Teensy woman. And, of course, after every boss, we encounter the Magician, and punch his ass into the stratosphere, where he (and the other versions of himself) will be tortured by demons on a Moon at the butt of a pig-shaped constellation.

Tons of extras, and more

I recognize this place! It's the Desert
of the Didgeridoos!

Some worlds of Rayman Origins also make a return, with 40 stages unlockable through scratch tickets. So many of them, it’s almost the entirety of the game – why bother purchasing Origins, when such a big chunk of it can be found in Legends? Of note however, the Back to Origins levels can only be obtained through scratch tickets.

Every scratch ticket is a winner?
Man, this really IS a world of dreams.

Thanks to the tickets, you can also win extra Lums, extra Teensies, and Creatures. There are 60 of the latter, and their only use is to provide Rayman with free Lums and coins. They congregate in the Creatures gallery, in six groups of ten members: A King, Queen and eight underlings. The Lums provided by these Creatures return every day, so you can come back to that source and deplete it, adding a couple hundreds or thousands to your Lum count for no effort.

Some of these look better than several new
Pokémon from Scarlet/Violet, don't @ me.

*checks number on the top left* *checks the numbers on the
paintings* *has almost finished the game already* Well,
I'm nowhere close to unlocking those guys, am I?

Lums in this game are used to unlock new characters. Five are available from the start, as per the multiplayer feature, up to 4 playersreaching (not by paying) a certain Lum threshold. The most expensive hero i can go through the levels together (and bash/slap each other on the way to the end). Then there’s the 10 Princesses to be rescued. Following that, there are 17 more that can be unlocked by s obtained by reaching a MILLION Lums. A secret final character is found after freeing all of the 700 Teensies, bringing the total of playable characters to 33. If this feels like a lot, don’t worry; every available character is either a Rayman, a Globox, a Princess or a Teensy. That’s it. So much for variety.

Ask my friends? None of them has the game...

To complement the multiplayer adventure, a mini-mode is available, called Kung Foot. It’s soccer but you have to smash the ball into the opposing net. And smash the others, too, while you’re at it. Fun? Sure, but it feels lackluster to have only one multiplayer mini-game when the remainder of the game can be entirely played with friends.

Who needs challenges anyway? The base
game is challenging enough already!

Oh, there’s also a Challenges section, where you could connect to Ubisoft’s services in order to access brand-new levels, challenges, play against or compare scores with friends, with a good amount of achievements tied to this, as well as the final bits of Experience needed to reach the eleventh and final level of Awesomeness, as the score from the adventure's Cups isn't enough to reach it. I say “could”, because that service was terminated and the mode is no longer available. Gee, hope you weren’t hoping to reach the last Level of Awesomeness.

Of note, though there are several new nightmares to fight in this story, none of them are affiliated – and depending on the number of Teensies you’ve freed, you can beat the bosses in any order you’d like. You could challenge the bosses in any order and watch the credits after you’ve beaten the last of them. Guess that’s all there is to say, really.

Final thoughts

The boss of Olympus Maximus looks like it
walked right out of a Kirby game... so, from
a different Dream Land, really.

Damn, this is great. A real shame that the sales numbers discouraged Ubisoft from making more Rayman titles, because I’d take more games like this in a heartbeat. Even before mentioning the actual gameplay: The game is freaking gorgeous to look at, every level is beautiful, brimming with personality and detail. The cartoony look of Origins was swapped for an oil painting style, 2D with 3D lighting thanks to the (then-)latest UbiArt engine, giving it a special feel. The music is similarly great, perfect in every stage where it appears. And then musical stages, need I say more? Have some examples.

Screenshot taken from Dragon Slayer, the
fifth musical stage.

The game isn’t lacking in content, either, having a total of 120 levels to get through. 40 regular stages, 30 Invasion versions, 10 Princess Rescues, and the 40 stages that make a comeback from Origins… all with Teensies to save, Cups to earn, Lums to gather, 33 playable characters (even if they're just reskins), creatures to collect, and the whole game playable on your own or with friends.

On to gameplay itself. First the controls themselves: Mostly unchanged from the game just before this one in the franchise, I’d dare say they have been mastered here. The difficulty curve is steady, perfectly so even. The game gets a bit harder from a world to the next, but never to a point that makes anything here feel insurmountable; checkpoints are plentiful, and you can even restart a level or a segment of level at any moment through the pause menu. The Invasion stages are the exception, containing no checkpoints, so they’re a lot more challenging.

If you want to do a 4-player game with everyone
using only the princesses, you can do that too!

I stuck to Rayman for the sake of the review,
but the Princesses are cool to use too! (Even if
they all look basically the same.)

Most Teensies are very easy to find; one can easily reach 500 without breaking a sweat. The last ones, trapped behind tight timing requirements in Invasions or the occasional very well-hidden ones, are a different story. It’s not impossible; it’s long and grueling, but ultimately a fantastic (but optional) test of skill. As for getting a million Lums? There’s no way other than grinding for them, hope you don’t mind. The scratch tickets offering free Lums, Teensies, creatures and Origins paintings are a great idea as well; they’re not very difficult to obtain, and the rewards are worth it.

Of the four Rayman games I’ve played for this series of articles, this is my favorite. 2 is a close second, but Legends wins. Definitely a recommendation, if you like the franchise or are looking for a memorable 2D platformer, you really should check this one out. That’s it for now! Hopefully I can post more articles before the end of the year, but I’ll see in due time. See you soon.

Keep on rockin', Rayman.
Or at least, come back to rockin', Rayman.