Last updated on June 23, 2013
Rayman Origins – Not sure why they titled it that way, given that it is most definitely NOT the first game in the series, but I guess the marketing department has their way with these things in advance.
For those not in the know, you could consider Rayman the “French” Mario character (now more like French-Canadian nowadays – wow, do I feel like a racist right about now). The first Rayman existed squarely in that strange no-man’s land of the platformer craze. If you remember, the early 1990s exploded with all manner of ill-fated mascot style games, from the first praised, now hated Sonic the Hedgehog to shovelware sellers like Bubsy the Cat. Maybe I could make a stretch and call Plok and Acro the Acro-Bat “mascots”, but that would give far too much credit to these poorly designed platforming games, let’s be honest.
In the midst of all these under-perfoming descendants of Mario came Rayman. The brainchild of Michel Ancel, Rayman brought storybook worlds in bright colors to the video game world, specifically on home consoles and PCs. The game looked hand-drawn, even animated, as Rayman worked his way through level to level. He had a basic jump and punch attack, but Rayman’s more known for how it came out on so many platforms, and its hardcore difficulty. If you failed to play it when it came it, the game exists for consumption in nearly every video game format in the last eighteen years since its release, so it’s not that hard to find.
After this initial success of Rayman’s first venture (it’s still the best-selling Playstation game in the UK, selling over five million copies there), Rayman went the way of every other mascot to 3D with his subsequent games. When the popularity of the platformer waned, so too did Rayman, and he dissappeared from the gaming landscape for quite a while. Well, he didn’t totally disappear, but whoever thought making Rayman Arena sounded like a good idea didn’t imagine a single way to take the character. Raving Rabbids, though fun, didn’t replicate the original design as a 2D platformer, as it brought Rayman to party game with mixed results.
Rayman Origins, then, appears a homecoming for the series. From what I can tell, the title refers to a return to origins, as this title plays much more like the earlier incarnations than the somewhat haphazard 3D installments. Not that they were bad in any way, but they failed to do much more than copy Super Mario 64, as did everyone during its heyday to the point where we hated platformers. Hey, that kinda sounds like what happens to nearly every genre in the video game market during some period of history!
That is, if the original Rayman played at hyperspeed and focused on speed, efficiency, and collecting with a precise jump and physics systems. It feels like the actual culmination of ideas gestating over many years, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Ancel (now more known for the much-praised Beyond Good & Evil than Rayman) directed this one as well. Having the benefit of Disney’s recently fired Animation Studio employees to provide a lush, magical world just feels like icing on the cake.
Thank goodness the fluidity of the graphics doesn’t take away from the game itself (ahem, VanillaWare!). Rather, it serves to heighten the sensation of speed and momentum you get from any number of speedy loops, ground pounds, and all manner of cartoon violence. In this case, the aesthetics do enhance the overall product because, well, you’re playing a cartoon. Seriously, isn’t that all you even wanted in the first place? Heck, if Nintendo ever made an animated version of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, wouldn’t you buy it? Rayman even plugs a multiplayer mode into the game to play with friends and family – or, alternately, smack them and make them fall into pits of death.
The game, with its frequent checkpoints and no penalty for death (beyond making you restart a particular section of a level) encourages a weird speed run mentality. It doesn’t measure you on time, but the game’s collectible, the Lum creature, provide a measure of progress to new stages and new places. King Lums make each individual Lum worth double, and that means charting a course through multiple runs of the same section wasn’t uncommon. Honestly, I wished Kirby’s Epic Yarn did the same thing; if you’re going to make me replay to get a higher score, why not just slice the level into tiny chunks like in Rayman Origins?
Origins also follows that old adage in video games: give you a simple move set, and make the levels complicated by design. It’s a standard trope and works well enough here, as you really need only a few moves here – just learning to use them accurately is the key. I’ve found I overshoot many smaller platforms, but that’s more a fault of habit than the game, and it’s nice that it teaches you to play well if you want rewards. They also throw random, and somewhat poorly designed, shmup levels into the mix, but when Rayman settles into its groove and niche, it has a flow that’s unique to the series.
If anything, I’m only sad that, at times, the game’s heavily derivative and relies on the same common platformer tropes you’ve seen a thousand times. Of course, they retain that special charm (and may explain the unbelievable critical reception the game received for being the only game like this on the market…at the time) and nostalgic factor, but it’s really a platformer that uses its own genre elements extremely well. If that sounds like your cup of tea, and it is for me, than you’ll enjoy it for what it is.
A word of warning: I only plowed through the first world, so I may find myself eating my own words in the future. I’ll write about this again if so, because I am honest with my own failings.
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And that’s Monday Update for this week! Who knows what I will cover.
