Last week Ubisoft invited me to try out a very early build of Rayman Legends Retold, which is coming to Switch 2 on October 1st. Rayman Legends Retold is a 2.5D remake of 2013’s Rayman Legends, a game very familiar to Nintendo fans as it was originally announced as a Wii U exclusive before jumping to other platforms when the Wii U’s fate became obvious. Rayman Legends Retold adds new levels (with some new music featuring work by Grant Kirkhope), a unifying story, voice acted cutscenes, and a world map. Not to mention of course entirely reworked visuals. With all that in mind it shouldn’t be a shock to say that I enjoyed my time with Rayman Legends Retold, because at its core, it is still Rayman Legends which is a very good 2D platformer. The question is whether Retold does enough to validate its existence, especially given that Rayman Legends is actively available on all the same platforms that Retold will be releasing onto.

A lot of what is new in Retold is the packaging. The content that surrounds the actual gameplay rather than the gameplay itself. What I’ve seen of the game’s cutscenes and hub area do a nice job of presenting a more cohesive narrative and world than the original ever did. For comparison the original Legends presented worlds and stages as paintings in a gallery, with very little unifying narrative to give context or meaning to those settings. By comparison Retold feels like a proper adventure even though the underlying structure is the same. You go from level to level, rescuing the captured teensies who serve as the prime collectible for unlocking additional levels. There are primary levels and unlockable challenge levels. In Retold these worlds culminate in new dragon riding levels, which play a bit like an extremely forgiving version of Star Fox. The two I played were fun and sorta feel like the one area in which Retold justifies its shift from 2D art to 3D polygons.

That actually highlights one of my largest points of contention with the underlying concept of this version of the game. Rayman Legends is one of the most visually accomplished 2D platforms I have ever seen. It was in 2013 and it still is today. It conveyed the weird visual language of Rayman better than any other game in the series. Because of the high degree of stylization, the 2D visuals of Rayman Legends haven’t really aged. While Retold looks perfectly fine in isolation, when compared with its own source material I couldn’t help but feel like visually it is a step down. And that isn’t the fault of the artists working on Retold, it is simply that I don’t believe it is really possible to improve on those original assets. For this reason I’ll admit that when I found out that this was the Rayman project I was going to be playing, I was a little baffled. If you’re going to remake a Rayman game there are others that could benefit much more from the attention. Games like Rayman 2 which were much more clearly limited by hardware of the time.

Don’t get me wrong, I am excited for the new content here. And I think the enhanced contextualization for the world and story really benefits the game. But when I’m actually playing a level, I can’t help but feel like this is a slight downgrade versus the original visuals. It does still play great and when there is something legitimately new on screen the package becomes a lot more compelling. If you managed to miss Rayman Legends at its original release or in its definitive edition on Nintendo Switch, Retold may be a much easier sell. But for those of us who already play one or both of its previous releases, Retold may have a harder time earning its place. You shouldn’t write it off by any means, but I do think Ubisoft has an uphill battle, and I can’t help but feel like the replacement of the original art style makes this upgrade a lot less universal. The fact that even within the confines of remakes they’ve gone with the most recent release rather than diving into more appropriate games in the catalogue is a bit baffling.