In my memory, Rayman Legends is a timeless classic. Released in 2013, it arrived at a time when Ubisoft was becoming best known for po-faced games like Assassin’s Creed and countless Tom Clancy spin-offs, but Rayman Legends was a beautiful 2D platformer brimming with silliness and slapstick that showcased the publisher’s creative talents and distinctly French humor.
So the news that Ubisoft is remaking it as Rayman Legends Retold, ditching its 2D art for 3D animation, hasn’t gone down well in the Benson household, I can tell you that.
Certainly, when I learned that Rayman Legends Retold is a collaboration between the original developers Ubisoft Montpellier, who have since made Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and Ubisoft Milan, the team behind the excellent Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle series, I calmed down a little. And then I played it and realized maybe they knew what they were doing.
With Rayman Legends Retold, Ubisoft leaves the level design largely alone. In fact, the older UbiArt Framework engine was designed to work within Ubisoft’s more modern Snowdrop engine, so the original levels were imported directly. Although all the elements are new, the presentation is much the same. Instead, what they add focuses on the interstitial moments between levels.
While I remembered the beautiful 2D artwork of Rayman Legends’ levels—ruined castles, richly green swamps, and golden Day of the Dead-themed deserts—I had forgotten how those levels were put together. Each world was presented as a corridor in a bare gallery with the entrance to the levels existing as frames that one could jump into. Although it arrived on the scene more than 15 years after Super Mario 64 and used the same conceit of jumping into webs to load a level, its core world was much less cohesive than Princess Peach’s Castle. So Ubisoft puts life into the seams between levels until they’re ready to burst.
“It’s a little bit all over the place,” says production manager Alessandro Arndt Mucchi, describing the story and layout of Rayman Legends. “There’s a rich world there that we felt needed a new twist, because we don’t really understand what’s going on in the Glade of Dreams.” Apparently, the story of Rayman Legends is that an evil magician stirs up the nightmares of Polokus, the Bubble Dreamer. The god’s nightly reflections form the lands of the Glade of Dreams, so nightmares mean chaos in his realms. Rayman and his friends are awakened to defeat the magician and make things right. However, this is only briefly explained to you in an opening cutscene and is rarely addressed afterward.
Ubisoft solves this problem in several ways. The most overt is new, fully voiced cutscenes that sound a bit like Ubisoft’s pitch to give Rayman the Super Mario Bros. treatment. Movie, but as beautiful as they are, it’s the more subtle touches that won me over.
(I’m stretching the definition of “subtle” here because I’m about to talk at length about a toad taking a shower.)
In the first Rayman Legends, the second world, Toad Story, is a set of swamp levels filled with bean stalks and aggressive amphibians. The levels are a glorious mix of ground-based platforming, where you leap and bound over the bamboo structures of the toad camps, swim under them in swamp waters, and glide above them, carried by gusts of hot air. The boss of this world, an armored toad, appears at the eighth of its nine levels. Summoned by the evil magician, you watch as boots and gloves are launched onto the feet and hands of giant amphibians, an introduction that lasts six seconds. You then fight the Armored Toad, dodging his missiles as he flies around with rocket boots and hides behind a bubble shield. This works, but it works much better in Rayman Legends Retold.
Rather than an episode of a story set in a bare gallery, the second world is now a location: Stinkbog. Located in the swamp, the entrances to the levels are portals that you must reach by jumping off walls between trees, flying over gusts of wind, and running along winding lines of ivy. Stand in front of a flat gate and you hear the whispers of its music flowing through the air. The hub is full of life. In the foreground, crows fluff their feathers, and in the background, signs of toad camps, bamboo staircases encircling vast vines that grow like redwoods. It’s both a preview of the levels you’ll enter and an environment to explore in itself.
The best contact, however, is there as soon as you arrive at Stingbog: in the middle distance, a toad waist-deep in swamp mud sniffs its pits. One armpit, then the other, then back to the first. He’s a toad who just wants to clean himself. You leave him behind when you move the screen to the right and start jumping around the world levels. But later, when you embark on one of Rayman Legends Retold’s new level types, Dragon Ride, you see him again.
Resembling the Starfox games seen through the lens of How to Train Your Dragon, these new levels have you climbing onto the back of a scaly, fire-breathing mount and guiding it through a roller coaster of dangers. You have to pass a needle between obstacles and enemy fire, roll the cannon left and right to avoid anything blocking your path, or blow a hole through barriers with fireballs. “Instead of just jumping from one hub to another through a menu or a board, we wanted to give the impression that we are actually discovering these places,” explains animation director Marco Renso. “It’s the fantasy of these levels. You’re flying through the Glade of Dreams, so you’re seeing these realms from a different perspective.”
Renso explains that these sections are an opportunity to give bosses more “space,” saying “it was an opportunity to make them feel a little more present.” In Stinkbog’s Dragon Ride, for example, you see next to the level’s action the giant toad from before finally taking a bath. Smaller toads clean his pits with mops, and you can see in his face that he is perfectly happy. It’s just another beautiful day in the swamp. And then you run through the toad camp, setting the vines on fire and breaking down the barricades.
The toad is easy to miss if your attention is focused on the path in front of you, but he gets up in a panic and begins sprinting off-screen, only a tight loincloth covering his big green butt. A little later, on the path ahead of you is a towel rack and a set of armor. The Toad reappears from the side of the screen, pulls himself up onto the path, and begins shooting at a large armored rocket boot. You have to dodge to the side to get around him before he flies off-screen again, a fallen towel floating to the ground in his wake. He then appears flying backwards on the screen, pulling up his armored breeches. “Marco presented the whole team with different creative briefs about these moments – the dragon rides, the new musical levels – and I can’t count the times I had tears in my eyes, crying with laughter,” says Arndt Mucchi. “It was so much fun discovering all these things about the world we were working on.”
As you continue on your way, causing havoc in the toad camp, some toads parachute in to try to block your path while others set off colorful fireworks to blind you. The Toad Chief, now fully armored, returns, ready to defend his kingdom. He tries to grab you out of the air, forcing you to plunge your dragon into a hollow bamboo cane. Moments later, his armored fists start punching through walls and you have to get around them.
Out of the tube, the action shifts from one side to the other. You fly between pieces of floating castle, Toads drift down on parachutes and shoot you with bazookas, and in the background the armored Toad throws pieces of masonry towards you. Everywhere you look there is life and activity.
Duck and dive in between all these attacks and the armored toad finally gets struck by lightning and he dives out of sight. However, your victory is short-lived, a second bolt stuns your dragon and the camera changes view again, chasing you down as you guide your unconscious mount between obstacles. Moments before crashing to the ground, he recovers and you emerge on the other side of the battle into a desert land, the next hub.
I’m a big fan of the original Rayman Legends, but I have to admit that this is a much better way to connect its worlds. Where before the Armored Toad was a fun boss fight, now it’s one that casts you as a bumbling invader ruining the Toad Kingdom’s otherwise happy day. Rayman’s creators have always appreciated slapstick and silliness, and Rayman Legends Retold seems to have found a rich new vein just beneath the surface of a game that was already exceptionally fun.
A remake is never automatically good or automatically bad, some seem to be nothing more than nostalgia, while others recreate and modify a classic so deftly that you forget to question what was part of the original and what was added. Based on the few hours I’ve played Rayman Legends Retold, it appears to be the latter. I cringed at the email informing me that Ubisoft was remaking Rayman Legends, so I found myself so excited to play the full game that it shows how much I enjoyed what I saw.
Oh, and they add new levels of music. So that swung the needle even further into the professional region.
