Title: Rayman: 30th Anniversary Edition
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $19.99
Release Date: 02/13/2026
Prelude
Well, I hoped to get back to the queue, but I like covering retro collections, and I wanted to give myself a warmup after getting my home back. Plus Digital Eclipse is a company I always enjoy keeping up to date on with my reviews, so why not get this set outta the way before I do some more catchup post-queue? I sure have a lot to say about it…
In this PS1/Jag/GBC/GBA/etc game, you take control of Rayman, a limbless hero who must embark throughout various different worlds to stop the evil forces of Mr Dark! There’s some FMV in the PS1 version, and the occasional in-engine transition stage here and there to explain the story and the new powers Rayman gets, but otherwise this one isn’t a plot-heavy game. The bible to the SNES version on the other hand, does have quite an interesting story proposed for it.
Presentation
This is A Digital Eclipse compilation, being more like their Worms Armageddon release rather than a Gold Master collection. This means while you do get some historical documentary stuff, it’s not the bulk of the package and gets treated more like a bonus feature.
For the documentary extras, they’re aggressively OK here. You get your usual box/manual scans when able, all look to be in pretty good shape with trademark edits as need be, and by far the coolest extra in the entire collection is the Pitch Bible for SNES Rayman, back when it was envisioned as a CD game. What ended up as a cartoony game, originally started as a computer centric adventure with the main villain being an evil virus, with gobs of plot details and concepts mentioned in these documents. This bible explains how Rayman was named after Raytracing, (the technology) and all sorts of cool info that compliments the very rough SNES demo nicely.
Stuff like that bible are the attention to detail I love Digital Eclipse for, and am glad they were able to put it here. You otherwise have various scans of merch, press releases, and other info on a rough timeline that goes to right around Rayman 2’s release, before it touches on the handheld versions and jumps to the present day.
There’s just the big elephant in the room with this timeline; (not counting the elephant the main game has to deal with) the presence of pretty uh, not so great people in the games industry in these interviews. Yes, Ancel made Rayman and you can’t really do interview stuff without him, that I get with him being in there despite allegations that would make me frown upon seeing him again. But Yves Guillemot himself also shows up in the documentary at key points, (since he did help get Rayman off the ground, along with the other brothers at Ubisoft, and shares some interesting factoids) and to say the Guillemot are people I’d be more than happy not hearing from again in my lifetime would be an understatement. Not faulting Digital Eclipse for them being in these videos at all, but it definitely feels real awkward watching those videos right around the time the Guillemots are seeing Ubisoft collapse from underneath them in the present day.
Alright, with that awkward ick outta the way, how about the games? How do they present and scale up and whatnot here? Well, you have the Digital Eclipse norms, I’m happy to report. That means you have pretty solid CRT/LCD filters and respective borders, and different screen size options. PS1 Rayman gets a cool widescreen option that makes horizontal stages 16:9, while keeping bosses and vertical stages the same 4:3 to not break the game.
GBC/GBA Rayman’s LCD filters are a bit darker than I’d like and harsher than they were in Early Days Collection, but they still get the job done and are filters I leave on without hesitation. All the games look as they should and are fairly crisp, letting you appreciate the differences between each version of the game and what it changed or had to compromise on, but the other big elephant here has to do with the music for Rayman; all of it got replaced.
Why, you may ask? I honestly can’t say for sure, but it’s commonly assumed that after the passing of the original composer in 2019 their music got wrapped up in legal/royalty issues, and ever since then it would either be crazy expensive to reuse the music as is or just impossible. There are also two other composers here that also had their songs replaced, and they might be a factor as well. Thus, the current composer for Rayman Origins/Legends did the new tracks here, and I think he did pretty good on some songs and pretty lousy on others.
The OST is a weird situation for me, since the only version of Rayman I played prior to this set was the GBC one, which had a really shrill rendition of that PS1 score with some stuff from Rayman 2 thrown in as well. For the GBC version in particular, I actually don’t dislike the new music at all. It’s a bit goofy, but pretty fitting and super accurate to the GBC soundfont to the point I did some digging, and it turns out this OST was first shown off on the reissue of Rayman GBC done for the Banned From SFG Handheld. That means the new OST is baked into the ROM itself, and thus doesn’t have any bugs to mess with while playing that version.
For the other versions of Rayman, I had no experience with those original soundtracks, so I only had the new one to go off of, and PS1/DOS Rayman definitely sounds more like Origins/Legends, GBA Rayman Advance sounds like utter nonsense, and Jaguar Rayman is busted. I don’t mean busted as in a “oh this is the worst sounding one and I don’t like it” kinda way, but actually broken and buggy in a way that somehow beats out the PS1/DOS OST having bugs where the soundtrack fails to loop properly.
See, at first when starting up the game you’ll hear one soundtrack kicking in, and then another soundtrack kicking in that seem to compete with each other. In-game you can pause and reduce the music to 0, but that just means the other soundtrack is playing exclusively. That one sounds fine and even better than the PS1/DOS one to me, which makes me suspect it might be the original left in by mistake.
