Was it Good? - Rayman 1

[Music] hi folks you wanna know what's going on let me tell you the story of rayman failure frustration and death that's the story of rayman this brutally unforgiving platformer draws you in with its child-friendly visuals and upbeat happy clappy soundtrack then bashes you over the head with a difficulty spike so steep it's basically a straight line rayman is often voted as one of the most difficult playstation 1 games of all time so i guess it's time to go back to 1995 and replay this test of patience all over again i'm going to finish the game critique every level beat every boss and show you every teeth grinding controller breaking last life taking platforming section from hell and then ask rayman juan was it any good ladies and gentlemen welcome i'm josh drive hayes and this is was it any good a series where i replay classic video games voted on by you then break them down and review the mechanics drop a like on the video or sub to the channel for more classic games and as usual a massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep the channel going more on how you can support at the end for now let's begin today we're replaying the deceptively cute cartoon side scroller rayman 1 originally released in 1995 for the atari jaguar sega saturn ms-dos and sony playstation i'll be replaying the playstation 1 version because it's the one i had as a kid all versions are essentially identical but a few of the electron cages are found in different places now i've got a lot of games on this list to get through but it was this tweet which motivated me to do rayman i want to see you suffer through rayman because i remember the game being hard as nails you know what okay and you're not wrong about the difficulty den of geek rates it as the 11th hardest playstation 1 game ever made watch mojo puts it as the second hardest multiple retro gaming subreddits cite rayman as the hardest side-scrolling platformer and venture beat features the article rayman the most punishing game on the ps1 so you know we're in for a good time not only is the game crushingly unforgivingly hard it was also incredibly successful selling 4 million copies globally making it the 21st best-selling ps1 game of all time and the highest selling playstation 1 game in the uk if you had a playstation 1 chances are you bought this game and if you bought this for a child because you thought oh that looks lovely you had no idea the gaming trauma you were about to create the game starts at the cutscene the magician tells us how the land is kept in harmony because the great protune is in balance but then the evil mr dark shows up and starts to kidnap all the smaller electoons and rayman is the only one who can stop him so pretty simple bad dude shows up go and stop him plotline interesting thing the cutscene is actually voiced differently in the european and american versions have a listen hi folks you wanna know what's going on let me tell you the story of rayman in rayman's world nature and people live together in peace hi folks you want to know what's going on let me tell you the story of rayman in rayman's world nature and people live together in peace you start on the overworld map each level is shown by a small gold coin and each level is broken down into smaller stages finish all the stages to unlock the next level now rayman himself can walk left and right jump and stick his tongue out and at the start this is all you can do you do unlock extra moves and powers as you go first level let's just talk about the visuals they are gorgeous you'll visit six worlds and each world has its own distinct style both in looks and in gameplay and we start off in the magical forest the cartoony style the sheer amount of animation and movement is overwhelming from rayman himself to the enemies to the small flourishes like flowers dancing in the breeze or the particle effects around the blue gems you can collect rayman is a beautiful looking game it's stylized extremely well but beneath the pretty exterior lies the heart of a monster so very first level we are shown a brilliant bit of game design to really set the tone from the very start you want to collect these blue orbs because getting 100 gives you an extra life but look there's a red orb just out of reach it looks like you should be able to jump to it but you just about can't but then as you play the level and climb up the vines and loop back around now you can get it the red orb increases your hit points from three to five shown by the little yellow pips to the top left now this very simple loop of collecting the red orb has actually just set up a lot of what rayman is going to be you can often see what you need but the obvious route is wrong you will need to loop back and return later the very first level sets up in less than one minute what will be a major mechanical theme for the rest of the game this is simple but brilliant design the backgrounds along with all of the foreground smaller flourishes use a technique called parallax scrolling to imply depth on a 2d plane you have a foreground layer which moves quickly objects and items that appear closer to the player than rayman is the gameplay level that's where rayman exists and then the multiple layers in the distance all scrolling at different speeds parallax scrolling helps create a feeling of depth and a full world beyond the single layer you are on of forests feeling cluttered and the sky feeling open and free at the start of the first stage of any level there's a big arrow sign walk onto this and you'll be sent back to the map at the end of each stage you'll find the question mark sign walk into it and you'll start the next stage of the level but remember once you start the second or third stage of any level you cannot go back you must now finish the rest of the stage to return to the main map from the second stage onwards we'll start to get enemies now the enemies change depending on the world you're in but there are a few consistent ones these irritating little black blobs touch one and you'll take damage and get knocked back for now just jump over them because you can't fight back in a few levels you'll also find the magician's hat hidden somewhere stands next to it and you'll drop 10 gems into his hand and access a secret level every secret level is different and they are all a time trial to collect a certain number of gems normally if you make a single mistake you won't be able to finish them in time completing them always gets you an extra life but you can only play them once the extra lives however will become absolutely essential sometimes you'll find checkpoints these photographers by an old style beach cut out stand by it you'll have a photo taken and when you die you'll respawn here oh yeah you've got lives we'll have a look at how the game over screen works later because you'll be seeing it a lot and now two or three levels in enemies start spawning when you cross certain thresholds one