Why modern Any% switches to Globox
Modern Co-Op Any% routes deliberately spend roughly eleven seconds entering the Heroes Gallery and switching away from Rayman almost immediately. That detour looks wasteful until the rest of the route is considered: Globox saves the time back through character-specific hitbox advantages and the Co-Op Zip.
The early meta: Rayman was originally competitive
Years ago, DJTHED tested whether changing to Globox was worth the gallery detour. At the time, routing was much less developed and Globox's later advantages had not yet accumulated into a large enough saving.
Those early tests put Rayman about 0.6 seconds ahead overall, mostly because he avoided the roughly eleven-second character-switch detour. For years, the choice could reasonably be treated as preference rather than a hard requirement.
Globox's attack hitboxes changed the calculation
As routing improved, Globox's unusually large backwards-kick and punch hitboxes started saving time throughout the run. His attacks extend farther than Rayman's and can interact with enemies and targets through geometry that blocks the other characters.
- Level 1-2: enemies can be hit from below instead of taking the intended route onto the platform.
- Level 1-5: enemies behind walls can be removed without Rayman's slower repositioning.
- Level 5-3: a Teensie target that normally requires a longer floating route can be hit directly through the wall.
- Other obstacle rooms: Globox can reach targets from angles that simply do not work with Rayman's attack reach.
None of these saves alone justify an eleven-second detour, but together they steadily eroded the original cost of switching characters.
The Co-Op Zip ended the debate
The decisive change was the rediscovery and reverse engineering of the Co-Op Zip. Globox's collision box is what produces the enormous displacement required for the useful version of the glitch.
In Any%, the zip can be used to skip the third phase of the World 4 boss. That single skip saves far more than the gallery detour costs, while Rayman cannot reproduce it at the same scale.
The current verdict
Rayman is not banned and there is no rule forcing runners to use Globox. The route simply became optimized to the point where Globox's cumulative advantages outweigh the early character-switch cost by a large margin.
That is why a modern optimized Co-Op Any% run can abandon the title character almost immediately and never switch back.