YMMV / Rayman 2: The Great Escape

aka: Rayman 2

• Anti-Climax Boss: Axel the first guardian. A single shot to the icicle above his head makes it crash down upon him, taking him down in the process.
• Awesome Music: The game boasts an impressive soundtrack composed by Eric Chevalier, who went on to work on several unrelated French and Franco-Belgian Made-for-TV Movies ever since.
• Best Level Ever:
  • The Sanctuary of Water and Ice for its laid back level design as well as its memorable slide section and boss fight.
  • The Cave of Bad Dreams. It has a unique level design compared to the rest's rather humdrum tone, truly terrifying and intense moments, fun boss, and an awesome soundtrack.
  • The Precipice. Frantic, fun, long and with some of the best visuals and music in the game.
  • The Iron Mountains, featuring the most varied settings in the game, from rainy swamps to river rapids to the top of the titular mountains, and equally-varied gameplay, with an extended gravity-defying walking shell portion and an unexpected switch at the end.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Fairy Glade has a cage inside a building, with no obvious way to reach it. Two worlds later in the Echoing Caves, when you've forgotten all about it, there's a secret exit that takes you on an abrupt detour through said section of the Fairy Glade before returning to the Caves. It's the only level you can't 100% clear on the first run, and the only instance of two levels connecting to one another.
• Broken Base: There have been many versions of the game, but the two most highly regarded versions are the Dreamcast version and the PlayStation 2 version. There is an argument on both sides for this; many fans cite the Dreamcast version as the definitive version of the game, since Michel Ancel himself said it was the one that came the closest to what he envisioned it to be, while many others cite the PS2 version for its hub world and its own improvements over other versions.
• Demonic Spider: The version of the Ninja Henchmen featured in the PlayStation version. They're a borderline Lightning Bruiser when down to a low enough health.
• Even Better Sequel: The original Rayman was already a great game to begin with, but Rayman 2 successfully brought the series into the third dimension, with stronger story and characterization, making the gameplay much more accessible to players with its more lax difficulty and faster pacing, as well as much more adventurous with its wide open, dynamic level layouts, thrilling combat and boss battles and unique gimmicks such as the walking shells and flying powder kegs.
• Hype Backlash: A lot of fans in recent years are not at all convinced the game has earned it’s reputations as “one of the best 3D platformers of all time” or “best Rayman game”. This effect became more noticeable as the game was ported to countless platforms over the years, with more new fans of the Rayman series experiencing the game and being unimpressed after playing both its sequels and newer 3D platformers.
• Goddamned Bats: The Black Caterpillar-like entities. They never seem to stop spawning and get annoying incredibly fast, forcing you to keep throwing bullets at them until they finally quit spawning. It gets even more annoying when they spawn as you're climbing across a spider web ceiling, where throwing your fist stops you for a brief moment, forcing you into a pattern of move two inches, shoot, move two inches, shoot...
• Magnificent Bastard: Jano is the first nightmare of Polokus, the creator of the Antitoons, and the guardian of the Elixir of Life. An affable creature, he challenges Rayman to overcome the Cave of Bad Dreams to claim the Elixir, subjecting Rayman to platforming challenges, eventually joining himself to fight him. Upon losing, Jano offers Rayman a choice between gold or the Elixir, taking his defeat in stride. If Rayman chooses the Elixir, he reveals that he simply hypnotized Rayman into a dreamlike trance, the whole challenge being a Secret Test of Character, and allows Rayman to leave with his prize.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • Rayman's "YAHOO!", heard once all the Lums have been collected in a level, and when the 1000th Lum is found in the Tomb of the Ancients.
  • The short jingle that plays whenever a red switch is activated.
• Polished Port:
  • The Sega Dreamcast version, which took the Nintendo 64/PC versions, updated the graphics, added some new features, and tweaked some existing features to work better. It is commonly regarded as the best version of the game, and it was so well-received that the iOS and Nintendo 3DS versions were built off of this particular iteration.
  • The PS2 version also fares pretty well with a new free-roaming hub world, even further enhanced graphics, and new mini-games to boot. This version also incorporates more in-depth combat mechanics and significantly improved enemy variety, including several new bosses, in an effort to address the original game‘s shortcomings in these regards (see Scrappy Mechanic).
  • The PS1 version is scaled down compared to the other versions, reducing the Yellow Lum count to 800 and cutting or re-arranging several levels. However, many of the sections removed are among the most annoying in other versions, and with the cuts come several exclusive features to this version—a boss for the Sanctuary of Stone and Fire, more characterisation for the Guardians, additional enemies, a revised final boss, and most famously, a full level from the original 2D iteration.
