At a glance: Rayman Origins · PS Vita · Ubisoft Montpellier, 2012 · Platformer · Score: 9.0/10
The Vita’s launch window had a secret weapon, and it wasn’t a shooter or a racer — it was a hand-drawn cartoon. Rayman Origins, Michel Ancel’s triumphant reboot of his limbless hero, arrived on the Vita in February 2012 in a conversion so faithful it amounted to an argument: that the most beautiful 2D platformer of its generation belonged, all along, on a five-inch OLED held in your hands. The console versions were gorgeous on a television. On the Vita, at native resolution, with the UbiArt Framework’s paintings rendered pixel-for-pixel at arm’s length, Origins became the platform’s first true ‘look at this’ game — the one you handed to sceptics, open at the food world, and watched them melt.
The game itself is platforming of the highest order. Rayman and friends (up to four on console; the Vita keeps the campaign solo, of which more below) run, jump, wall-slide, swim, ride mosquitoes and punch through sixty-plus levels across a dozen worlds — jungles, deserts of didgeridoos, gourmet lands of killer cutlery, oceans, mountains, and a steampunk finale — rescuing Electoons and Teensies, and chasing Lums with a score-attacker’s greed. The controls are the modern gold standard: weighty but instant, generous with coyote time, honest with momentum. Origins’ genius is its teaching — every level introduces one idea, plays variations, then combines it with the last three at speed — and its difficulty curve, which coasts charmingly for two worlds and then, in the Land of the Livid Dead’s optional gauntlet, reveals one of the hardest platforming challenges of its decade, offered entirely without malice.
The Vita conversion, in detail
Judged as a Vita version — this review’s brief — Origins is close to flawless. The art suffers nothing: UbiArt’s vector-painted style scales to the screen perfectly, the animation’s squash and stretch read beautifully at handheld size, and the frame rate holds the console versions’ sixty in all but the busiest co-op-free scenes (the Vita port runs solo, so the busiest scenes are calmer). Load times are short, levels are sized for handheld sessions, and the port adds its own touches: collectible relics hidden in each level, assembled into mosaics, and touchscreen interactions for a few secrets and the end-of-level lotteries. Ghost mode time trials give the score-chasers a proper ladder. What was lost is real but specific: the four-player simultaneous co-operative play, the console versions’ chaotic soul, does not survive the transition, and with it goes some of the original’s party-game magic. Solo, Origins’ level design stands fully on its own — it was always the core game — but a buyer choosing between versions for the multiplayer should choose elsewhere. A buyer choosing for the campaign, the art and the handheld life should choose here without a flicker.
Televisions made Origins a hit. The Vita made it a jewel — the same paintings, cut to the size of your hands.
The soundtrack deserves its own applause: Christophe Héral’s score is a lunatic delight of beatboxing, kazoo, big-band and world-music pastiches that reacts to your play, and through headphones the Vita version is a private concert. The whole production has that rare Ancel quality of anarchic joy — enemies are grannies, chefs and living instruments; death is a deflation and a honk; the nymphs’ rescue dances are pure Tex Avery. In a launch line-up of grey shooters and serious racers, Origins was the colour, and time has only widened its lead: of all the Vita’s early showcases, this is the one that looks entirely undated today, because paintings do not age the way polygons do.
Value and verdict-adjacent matters
Origins on Vita is also, practically, a bargain with unusual longevity: the cartridge is common, the campaign runs fifteen hours to the credits and thirty-plus to true completion (every Electoon, every time trial, the Livid Dead’s gauntlet), and its difficulty tail gives it a second life as a mastery project long after the jokes are known. It plays identically well on both Vita models — the OLED’s colour gives it the edge, the Slim’s battery gives longer sessions — and it remains the platform’s easiest recommendation to a newcomer of any age. Platforming fans ranking the generation will argue Mario, Donkey Kong Country and this in some order forever. The Vita’s good fortune is that its entry in that argument fits in a pocket.
The worlds, savoured
Take a paragraph for the level design’s variety, because summaries flatten it. In the Gourmand Land you slide down cocktail ice and flee a dragon chef across a banquet of collapsing cutlery; in the Sea of Serendipity you dive between anemones and flee something enormous in the dark below; the Moody Clouds strand you on a mosquito’s back in a storm of living instruments; the final chase sequences — those famous, merciless, music-synced sprints after runaway treasure chests — turn every skill the game has taught into a single test at full speed, and finishing one produces the specific joy of a difficult piano piece finally played clean. The tricky-ray and Livid Dead levels then ask whether you meant it. It is a campaign with no filler worlds and no repeated gimmick outstaying its welcome, which is why its thirty-hour completion tail feels like generosity rather than padding: there is always one more Electoon behind one more idea you haven’t mastered yet.
And a word for what the Vita version meant in 2012. The console launch line-ups of that generation were a grey-brown argument about realism, and the Vita — Sony’s most powerful handheld ever — was widely expected to compete on those terms. Origins competed on opposite terms and won its corner outright: proof that the machine’s screen, horsepower and audience could serve colour, whimsy and hand-drawn art as triumphantly as any shooter. Michel Ancel’s team had made the same argument on home consoles the previous autumn. The Vita port is where the argument became intimate — a cartoon you could hold up to the light. Some launch titles date with their tech. This one dated like a picture book, which is to say it didn’t.
One last practical pleasure: Origins is a game that behaves itself on a handheld in ways its peers forgot. It boots fast, saves constantly, resumes mid-level from sleep without complaint, and its bite-sized time trials respect a ten-minute gap in a day as happily as a three-hour session. In 2012 that was unremarkable. In the Vita’s long twilight it is a large part of why the cartridge still lives in so many travel cases: the complete, colourful, masterful thing, available in the time you actually have. Ubisoft Montpellier made many fine games. For one launch window, they made the Vita’s happiest one.
Verdict
Rayman Origins scores 9.0/10 on Vita: a masterclass platformer in a conversion that loses the multiplayer and nothing else, its paintings perfected by the screen they play on. If the Vita had done nothing but give this game a handheld home, the launch would have justified itself. Play it with headphones, chase the pink Lums, and mind the Land of the Livid Dead.