Engineering tissue similar in structure to their natural equivalents is a major challenge and crucial to function. Despite attempts to engineer skeletal muscle, it is still difficult to effectively mimic tissue architecture. Rigid scaffolds can guide cell alignment but have the critical drawback of hindering mechanical function of the resultant tissue. We present a method for creating highly ordered tissue-only constructs by using rigid microtopographically patterned surfaces to first guide myoblast alignment, followed by transfer of aligned myotubes into a degradable hydrogel and self-organization of the ordered cells into a functional, 3-dimensional, free-standing construct independent of the initial template substrate. Histology revealed an intracellular organization resembling that of native muscle. Aligned cell constructs exhibited a 2-fold increase in peak force production compared to controls. Effective specific force, or force normalized over cross-sectional area, was increased by 23%. This template, transfer, and self-organization strategy is envisioned to be broadly useful in improving construct function and clinical applicability for highly ordered tissues like muscle.