• Porting Disaster: The DS version, being a port of the N64 version, keeps the lower-quality MIDI soundtrack while adding severe frame rate issues, muddled graphics, several game-breaking glitches, and two equally unreliable control schemes that suffer from the system’s lack of analog control.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Combat as a whole. A majority of fights amount to “attack enemy, dodge, wait for their invincibility frames to wear off, attack again” with very minimal changes even after you get more abilities. To make matters worse the robo pirates themselves come in only 3 or 4 varieties who aren’t that different from one another. The PS2 remake (and to a lesser extent the PS1 version) attempt to alleviate this by ramping up the enemy variety and AI, as well as introducing new combat scenarios.
  • The walking shells. They require an easy but repetitive taming process before allowing the player to mount them, and once Rayman rides them they prove very difficult to control, careening wildly at the slightest nudge of the analog stick. Their sections are often plagued by dodgy collision and physics which, coupled with their tendency to explode upon brushing anything, tends to result in countless deaths. The flying shells introduced in the last levels take these issues up to eleven.
  • The Rayman DS version attempts to remedy the lack of an analog stick by offering the choice of using the D-Pad or a virtual analog stick on the touch screen.
  • The 3DS version removed the ability to manually stabilize the flying shell and modified the controls in an attempt to make it “easier to control.” In practice, these changes make the flying shell nigh-impossible to pilot properly.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The level design is far less sadistic than that of the first game, and the player no longer has to 100% the game to access the final level.
• That One Level:
  • Whale Bay has the most swimming in the game, which comes with limited air and sluggish controls. There's an extended section where the only sources of air are bubbles from Carmen the Whale, which are snatched up by piranhas if you're not quick enough on the draw. Made worse in the PS1 version, where it is now the fourth level instead of the ninth and a bug is introduced that prevents Blue Lums from respawning.
  • The Sanctuary of Stone and Fire can get pretty tedious since it's the longest level in the game and appears relatively early. Much of the level is covered in lava flows that instantly kill Rayman, forcing the player to contend with the dodgy purple plum controls in order to progress. And the optional shell riding race to reach a cage and its yellow lums is the hardest of its kind, riddled with various game-breaking glitches depending on the version you’re playing.
  • The Top of the World starts with an incredibly frustrating “roller coaster” minigame in which Rayman automatically moves forward and must dodge obstacles. The twist is that the chair can rotate a full 360 degrees around the beam, which creates massive Event-Obscuring Camera issues and constantly leaves obstacles either out of sight or coming at unusual angles. Many players find this part to be a rigorous test of trial-and-error and memorization, not to mention getting all the Lums along the way. Then the second part of the level features many Barrel Pirates to contend with. Some later ports of the game either relegated the roller coaster section to an optional minigame or cut out the level entirely.
  • Beneath The Sanctuary of Rock and Lava. Since your flying has to be timed perfectly for some parts, expect to retry and respawn a lot. Many passages are both narrow and completely lined with lava and bramble, both of which kill Rayman on contact. And since the flying ability overrides the hover cancel, the player loses the ability to fall quickly, leading to some Damn You, Muscle Memory!
  • The second part of the Prison Ship, where Rayman rides a flying walking shell. If you get past the awfully narrow labyrinth of wooden beams without crashing, then you will be shot at by laser beams, which suppress the shell's ability to fly for a second. And there's no green lum to save at any point.
• That One Sidequest: There's a cage in the Sanctuary of Stone and Fire that is exceptionally well hidden, in a cave that is basically impossible to see until you are right beside it. It being in the steep lava plum ride where you have to make very tight movements to succeed only exacerbates the problem.
• Tearjerker: After Rayman defeats Razorbead, the latter decides to set his pirate ship to blow up in a last ditch effort to kill Rayman shortly before escaping. This is followed by a sequence of Rayman's friends, believing he died in the explosion, mourning him around a pedestal with one of his shoes laying on it. But Rayman actually survived as he soon enters the scene, walking with a crutch, much to everyone's relief and joy.
• Tough Act to Follow: This game was so well received, that Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc was unable to quite live up to it. While Hoodlum Havoc was still widely considered a solid game itself, compared to its predecessor, it came off as somewhat underwhelming. This has lessened overtime though with more fans growing up with Hoodlum Havoc and older fans reevaluating both games.

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