These aren’t CD renditions so the Jag OST is gonna be different by that nature, but when trying to play it normally just assaults your ears with two soundtracks at once, it sure makes the Jag version the worst to try and enjoy the sounds of while playing. All in all, I definitely see the complaints and hope they have an option to bring back the original OST soon, but if we were stuck with this new one, I wouldn’t consider it the end of the world either (unless they don’t fix the Jaguar double soundtrack issue, since that stuff is unlistenable)
Gameplay
I already went through the documentary bonus section (only one thing to add; skipping around the videos if say, you don’t want to see Yves’ face, might cause the videos to softlock, and I have no idea why the video playback is worse here than in other DE sets), but besides that you have 5 versions of Rayman plus the expansions for the PC DOS version as well. Yes, the SNES prototype is here, and is fun to goof around in for two minutes. No, they never made a more complete build than this, and since you just goof around and see funny animations from 1992, I don’t need to cover it as a distinct version. Treat SNES Rayman more like a bonus or a sandbox.
Anyhow, each game version has their own set of three save files to choose from, which are essentially three save state slots. You’d think this means you’d have a lot of extra files for Rayman due to the in-game saves, but a lot of them seem to break real easily and cost you your save. You also have the typical rewind feature, which works great in everything but Jag and PS1 Rayman here (it makes those versions a slideshow, even on Switch 2), while DOS Rayman doesn’t have it at all.
Unfortunately, using Rewind softlocked my game at one point and I had to restart the application, so even this can be buggy from time to time. Anyhow, onto seeing if the bugs can stop and we can have some fun. You can also turn on enhancements when starting a new save file, which help make things a lot easier and shortcut some of the cheats already in that PS1 original, if you need a bit of extra help.
Rayman (Jaguar)- This is the true original version of Rayman! And it’s just absolutely busted and has the most baffling bugs that made what was my second most anticipated version to play, a dark sign for what was to come with this collection. Still, this is the version that the other ports were based on, and I think it does some things better than the PS1/DOS versions. Some levels are a lot more fair, the game flow is decently fun, and the visuals really help make it one of the best looking games on the Jaguar when you consider the competition it was dealing with at the time.
Sadly, multiple things prevent me from playing this further and giving you deeper comparisons. The first is that saving in this version of the game is broken beyond belief. Yes, I noted the three save state slots from earlier, but even if you use those, and even if you say, save on the world map and decide for whatever reason to reset the game so you could try the breakout bonus game or whatnot, you will come to find your in-game save is gone. “Oh, no problem, I’ll just load my save state!” You might think, except for some godforsaken reason the in-game file select screen makes an auto save state that prevents you from loading your actual game and you have to start all over. Hope you didn’t hit the reset option in the menu while near the end of the game!
That’s not even the dumbest bug in Jaguar Rayman here. In nearly every last video game reissue I’ve played, throughout my 12+ years of running SFG or even as a casual retro gamer, one thing all these emulators try to have in common is blocking the player from pressing left+right on the controller at once. Some modern controllers have very easy means of doing that, unlike the original consoles where you’d have to take the controller apart to pull it off. On pretty much every system that Rayman 30th is on, you can hold right on the D-Pad, then flick your left joystick to the opposite direction to cause the game to freak out since it actually replicates the real left+right combo and thus crashes not just the game, but the entire application.
It is so, so easy to do I’m gobsmacked this wasn’t fixed. I’m also gobsmacked this didn’t do what pretty much every other retro reissue including Digital Eclipse’s past ones have done, and just stop the player from doing this! This clip below shows just how pathetically easy it is to destroy the game.
Yeah, could have done with a bit more listening to your QC Team, Ubisoft. Anyhow yeah, that’s the disappointment of Jaguar Rayman here; a promising base version marred by bugs and weird doubled soundtrack, along with the chance of your save getting eaten to boot! Fun…
Rayman (PS1)- Jag Rayman was the original, but PS1 Rayman is the popular one, and it’s very easy to see why. Fancy new FMV intro, extra touchups and tweaks, voice clips and CD quality music, (even a changed OST is still enough to show improvements over the changed Jag OST) it all led to this being the most accessible and easiest version to play for the longest time.
And yet this version also has problems. Thankfully, the new Widescreen toggle wasn’t one of them for me, since it shifted resolutions when needed and the widescreen changes didn’t break the game to the point I noticed it hindering my enjoyment. In fact, I much appreciated the extra visibility, since PS1 Rayman messed with the level design in some places to make it feel worse compared to that Jag original. This game is notorious for being pretty dang hard, and that reputation is deserved, though it ain’t in a fair sense like Ninja Gaiden, I’m afraid. As soon as the second world things ramp up quickly, and if it weren’t for that extra visibility you’d be dealing with a lot of frustrating “gotcha” moments. Definitely worth making use of the rewind/enhancements here.