of the main designs of rayman is you will trigger things like enemies or cages or platforms sometimes they'll appear back at the start of the level sometimes they'll appear right next to you so you are never quite safe and a lot of the later levels as we'll see are trial and error because you never know what you're going to spawn next this is a cage they hold the imprisoned electoons i need to free them because well i can't yet because i don't have an attack so i'll need to return to this level later backtracking and replaying levels are essential parts of this game's design eventually we'll reach the first but tiller the fairy level and we'll get given our first power rayman's iconic punch press square to punch and you'll throw your disembodied hand out hold square and you'll charge up a stronger further reaching punch this stage also introduces us to interactable scenery you can punch these plums off the vine and they'll bounce you can now punch them around and then use them as platforms to jump off they even have basic physics because plums will bounce downhill or float in the water one of the nicest design choices about rayman is how many small situational animations they've added standing right on the edge of a platform gives you this don't fall off animation it doesn't do anything mechanically it's just fun to see and it shows a great deal of care about the character of rayman now we've got the punch we can start breaking cages freeing the electoons adds a happy smiley face to the level's gold coin there are six cages in every level spread across all the stages if you find all six the gold coin icon becomes a big smiley face another nice touch when you stand on a floating plum you'll move in the direction you're facing but you also get this cute little sound effect of a boat motor gently chugging away it's these small touches that really lull you into that false sense of security you're thinking this is going to be fun remember remember when you played the first level of rayman and you thought it was going to be fun oh we all made that mistake in most levels you'll find two types of punch upgrade the sparkly upgrade increases the speed of the punch and the gold increases the strength you actually keep upgrades between stages in a level but if you die and restart you'll lose them some enemies however begin to get wise to your punching tactics and they will duck whenever you charge a punch up toward them and this is the first moment you realize rayman knows what you're going to do and is designed against you the childlike design is hiding the evil intentions of the designers another recurring enemy the hunter fires bullets which pop open to have cartoon hammers held within it's silly but it's also deadly thankfully you can lie flat and the bullets will always pass over you one issue with fighting back however is enemies do have immunity frames you can only hurt this guy when his gun is down if you try to hit him when the gun is up or he's firing a bullet he'll take no damage another lovely early game example of enemies have weak moments and you need to attack at the right time now if you miss a cage in stage one of the level and you've already moved on to stage two tough you can't go back you need to finish the entire level and then start over again there's no backtracking between stages when you finish a level you'll open up more levels or sometimes these level save coins with the icon of the magician's hat being an old game you'll need to save your game every time or write down a password between every single level it is important you do this because you will need them now things are getting a bit more complex you've got swinging plums and you'll start to see some purple flying rings which we can't use yet so make a mental note to come back here when we have the grab and swing power and now for the first boss each world has a main boss the boss's health is shown to the bottom left hurting a boss is always a case of memorizing their attack pattern and getting a punch in when they are vulnerable now the mosquito isn't that hard if you've never played roman you probably still think it's a kids game don't worry you'll find out how wrong you are pretty soon beating a boss has rayman and the boss do a little celebration dance together because we're all good friends here and the game is always happy apart from you know when it's not and now the first of many auto scrolling levels having made up you and the mosquito fly together dodging brambles and enemies avoiding the water and making sure you don't get caught between the scenery and the moving edge of the screen because that will kill you another patilla level we now have the power to hang from ledges so all of those jumps which were just out of reach we can now make them and pull ourselves up from horizontal to vertical the swamps of forgetfulness level has us punch this loin cloth down to tarzan who gives us some magic beans on this level pressing o will plant a flower which you can use as a platform and the moment you do the water begins rising the music switches to this ominous rising coconuty and now it's an anxiety-inducing race against certain death the main problem with this level is no matter how fast you want to go you are limited by the screen scrolling speed so even if you did want to push on and race ahead you can't and when you reach the end a one-up life spawns on the other side of the screen to where you are making you dodge back to get it and more often than not ironically killing you here's a lovely touch punching the plums onto enemies from above has them stick on the enemy's head and now you can jump along them this is combining the movement mechanic because you can now stand on the plums the enemy mechanic because the plums landing on them neutralizes them the punching mechanic because that's the only way to knock the plums down and the interactive scenery mechanic because new roots are now open to you another perfect example of developing multiple systems that all interact together now plums are sometimes hidden off the top edge of the screen behind foreground scenery meaning you're really scouring the levels to find all these hidden cages like how climbing this vine then jumping off and following the gems down spawns a crate rayman is a game about finding invisible trigger points to progress and when we have to start hunting for those points later you'll realize how brutal this game really is bounce all the way down this hill on a plum and head to the next boss level the mosquitoes nest now the platforming starts to get a little bit more challenging we've got red spiky swinging thorns and movement across water now when the plum or the flower platforms are moving along water or through the air you can't control the speed only the direction so you're timing your jumps to land when it's safe and you're dodging vertical columns of piranhas now here's a lovely touch you're dodging the piranhas when crossing the water