Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that everybody loves Rayman. Yet, for the longest time, I didn't. I think it was the stupid haircut, but whatever it was, it was superficial and not particularly fair in retrospect. I let the first Rayman slip me by because it was only released for platforms I didn't yet own - the Saturn and PlayStation (and, uh, Jaguar) - so when I had the opportunity to try out its sequel via its PS2 "remaster", I wasn't at all invested in the story and characters (though Raymans Origins and Legends have since won me over in that regard) and quickly left it on the wayside. It wasn't my beloved Rare collectathons, though it does have plenty of that going on, and for a long while it didn't seem like the PS2 would have anything with which to compete with Nintendo in that particular field. History has proven otherwise, of course, with many of the best 3D platformer franchises ever devised debuting on the PS2: Sly Cooper, Jak & Daxter, and Ratchet and Clank to name the big three. I might actually say Rayman Revolution, if not quite up there with the games from those three franchises, is a hell of a fine 3D platformer, and all the more impressive compared to the rest of the so-so launch library the PS2 debuted with.

Rayman Revolution is essentially the N64/PS1 game Rayman 2: The Great Escape with a few modifications, the addition of voice acting, and a modest facelift. It switches from one central hub world to several, for reasons I can't be too certain about, and includes a few extra stages and areas to explore. Of note is the game-wide scavenger hunt for 1000 Yellow Lums and 80 "fairy familiars" - the former of which can be spent on acquiring new upgrades, while the latter unlock bonus stages which can increase Rayman's total health bar. There's no lives in the game, just Rayman's solitary bar of HP, and even if that happens to drain all the way the player doesn't actually lose anything - you're right back to the most recent checkpoint. The game is extremely lenient, though I did get a little frustrated at the slightly anachronistic way it asks you to save after every area transition. It also controls just fine, with the sole and sadly inevitable exception that is the camera. There's no analog stick assigned to the camera, so the player swings it left and right with the trigger buttons except in corridors and other tight areas where the camera won't fit and refuses to budge as a result. Sometimes I think Super Mario 64's greatest masterstroke when "inventing" the 3D platformer genre was introducing the meta notion of the camera being an enemy you could never defeat.

Exacerbating the camera issue a little further is how the game handles combat. Rayman is given a hard right hook initially, but soon acquires the ability to shoot fireballs from his fingertips. Every enemy is invariably fought by strafing side to side to avoid their fire while retaliating with your own, and for the most part it's fine. There's some degree of auto-aim when you're pointing in the general direction of enemies, provided the camera is looking at them, and having a dedicated button to hold down for this strafing mode simplifies things a little. It's a combat system that would evolve into something more elegant, not to mention more varied, in Ratchet and Clank when it was released two years later. The platforming, meanwhile, is actually pretty good: a second mid-air jump allows Rayman to helicopter his way down slowly, giving the player ample time to pick the right spot to land. 3D platforming isn't always the easiest genre of game due to the way it can sometimes be difficult to judge distances and see your own shadow to line up a landing, but the slow fall mitigates a lot of that unwanted challenge. The game also keeps its stages diverse with underwater levels, slide levels, and "vehicle" levels that have you water-skiing across a swamp or riding a missile enemy through an obstacle course at a (mostly) full-speed tilt. They're a little annoying if you're trying to grab all the collectibles, but the variance helps a lot.

The one aspect about Rayman Revolution that may have chased me off initially but I can appreciate more with time is how the game is apportioned in an asymmetrical manner, quite unlike the discrete and uniformly large worlds of its peers, and the way the level progression is tied into the story in some odd ways. It helps makes the game feel more interconnected and distinct. You might enter a relatively short level with a handful of collectibles, with a few platforming challenges to complete, before moving onto something far more substantial because it happens to be that much more important to the plot. Many of the big stages in the game have 50 Lums and 10 of the fairy familiars, but there's lots of smaller interstitial areas with far less going on in terms of items to collect. In addition are the hub worlds, which have their own set of collectibles and each of which also contains a "Teensie Circle". The blue, The Great Gonzo looking mystics unlock the fast travel portals, and a new one is rescued at the end of each stage. They all congregate in stone circles that link to all the stages within a hub area, and also to all the other Teensie Circles in the game. It's an unusual hub and fast travel system, but it allows for a contiguously connected world that often detours to various remote locations as the story calls for it. Speaking of which, while the story is as paper-thin as you might expect from a platformer intended for a younger audience, the way it'll have you collect some McGuffin one moment to rescuing a friend to the next means that you're never quite sure what mission you'll find yourself on next. There's more immediacy to what Rayman's doing at any given moment, rather than being given a checklist of game-wide objectives to tick off as they explore at their own pace. The game is incredibly linear - while you can move to various stages in the same hub, all but one are basically inaccessible until you've completed the next plot objective to unlock a new ability or change the world in some way - but the variation in the individual stages, their make-up and their role in the story is just enough to keep my attention. I also like the game's occasionally quirky sense of humor - a Michel Ancel trait, I imagine - including one scene where the villain is shown eating one of the game's Yellow Lum collectibles: the overall game-wide counter for them dutifully updates itself to say "x/999" instead.

I was pleasantly surprised by a game I clearly shouldn't have written off so quickly back in the day. I own almost every PS2 3D platformer of note, such was (and is) my fondness for that genre, so I'm heartened to discover a good one that I missed. I'm nowhere near completing it just yet (it's quite lengthy), but I'm going to see it through and give it a fair shake at a shelf space when the time comes.

Result: Progresses to the Final Round.

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