Rayman: 30th Anniversary Edition, A Love Letter With Missing Pages
Introduction to the Love Letter 💌
So Rayman turns 30 and Ubisoft decided to throw him a party. The question is whether anybody is actually having a good time.
Let me be clear: Rayman 1 remains a masterwork. The hand drawn visuals, the cartoonish animations, the sheer personality of every punched piranha losing its teeth, it all holds up beautifully since three decades. This is a game that communicates joy through every pixel, and no amount of corporate mishandling can erase that. The collection itself is generous on paper: five versions of the game, 124 levels counting the bonus add ons, the SNES prototype, the surprisingly charming GBC adaptation, and a museum section packed with concept art and the legendary design bible. For 20€, the raw content is hard to argue against.
The "Missing Pages" 😔
But here is where things get complicated.
The elephant in the room is the soundtrack. Due to copyrights issues (I guess), the original compositions by the late Rémi Gazel have been stripped out and replaced by new tracks from Christophe Héral. Mr. Héral is a talented composer and his work on Origins and Legends speaks for itself, but his style simply does not fit the atmosphere of the first game as good as the work of Gazel. It is not that the music is bad (it's far from it), but rather it is misplaced in its ambition and nostalgia is too strong of an emotion. Several reviewers (most of negative Steam reviews) described it as a heartbreak, and they are not wrong, at least to me. An Anniversary collection for a classic game without the music that defined the nostalgia feels like visiting your childhood home after someone repainted every wall.
Other frustrations pile up. No French language option for a proudly French game, which is almost comical (I speak french, so that's why I bring this up). The emulation has occasional slowdowns on the MS-DOS version. The shitty launcher Ubisoft Connect sits there mandatory on PC, because apparently a 30 year old platformer needs online verification... And the absence of a level editor feels like a missed opportunity nobody at Ubisoft even considered.
The quality of life additions like: rewind, widescreen, save states and so on, are genuinely welcome though, and they transform what was once a brutally punishing gamepaly experience into something approachable. That worths the detour on its own. The CRT filters would merit some improvements because they feel a bit cheap and unrealistic for now.
Verdict 🤔
My honest advice? Wait for a Steam/e-Shop/Playstation sale. 20€ is a bit steep for a nostalgia trip with the alternate audio, even if the visual filters and 16:9 support are nice. The bones are excellent but the package needs patching. I have good faith on the Rayman modding community to bring the original soundtrack with an easy to install mod on PC thanks to RCP.
Vote on GOG Dreamlist! Maybe we could get a DRM free version, because Ubisoft Connect simply makes this edition worse than necessary.
And if you bought it, do what I do: play the Atari Jaguar version included here. It is the original game, the one Ancel and Houde actually built with their own hands. I have been saying this since years and I will die on this hill.
For better options right now, check the other recommendations on the homepage. Rayman deserves better than this, and so do you. Anyway this is not a bad anniversary edition, but I hope Ubisoft will improve it (beside the soundtrack which they probably won't)