then later as you climb through the level and backtrack on yourself you're avoiding the same column of piranhas as you jump from platform to platform levels in rayman can be very dense and they use one threat in multiple ways you'll find that the route a level needs you to take often intersect the same threat from multiple different angles more secret levels now you'll find as you progress finding these levels becomes less of a focus for you they're often hidden down dangerous paths and as they get harder to complete you often lose more time than you really gain back here's a nice bit of combat design some enemies are small so your punch attack will go over them and you can only punch while standing but if you lie down while your fist is returning to you it will lower to meet rayman's main body and in doing so can hit shorter enemies this means you have to creep as close to an enemy as you can punch and then time your lie down sometimes rayman just throws a couple of what the hell moments at you like this giant shuffling lip plant which spits out enemies punching it in the body gives you an enemy but punching it on the lips makes it crumple into a pile so you can quickly jump past one-off enemies which look like something out of hr geiger's fever dream up until now every platform has fallen down and this is the first time something moves up and quickly and now i can't trust what i stand on anymore platforms are starting to move quicker and the thorns are becoming much more densely packed and now for another scrolling level except this time we're being chased by an evil mosquito carrying a huge deadly bramble this level is brutal make no mistakes because if you do you'll die and it moves in closer to you so the actual playing space you've got on this screen as it moves is massively reduced and then we fight the next boss the actual evil mosquito much harder than the first with much more mechanics and this boss fight really highlights one of the main weaknesses in rayman's design the hitboxes are not pixel perfect in fact they're not even close rayman's body or the graphics of dangerous things like the thorns have damaging areas hazard areas to you as a player but you don't actually know where they are watch as this giant thorn passes over rayman and the pixels of both rayman and the thorn overlap but you don't take damage part of the difficulty in rayman is knowing exactly what part of any dangerous thing is actually dangerous it's old school games like rayman which inspired fantastic newer games like cuphead except cuphead does bosses far better because it respects the pixel perfect mapping of hazards and your own player sprite and now a tricky little bit of design i've been punching this mosquito every time it flies at me it's got one life left but watch as i go to punch it this is the only time it actually dodges and i need to quickly follow up with another the designers knew this this was the moment they wanted you as a player to realize they knew what you were doing and they were going to design against you rayman is a very confrontational gameplay experience despite looking child friendly it's not designed to be fun it's designed to be brutal beating this boss gets us the next power punching those flying rings lets us connect to them and swing from them welcome to bandland first level bongo hills from now on even the floor isn't stable the metal lines of the musical score are slippy and there's a delay to build up speed and then almost no friction so stopping takes ages and in one of the worst design decisions ever this effect continues when you jump into the air we'll discuss how annoying that is later this is also the first time use of bouncy clouds jump at the apex of the bounce to jump higher and avoid touching the spiky musical notes because like most things in this game they hurt you rayman 1 really excelled in visual design the vertical walls being flutes the floor being drums the color palette shifting away from the vivid greens and purple to the more beige and tan with contrasting shiny chrome every world was unique and distinct and they're all super memorable because the design asked how much can we use and how much can we change to be visually striking but then there are some designs you block out for your own sanity like these lightning shooting eyes when they blink they fire a bolt at you and i didn't remember these because child may clearly wanted to forget but look in the background it's that strange plant from the floor which is a lovely visual link between the end of world one and the start of world two despite being so visually different there are enough call backs and subtle background touches to unify the world of rayman together one of the biggest problems with exploration however is how some drops have hidden platforms and they'll lead to hidden cages but some have death and you don't know which ones until you try and most of the time it's death rayman is a trial and error game and this level is the first time you'll make more errors than successes which given you have limited lives is incredibly frustrating enemies have also been upgraded to be even more annoying this green fly dodges your punches and then jumps over them and then ducks under them and then jumps at you to attack and is generally annoying we are now seeing auto moving platforms with far more hazards around and i am burning through lives far too quickly rayman is a game where you need to memorize the root the timings and it is possible with practice but you don't get much practice with each attempt because the bit where you die is far away from where you start sometimes at the end of the level just before you touch the finished post you'll hear the telltale sound of something spawned so you'll backtrack and look for new platforms and sometimes you'll see cages but have no idea how to reach them either you've missed a secret or they're impossible for now rayman tricks you with its kid-friendly first level this isn't a kids game this is a test rocket maracas they boost you straight up stand on them and then stand to the left or right to guide them then don't get trapped under a platform don't bump into a hazard spike don't panic don't make any mistakes simple now even something as simple as falling down is more complex these spinning things i don't know what these are as a kid i always assumed they were christmas puddings for some reason don't ask me why kids brains make strange connections falling down them while they spin trying to avoid the spikes the game really wanted to push the limits of what platforming games could do to be annoying finishing the level is now your primary goal finding cages are a distant second seeing a cage is great but you've got enough to worry about just surviving the cage hunt can wait until we have all the powers the next few levels take place at night you've got this lovely storm ambience a dark sky with streaks of blue and white lightning unfortunately this