"Welcome to the Salty Spitoon. How tough are you?"
"How tough am I!? I beat Rayman 1!"
"Yeah, so?"
"Four times. On four different consoles including the weird Game Boy Advance port with the small screen and that one Game Boy Color version no one remembers that actually has a Mr. Dark boss battle."
"R-Right this way!"

This one is a stinker. It attempts to be realistic by having a fuel meter and a damage model for your car. This means that you have to pay to repair your car and refill your tank after each race. This feature sounds fine in theory but these cars chug fuel like no other, and turning without careening into a wall is nearly impossible.

In my extensive research, I could not figure out what the “DT” in DT Racer stood for. I can only assume that it was a coded warning of “Don’t touch” that I didn’t notice until it was too late.

Severely misguided attempt to add more structure to a game that was already structured just fine for what it was. Now there's an upgrade system, but you start off weaker than where you started off in the original version. There's an open world, but its horribly aimless and kills the mood of the original Hall of Doors, while also running worse than anything else in the game. Cutscenes and dialogue have been added to elaborate on plot points, except the game's story didn't really need elaboration so everything ends up getting explained twice while the mystery of the original is lost. Rayman 2 didn't have a hub world because it was all meant to feel like one continuous adventure, winding through different kinds of dark fantasy/steam punk-inspired environments while constantly being tailed by your enemy. The hub world here adds nothing, neither do the extra cutscenes, and while you have the option to switch to the original version's gibberish language, the game hides that option and doesn't save it when you quit, meaning most of the time you'll be hearing the much more boring version of the dialogue.

The biggest heartbreaker to me was you can no longer read the game's extensive lore, something you could originally access at any time in the original game. Rayman 2 on the N64 was my first experience playing a game where the world was wholly a mystery to me, and being able to read lore about all the characters being thousands of years old, and how each character was involved in creating the universe, it blew my child-mind. And none of it was ever even brought up in the story, it was the first time I could feel how huge the world of a game was, not through it having a literal huge map but by smartly implying it while going through the story. But Revolution is interested in removing all of that wonder, and makes sure that every element is as obvious as possible. And the game takes too damn long to load! I still enjoyed it to some extent because underneath all the bad changes it's still my beloved Rayman 2, but in no way is this the definitive version of the game, would never recommend this to be the way someone experience one of my favorite games.

The thing about "Childlike Wonder" is that it accounts for both the beautifully earnest, warm, yet often unsettling and traumatic experiences of early life. Despite the game's general lack of challenge, Rayman 2's world perfectly walks the line between lush, comforting sentimentality and supernatural peril. It captures the bizarre, wholesome yet visually disturbed imagination of an adolescent kid. Only a handful of minutes traversing the dimly lit, melancholic Glade of Dreams is enough to lure the player into a false sense of security, preying upon the childlike naïveté the game’s atmosphere promotes. This is used to toss them into a blind pit of jarring sounds and visuals crafted from the most chaotic recesses of a child’s creative mind. Whether they’re the unintelligible mumblings of a limbless marsupial-dog hybrid, or the horror of escaping the clutches of a toothed monster from within its maw, these striking visuals, much like the memories and thought processes of a child are seen as erratic or hard-to-follow in the eyes of a more jaded adult. This is why, in a meta sense, it feels almost poetic that this game has no definitive version, having been re-released on all but your TI-84 X Calculator over nearly two decades, each platform offering a somewhat different interpretation on the game's vision.