YMMV / Rayman M

• Awesome Music: Henchman 800's theme is quite hardcore. It has a catchy riff.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Of the three Canon Foreigners created for the game, Henchman 1000 is the most beloved thanks to his awesome Spanish Robot Pirate design.
• Good Bad Bugs: One of Razorbeard's animations at the start of battles runs a little longer than the starting countdown timer, giving everyone else a head start. Normally, this would be a really frustrating oversight, but it can really come in handy if you restart the round until one of the AI players gets him. It is especially helpful on the below-mentioned Spooky Towers map.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the skins for Globox is essentially him dressed up as Rayman, complete with yellow skin. A decade down the road, one of the playable characters in Rayman Origins would be the exact reverse, with Rayman dressed up as Globox.
  • It's possible that the reason why some versions of the game changed the name from Rayman M to Rayman Arena/Rush was so that people wouldn't mistakenly assume that this game has Mature content. Years later, Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix would portray Rayman as a TV host for a despotic regime who gets drunk, does Hookers and Blow, before eventually going postal against his former employers as Ramon after getting sacked and replaced for losing his temper against Red's bigotry.
• Nightmare Fuel: Razorbeard's theme. It is so spooky.
• Polished Port:
  • The Nintendo GameCube and Xbox versions can be said to be this compared to the PS2 original, due to to the fact that they have more content at the cost of removing some of the race and battle modes.
  • The American PC version has an exclusive LAN mode, allowing it to support a form of online play not available in any of the other console releases.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The PlayStation version entitled Rayman Rush only showcases the racing mechanics. It doesn't help that the graphics are scaled down and the Teensies were replaced by Globette.
  • A peculiar case was caused not by the console itself, but by its emulator. The Dolphin Emulator for GameCube will always freeze during the loading screen of "Rise & Shrine", making the level (and by preventing any progression, basically half of the game) unplayable. This is among the most infamous bug in the emulation community, as for two decades no definitive solution was found. The bug is caused by an opcode erroneously generated during the cutscene, for reasons still unknown. For years the only known solution was to skip the cutscene immediately, so that the opcode won't crash the emulator, but doing only that is like playing dice: one has to raise the emulated CPU and enable Dual Core to be 100% sure that the trick will work. Only in 2021 a Gecko code was published on the Dolphin Emulator Wiki, which solves the bug without any further tinkering necessary.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Tily is hated for replacing fellow fairy Ly from Rayman 2, who was meant to appear before being cut. Not helping matters is promotional renders featuring Ly being used on the European cover, or her giggling.
  • For Rayman Rush, Globette for replacing the Teensies and having the exact same theme as Dark Globox.
• Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer: For the battle mode, Lum Fight seems to be this through and through. Then again, it is the most intricate mode and is the most frantic of all of them.
• That One Level:
  • For races, Thousand Waterfalls. The course design is pretty awful for one, including one alternate path at the very start that is deceptively faster...however, because of the amount of time you spend waiting for things to happen, it ends up being slower most of the time. Worse yet though, the AI almost always takes this path, and is inhumanly good at it. Most of the other alternate paths also seem a whole lot slower as well, and the course is just a complete and utter mess, resulting in a lot of Fake Difficulty. And this is only in the second league.
  • For arenas, Spooky Towers. All the other leagues pit you against a Hard AI at best, but this one puts the AI on Ultra Hard...and you only face one, so there's no other AI to help offset the difficulty. Lum Spring is especially a nightmare; Ultra Hard A.I.s actually run faster than the human players can. You know, on a mode that is all about trying to reach randomly spawning items first? And worse yet, their reflexes are extremely quick (they seem to especially have a knack for keeping you frozen as long as possible), and they always know exactly where to go whenever a lum spawns, which is a problem because of the confusing design of the arena where you have to go up a specific tower to reach a specific spot. Your only hope is just cross your fingers and hope the RNG works in your favor to spawn lums in places where it just happens to be convenient for you. Lum Fight and Capture the Fly are thankfully a bit easier, but Lum Spring will probably take you quite a few tries before finally winning.

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