means they can put those stupid lightning eyes everywhere and call it thematic this is one of the first times we see a lot of smaller dangers the lightning eyes the little fuzzy enemies the damaging note scenery and they all combine there's no single dangerous thing there are many dangerous things which all chain together meaning one mistake will often knock you into another danger causing a chain of damage secret areas are also getting much harder both to find and complete and it's around now you'll probably stop even trying finishing the level is all that matters and now we ride the christmas puddings through the maze of death imagine if this was the first level imagine setting expectations from the very start imagine not tricking players into a false sense of whimsy before you start viciously ripping lives away from them how about a giant unkillable lightning enemy with maces for hands which shoots balls of lightning at you whenever he slams them down also he hits you when you're standing in the supposed safe zone above him some cloud platforms are on timers but when you first see them they're always there so you'll jump thinking they're permanent then they disappear when you're about to land on them because they've been timed to do exactly that and then you die and then you know the game hates you oh one new advantage the grab the rings and swing power also lets you grab the one up trophies so getting extra lives is now a little bit easier which is good because you'll need them watch this you get the item because you need it and doing so triggers more hazards to appear because every advantage must be accompanied with a disadvantage nothing is just a good decision anymore it's always the balance of a benefit and a setback while playing i found this review it is a very poor design choice to only grant the player the ability to attack two levels in you know what i completely disagree rayman is a giant challenge and every move in your arsenal is vital to surviving it and by granting you abilities slowly they are forcing you to become comfortable with the basics before making it more complex and with the first level being purely platforming you have everything you need to pass that first level they are teaching you to move and then with the second level having enemies but you not having an attack they are teaching you that sometimes avoiding combat is a better choice than fighting back then when you do get the punch just like the hanging the swinging the helicopter and the running you know it's an addition but it's not the foundation rayman is a movement based platformer combat is a fallback plan it is very rarely the primary answer on to allegro presto time to build up some serious speed on these slippy surfaces and then slide uphill under the deadly musical notes and now the trumpet bit these trumpets blast you sideways you need to jump at the right time land on the slippy platform and then instantly jump again to reach the next layer of trumpet and you need to do this about six times one after the other as the platforms you're trying to land on gets smaller and smaller and if you miss a jump you fall back down to the start this is tedious it's a case of memorizing split second timings which is slightly different for each jump and when you finally do make it you now know trumpets push you away from themselves so when this trumpet actually pulls you toward it in a straight line into danger and death you're probably gonna feel more than a little bit tricked now we're jumping from tiny slippy platform to tiny slippy platform and you'll notice i'm actually trying to land just to the side so i grab on them as an edge and here's why your movement in the air follows the same rules as your last known position on the ground if you're on a non-slippy surface and you jump rayman will control non-slip in the air meaning perfect side to side movement for accurate landing with instant turning but if you were slipping on the floor when you jump you'll continue to slip in the air meaning floaty hard to control movement and slow sluggish turning the only way to combat this is if you're standing perfectly still on a slippy surface when you jump if you do that your movement in the air will follow the non-slip rules so by grabbing the edge i can guarantee i'll land on the platform still jump up land on it still and jump off it still this level literally starts with a lightning bolt coming straight at you no rest no relaxation just more death and now we've got moving musical note hazards sliding toward us as we climb up a slippy hill and the notes change size so jumping over them is even harder and when we reach the end we see the notes are being fired out of a giant saxophone setting up the next boss another power pressing jump again in the air makes rayman's hair spin like a helicopter for a few short seconds meaning we can now glide with our jumps welcome to gong heights one of the first levels with no floor so falling here means death lovely visual touch the meditating monks holding the bongos when they bring the bongos together by their face the sideways facing eyes of the bongos become the forward-facing eyes of the monk that's a lovely perspective trick the design in rayman is just stellar more auto-scrolling levels but now touching the edge kills you but you need to wait for the screen to move along otherwise you are jumping blindly into the unknown so it's a balance of how close can you get to the moving edge versus how much do you want to risk blindly jumping into an enemy that may be there it is a horrible balance even on a super short level i still missed two cages how i went everywhere onward to mr sax's hullabaloo extra lives are really beginning to matter and now we'll start to find these little fireflies which shrink rayman they're meant to let you get through small gaps and make regular enemies more of a threat but if you shrink down and then loop back round the entire level as small rayman you could access a few hidden areas and find some cages and some lives running into a firefly will again return you to normal size this bit took me ages to figure out as a kid this stupid symbol you need to stand on an edge to make the symbol move that way but when it begins to shake lie down in the center to avoid damage and even if you do this correctly when you get to the end there's still clouds on timers to deal with and you can't jump full height because you'll hit the upper symbol and fall off and die next boss mr sax he fires musical notes at us punch them in the air to shoot them back at him pretty simple stuff but then we move on to an auto stroller where we are dodging bombs and notes and trying to land on the correct platform and then we're trying to avoid bombs that he shoots at us and punch only the notes back honestly this is probably one of the easier bosses out of bandland into the blue mountains twilight gulch no more slippy sliding musical bars now just hard harsh rock and spiky crystals