Still, this is Rayman, sans the original music. You gain new upgrades as you progress through the game, you can use those upgrades to revisit older stages and free some more Toons to work towards 100%ing the game, and overall have a pretty decent time here, except for another awful save bug popping up yet again. This time around, the in-game save files might corrupt if they feel like it, so if you beat that final boss or decide to just game over and end the game, you might not be able to do much else until you start over. Not as code red as the Jaguar’s easy to do on accident save bug, but still immensely stupid to let slip by, and a bug that hinders my enjoyment of this version from what it could have been.
Rayman & Expansions: (DOS)- Rayman comes back again, to DOS! This time the PS1 game is the one to get some tweaks here, and yep, it’s still brutally tough like before. Except now you can’t rewind, so I hope you make use of those enhancements or abuse the heck out of the save states. Or get good with a platformer that doesn’t age all that well once you see all the band-aids ripped off it.
Still, compressed sound effects aside, this version is fine and I didn’t notice save bugs here like with the other two versions thus far. This also is the version to include an insane amount of bonus stages, meaning if you can’t get enough Rayman you have extra levels made by fans and Ubisoft for over 100 extra stages. Some are laughably easy, some are pretty darn clever and some make the base game look like the first Super Mario Bros to Rayman’s Lost Levels. Well worth playing the bonus levels at the very least if you don’t want to go through the base game all over again, but of all the base game versions to play, this is the one I feel is the most safe to go with and not deal with any saving nightmares.
Rayman (GBC)- This is my nostalgic Rayman, and I grew up with this on 3DS VC! Changed music aside, I’m impressed by just how well this port holds up after all this time, though it’d be better to call this a reimagining VS an outright port. The world themes are the same as the original game, but the level designs are completely different, made for the GBC in mind, and a lot more balanced and fun! You still gradually get new powers over the course of the game, but there’s no world map and thus no revisiting old levels until much later on, and there’s no bosses outside of the final fight.
This ain’t groundbreaking or the best platformer on GBC or whatnot, but it still manages to serve up some solid Rayman fun and thankfully for me, this version was the one I had no bugs with while playing through it. It also helps it uses passwords so if something did go wrong, I could just enter a password and keep my stuff, but as it stands the save file feature works pretty well for this port.
Definitely worth a play if you’ve enjoyed the normal Rayman to death many times or want a version of Rayman 1 that isn’t buggy here. The only gripe I have is the Ubi Key stage is inaccessible, but otherwise this version is presented just as good as it could have been here.
Rayman Advance (GBA)- This is interestingly enough, a port of Rayman 1 to the GBA from Digital Eclipse. Yes, the same company as now, but in a different incarnation, led by mostly different people. A bit of a bummer Mike Mika wasn’t interviewed about the porting process, but otherwise this still tries to do some noble things to make the original Rayman 1 a lot less annoying, especially since you have huge screen crunch this time around.
The levels became much harder to see, and that rewind feature comes in handy too, but to offset this you have a better health bar, some more forgiving level design tweaks in certain spots, and the bosses got easier, too. I was actually kinda stunned how this was more enjoyable than the GBA port of Mega Man and Bass, another stupidly hard game made harder by GBA screen crunch. Unlike that port, this one actually feels like you could finish it on original hardware if you kept at it long enough!
A fourth version of this same set of levels might be overkill, especially with the music being atrocious here, but this is a fun way to experience the game with a bit less headache if the enhancements don’t cut it for you in the other versions. I didn’t have any major bugs here and found this version to be slightly preferable to me over the DOS port since the rewinding was there and I love my handheld reissues with good filters on them. The extra tweaks to make things gentler here really did help quite a lot, and I think this one and the Jaguar version were the best versions of the “normal” Rayman experience if all the bugs in this set get fixed up.
Conclusion
Rayman 30th was just an absolute mess, and it really saddens me to see it as such, especially coming from Digital Eclipse who did such a good job with Karateka. From ludicrous bugs ranging from save erasure to easy crashes, a replaced OST that while not the worst, is implemented in a buggy manner in some versions, and pretty lackluster bonuses, this feels like a compilation Digital Eclipse did a first draft of, sent to Ubisoft, and then Ubisoft just hit the publish button without any sort of QA or polish on their end of the bargain.
The usual DE goodies are here, but they all feel wrong. Being able to crash a game by using the joystick and d-pad is something most emulators fixed decades ago, yet you can do that with Jag Rayman effortlessly. Dealing with save files that erase themselves because they get bored or have a weird quirk going on is utterly ridiculous especially considering the difficulty of the original game, and even the handheld versions that act fine enough are still not the same without that original OST.
As a fan of the GBC game, I had a decent time playing that again and giving Advance a spin, but I just couldn’t enjoy any other version in this set due to the sheer amount of bugs and overall clunk of the whole package. A pretty miserable anniversary celebration that treated an otherwise great developer dirty.
I give Rayman: 30th Anniversary Edition a 4 out of 10.