if the dream forest is the tutorial and bandand is the designer's preparing you this is where the game really starts look a drop to your left at the start of the level is it a secret is it certain death who knows you've got to jump to find out enemies now throw exploding rocks but again due to the difficulty telling which exact part of a hazard is the actual dangerous bit avoiding the shrapnel is more art than science also you've got these cute rock dogs jumping around and spinning at you and i almost feel bad for punching them because they make this cute squeaky toy noise when they die but then i remember they are trying to kill me and now i feel much less guilty on all of the mountain levels you'll see these big boulders punching them a few times breaks them not really a problem in normal levels but a bit more annoying when we get to auto scrolling sections and you need to get past them quickly or this bit the rings fall slowly as you swing on them so you need to jump at the apex of the swing to give yourself enough height to make it to the next one and then you go into this cove and then boom boulders spawn behind you trapping you in and making you punch your way out by now we are really pushing the limits of what this movement system can actually do jumping or swinging from cloud to cloud over and under hazards and just grabbing the edges of everything this is the kind of precision you'd normally want a program to do you are changing direction in mid-air jumping before swings reach the top landing on disappearing platforms and they expect a human to do it repeatedly without unlimited lives rayman borders on sadistic on its level design from now on onto the hard rocks punching these giant spiked swinging balls sets them off swinging and now we need to time jumping past them and sometimes spikes just spawn in and fly at you at the very last moment because why not riding clouds used to be fun but now obstacles spawn in right in front of us as we're riding them and you don't maintain momentum in the air so you need to be constantly moving and matching the platform's speed while jumping to make sure you land back on it and don't die i've just completely forgotten about secret levels and stopped caring about finding cages at all i can't be risking blind jumps into what might be secrets and might be cages but is much more likely death i don't have the lives to spare the majority of this level is nothing new it's just refining mechanics we already know and pushing them to even greater limits with a few more randomly spawning enemies which reward quick reactions instead of careful planning because you can't plan for what you don't know is going to happen and now a back and forth trigger setup standing here triggers a live up icon to appear so we fight our way back to the platform and get it and doing that makes a cage appear back at our original location so we fight our way back to the platform again and then we fight past two rock throwers to get to a final trigger cage at the end this level is so trigger-happy i was expecting dom jolly to appear onward to mr stone's peaks a rather strange start to a level a musician seems to have lost his instrument it's trapped under a rock so we punch the rock free a guitar and he gives us a helicopter potion so our helicopter hair will last indefinitely but only for this level pressing jump makes you fly up a little bit more and punching will stop it but if you're quick enough you can catch yourself before you fall down this is another level the lack of any obvious hitboxes really harms the gameplay how close can i get to these spikes is it pixel perfect is it graphical but not harmful i just don't know this bit sees you flying through a spiked path reminds me of the underwater level in turtles in time the problem here is you're constantly tapping left and right to make small adjustments to your movements in the air but when you face right the camera pans to the right shifting the screen and when you face to the left the camera pans to the left shifting the screen back that way so you are constantly whipping the screen backward and forward from one side to the other which makes flying even harder another level i was stuck on for hours as a kid a vertical auto scroller but the platform above you is being pulled down trapping you toward the water you need to hover so your hair cuts through the ropes dragging the plate down you'll even see the ropes fray as they get closer but while you're doing this spikes are flying at you from both sides and from below so you can't always fly where you need to be now another vertical climbing level which is a hell of a lot faster than the original jungle one and you've got multiple climbing sections to complete with enemies spawning in and no checkpoint between them the ground now has snow on it which means we're back to slippy surfaces so i'm trying my best to never ever jump when i'm on the snow because the slip movement continues in the air and sharp rocks are still spawning in the worst of both worlds out of sheer luck i managed to get every single cage in this level and then i die thankfully it actually saves your cage progress between your lives i actually die a lot on this level because you cannot change your direction in the air if jumping off a slippy surface and this makes it incredibly hard to time jumps this even spikes on grabbable ledges so you go to grab the ledge and then you just die the next boss mr stone see the huge pillar in the middle of the arena you've got to punch the top of that to swing down and hit him and he'll throw boulders at you and shoot lasers and drop exploding boulders and when there's finally a stable bouncing boulder jump on it punch the pillar then cross over to the other side as he runs at you and i died so many times because he will shoot lasers that you need to duck under but then he'll drop a boulder on you but you can't move fast enough because you're ducking this boss is completely unfair i died many many times i had to use my password and reload the game multiple times so i didn't run out of lives and remember getting to a boss means replaying the entire level leading up to them so it's incredibly time consuming finally beat this dude the traditional after boss dance sees him replace his head with the gormless smiling pedestal rock and batilla gives us our final power the ability to run holding circle makes you run you can run and jump further and now we are fully powered up so onwards to picture city eraser planes welcome to the art world colorful fun whimsical absolutely unforgivingly crushingly difficult also yes the level starts and you discover ink is even more slippy than snow and you slip straight into death what a fantastic introduction a few new mechanics here the blue sparkly magic erasers are bouncy and always bounce you to maximum height and the spiky rocks are replaced with thumbtacks which are even more awkward hitboxes the cages are now completely out of the way in previous levels you might bump into a cage as you complete the level but now they are hidden down side streets and secret routes it's very rare you'll ever bump into a cage if you just play through the level normally you need to specifically hunt for them from now on the ability to run comes in handy running through this deadly wave of sharpened pencils and the plums from the forest have reappeared in the form of yin yang bouncy balls sometimes with a spike on top the music and visuals are both beautiful as always in fact a lesser known fact about rayman if you put the playstation 1 rayman disc into a regular cd player it will act as a cd and play through all of the music tracks in the game you can try this as we push on we're attacked by a monkey in a space helmet riding a giant spoon i mean i know the game was whimsical but the design does get a bit random from here on out finding cages as a complete chore they are hidden behind long chains of triggered events from spawning platforms to lives to enemies to backtracking it's more luck and you'll start to need a guide if you're looking for them or you're just wasting your time look at this four bouncy balls with spikes on top and one safe ball you need to punch the dangerous ones away while very carefully jumping on the single safe one and this platform which bounces you into thumbtacks directly above you you need to use the helicopter skill to slow your descent to be able to move between the hazards and this does show they've really thought about how to incorporate the skills you have into the dangers they make without that skill you can't complete this so your extra move set isn't just an addition anymore it's now a fundamental part of the solution this however is one of the worst designed puzzles a lightning eye shoots at you while you punch spiked balls out of the way this is one of those puzzles that you figure out quickly but then putting the solution into practice is just tedious it's not difficult it's just repetitive making the player perform the same action over and over again with a really high risk is annoying but making them do it over and over again with low risk that's boring and while a game can be annoying because annoying is still an emotional response and will create a lasting memory a game never wants to be boring because you don't remember the boring bits onto the boss a pirate ship which shoots bombs at you so you need to jump and punch the crow's nest but when you do a shower of bombs drops onto you and then at the same time you've got this dude who throws a gold earring at you but then he also ducks under your punches you need to time them to just before he throws he's animation locked i cannot remember how many times i died on this stage because when you do beat these two the real boss begins space mama this crazy lady shoots knives at you from her rolling pin and then you need to bounce on the knife once they're stuck into the floor to gain the height to punch her but then the knives change pattern and bounce around when you do win there's no dance interesting next level pencil pentathlon first time we need to break a cage by punching and then moving rayman and having the new return path of the punch catch the cage clever design right how do we get out of here the only ball available has a spike on it so that's no help but oh hang on oh you clever developers they've stacked assets on top of each other and hidden a safe non-spiky ball under a load of dangerous ones very nice use of the limitation of stacking assets swinging from ring to ring but the pen tips are hazardous you need to jump just before the swing finishes but you do need to jump at the very last minute otherwise you won't make the next ring devious this is also the first level with not only hidden cages but multiple routes through the level and no backtracking so i think it's actually impossible to get every cage on this level in one playthrough another level with a helicopter room except this time you're not avoiding the walls you're avoiding the floor because it's the bouncy eraser and landing on it would bounce you into the spikes above and you'd get stuck in a never-ending loop of damage one thing i do admire about rayman is when they give you a new power the designers really sit down and think hard about the absolute worst scenarios you'd need to use it to get through and then when you're going up or down dangerous dropping pencils spawn last minute and you're dodging them and unlimited flying really isn't as fun as you thought it would be when everything wants you dead and now one of the most annoying levels in the game using one of the simplest design choices all you need to do in this level is move downwards but every surface is the bouncy eraser so you'll bounce up to the next layer and then up again and then up again and there's only one root between them one thin path of no bounce which you have to carefully slip through that will actually get you down because if you move too early or too late you'll catch the edge of a bounce and bounce yourself back to the top and to add insults to injury if you decide to just bounce along the top and try to finish the level you'll find they've written the word no in gems just so you understand that the devs know how annoying this level is as well and they don't care they've balanced the physics nicely though running onto a bounce pad sends you hurling through the air in a ball and some of the traps are built for this exact move next level space mama's crater the levels are starting to get so large now it's actually difficult to keep track both vertically and horizontally of where you are and the cages are all but forgotten this is just about completion oh another nighttime level i wonder what it will bring ah right it will bring unseen levels of accurate platforming and death for any mistake swinging from ring to ring while dodging hazardous spikes repeatedly in sequence if you bought this game for your kid and your kid ended up getting frustrated this is why this level isn't fun i'm just straight up not having a good time this is a gauntlet level it's just spike after spike enemy after enemy you've got to punch balls to clear your path while ducking and crawling and sometimes waiting but other times running and if you choose the wrong thing you die it's an exercise in memory and tedium but every time you hear that enticing sound effect of something just spawned there's still a masochistic part of you that wants to run back and see what's new rayman is great at killing you but it's also great at making you want to return for more because it's just such a nice experience to die in and now we take on space mama an opera loving viking lady who hides behind a magical flying washing machine throws knives at us and then shoots lasers out of her deadly rolling pin and then she flies around the room spawning pressure cookers which explode and send the lids flying as projectiles and then she'll spawn rows of these so we need to quickly run or crawl from one side of the screen to the other and if you are a second too slow you take damage and then she hides behind the washing machine and we need to duck or jump over this laser blast as we try to punch the machine and all this happens while the fight very slowly speeds up so you can't keep a constant time pace either 30 deaths is when i stopped counting i had to keep reloading repeating the last level and burning through all of my lives just to slowly but surely learn each and every attack you know some games like cuphead or bloodborne games that care about constant attempts and constant failures they are difficult but they work because returning to the difficult bit is easy and quick in rayman failing on the boss means completing the entire level again and that's often a challenge in itself finally after what feels like an absolute age space mama is defeated and we're told mr dark has kidnapped patilla the fairy so onward to the cave of scops the crystal palace okay look by now even using checkpoints makes additional hazards spawn don't do this to me game i need checkpoints they're my only salvation and you are making using them a negative thing i hate you rayman 1. i hate you so much if you die on zero lives which let's face it will happen a lot you'll get the continue screen rayman trudges to the left to the dark and dismal future where he's apparently a criminal with wanted posters but pressing any button has him cartwheel over to the right and keep trying if you don't press anything you'll return to the main menu where you basically have to reload or use a password or start a game so cages have gone from easy to find and in your path to difficult to find but still visible and now they're actively a bad idea getting cages spawns enemies or obstacles or are always in super dangerous places there used to be rewards for exploring now they're punishments and actively make the level harder traps enemies cages are just not fun anymore more vertical scrolling levels with what is essentially unavoidable damage unless you knew things were going to happen ahead of time rayman really didn't want people completing it did it another unusual level eat at joe's there's a few seconds of chilling in front of joe's bar but then joe gives you a firefly to light your way and i don't know why the firefly is sitting all seductively like that at the bar but you know what joe whatever floats your boat and now begins the dark level to see ahead of you you need to punch now i like this mechanic in theory the exploration of the visual aspect of a game as mechanic is fine but if you think they're going to make navigation a lot harder surely they'd make the level layout a little simpler to compensate well no you can't see what's going on and there are random death pits and enemies on tiny platforms you need to walk on and random timed clouds and secrets you need to backtrack to find even if you could see this level would still be hard i talk a lot about the quit moment in games the moment the frustration outclasses the fun and the player decides to stop playing this is it this is the moment it goes from hard but fun to just plain difficult this level isn't designed to be enjoyable in any way it's just designed to kill you the next level messes with the standard design even more by having us move from right to left instead of left to right i think this is the moment the design staff realized they could take a meta structure and start manipulating it even the platforms are dangerous now the red angry crystals can be stood on from above but underneath they will kill you jump down this spike tunnel lightly take damage from both sides then crawl and a boulder spawns and kills you this is unfair i'm dying to random boulders it's tomb raider all over again all i've written in my notes for this level is spike tunnel and fire spins i don't remember exactly what i was writing about it's only been one day and i think i've already blocked the memory of this level out to save my sanity one of the interesting things i do remember are the wires in the background a rather strange scenery choice i hope they use this for something mechanical because i feel there's a lot of design potential with machinery that we've not explored yet and there it is we punch this plug into the wall and then ride this ufo style platform as it follows the wire and in an interesting twist it takes us back to the start and the next level is a copy of the previous but now the ufo platforms are working the ufos themselves are a giant 3d moving puzzle you need to avoid obstacles while also punching switches as you are moving to change the path of the ufo and even then there are multiple ufo paths and hidden cages spawning and hazards moving around however this level was actually the perfect balance of challenge and fun we are back at joe's and now begins the worst section of the game bar none this is just straight up the worst designed bit well if the intention was to kill the player it's the best designed bit basically this bit is an atrocity of unfair game design all we need to do is move across these floating beach balls but sometimes you need to wait on a beach ball for a fish to come and nudge you along but then some other fish jump out the water quite high out the water and knock you in and then they'll swim back and forth and attack you multiple times and then there's hazards to jump over as well on the slow moving beach ball and then you've got to time your jumps to match up with other beach balls or with clouds but you don't know the timings because the only way to know is to die at least once this section took me at least half an hour because this section is awful finally eventually make it across onward to mr scott's stalactites look at this unfair design that cage is on top of a spike so you can't stand there but you don't know this until you jump to it and try to stand there you need to jump punch jump again timing is everything this is the limits of what rayman can be a hard as nails platformer with razor thin timing tolerances the final section of this level the ambient red is just brutal and finally we get to the boss mr scops now this boss is a three-phase nightmare first jump over the pincer as he throws it then make sure you're not standing on the red crystals as they fall down then when all the platforms are gone jump to the ledge as he moves back but then hang from the ledge because if you don't he'll rush forward and knock you off and you'll die but make sure to jump up before he slams the ground because he'll break your hand and then jump back and hang again several times with perfect timing and then when he begins to move back race against the lava over the platforms and jump from ring to ring and don't stop or you'll die and when you've taken an hour to do this the real boss begins in a tiny arena you need to punch his own energy bolts back at him and then slingshot his attacks back at him by jumping over them at the last minute and having them hit him in the face and he gets closer to you so you basically can't move and after another 30 minutes of attempts including absolutely mastering that [ __ ] beach ball section i finally take down mr scops and we get batilla the fairy saying help me rayman and back onto the main map and no more levels appear so we're done right well no to access the actual last level you need to find every single cage in the game which means returning to the very start and using your new skills to find everything you missed in modern games finding every collectible would get you an achievement or an award or just be a fun little side quest in rayman it's actually required to see the final level getting every cage is the most punishing aspect of this game because remember the levels are split into smaller stages and if you miss a cage in stage one you can't go back you need to complete every stage in the level before you can restart the level as a whole and nothing tells you what part of the level what stage you're actually missing the cages in and there is no way to know where the mist cages might even be so i start the grind and i find cage after cage after cage i just grind and eventually after four hours of grinding countless deaths endless restarts i get fed up and put in the cheat password don't judge me because you did this too okay with every cage found kind of you can access the final final level candy chateau mr darks dare here we go the first stage you're on a spoon sliding down icing into a pit hope you are ready to jump this whole level is about building up enough speed to jump over the gaps but be careful you only build up speed while in contact with the floor while in the air you actually lose speed so you need to jump at the last minute as little as possible and just about make it over every single jump so you're touching the floor to make sure you have enough speed to clear the next gap and then to jump over the caramel puddle without dying the next stage is probably the most anxiety-inducing level in the game mr dark appears and makes an evil clone of you now this clone follows your exact movements but lags a few seconds behind and if you touch it even if you have full health you die instantly this means you can't stand still and as the level goes on you'll face slippy platforms precision jumps hazards and then a part where you need to loop back on yourself which means you need to either jump and walk under or walk and jump over your cloned self because nothing is more irritating than dying to your own mirrored movements the next part of the level mr dark shows up again and reverses your controls pressing left now moves you right and vice versa the challenge got very meta at this point this section is actually pretty easy once you get used to the swapped movement and at the end your controls are returned but mr dark shows up again and now you are non-stop running you cannot slow down at all all you can do is jump the whole game has been about player control and taking on the challenges with your skills this level is specifically about being out of control and trying to keep up with that and then the final part at the final level mr dark shows up and removes your ability to punch and now the final boss starts the fight starts with mr dark teasing you about how you can't punch anymore there's a glove power up on a rope and when you go for it nope he pulls it just out of reach so he shoots some fireballs which turn into columns of flame and slide around on the floor trapping you and then they get even closer and then he fires helix bolts at you which you have to avoid by standing perfectly still but you can't because the columns are moving and the helix bolts keep coming and this is already a hard time and it's about to get worse the electrons you freeze show up and bring you the glove so now you can punch and then the real final boss begins you need to fight three bosses one after the other and each boss is a combination of two previous bosses the scorpion and the stone dude have combined you need to jump over the claw and punch them a few times on their face relatively simple and then the hardest boss in the entire game the double space mama with double lasers firing at you from both sides and this part is actual hell because they don't match up to each other so you're dealing with two separate enemies firing two separate hazards the only way to win this is to spam punch as fast as you can then the mosquito and mr sax show up and they shrink us down to small rayman and you need to punch every time you get bounced into the air and hope you don't get stepped on now i've made that sound pretty easy but here's the reality of this boss fight and finally after more deaths than i could possibly count i beat the boss we free but till the fairy and we can watch the ending credits so rayman 1 was it any good rayman is a brutally unforgiving platformer with a minuscule amount of lives compared to the skill level expected of you it's an incredibly well designed game insofar as the mechanics of movement environment enemy and combat all combined so well that they enhance the other creating one of the most engaging platforming experiences but the lack of obvious hitboxes and pixel perfect hit detection in a game which is all about precision makes the actual gameplay experience super frustrating it's easy to die perhaps too easy because a lot of the design is how can we kill rayman and many of the late game deaths don't leave you feeling that's my fault i'll get better they leave you feeling annoyed at the progress you've now lost or the unfair situation the game placed you in with absolutely no preparation time it's a well-made game both graphically and mechanically with incredible audio and lovely ambience but it's not always a fun game it's definitely not a child friendly platformer but when you do finally beat a level and find every cage the relief you feel is incredible nowadays people compare games to dark souls when they want you to understand they are hard but when dark souls came out it was absolutely compared to rayman so to end the review i will award rayman troublesome isn't it and i'm tidy too out of ten cheers for watching a massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep this channel alive you can support from only one pound a month check the video description for links to the patreon twitch twitter and discord and as always remember go and free all of the electoons rayman and bring back the great protune from its mysterious kidnapper [Music] but will the bad guys let him do it foreign

Channel: Josh Strife Plays

Views: 1,580,972

Keywords: classic gaming, retro games, older games, retro review, gaming reviews, nostalgic gaming, nostalgia games, playstation 1, playstation 2, n64, dreamcast, classic rpg

Id: ys3JdalNcjU

Length: 51min 54sec (3114 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 12 2022