Scott Pilgrim EX review

I like garlic bread. It’s not really a meal, though. Most comfort foods are hearty and filling, but few taste as good as even cheap garlic bread, which leaves me full in a comparatively hollow sort of way. Maybe I love it because beneath all the carbohydrates, garlic bread is nostalgic—and nostalgia is also craveable and easy to love but, in great quantities, bad for you.

Side-scrolling beat ‘em ups tend to have the same reputation, perhaps unfairly, and I think that’s why recent ones like the excellent Absolum and Scott Pilgrim EX exhibit an urge to fuse with more apparently nutritious, thinky genres like roguelikes and RPGs. In EX’s case, the result is a modern take on River City Ransom set in an explorable city stuffed with secrets and chatty NPCs, where money pours out of enemies and each of the seven playable characters embodies a fighting game archetype, waiting to be upgraded with stat-boosting items. It’s bigger than developer Tribute’s previous games, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge and Marvel: Cosmic Invasion, and sometimes better. But it feels mostly like a lateral move that I wish had either committed harder to its unique ideas or stuck to the simplicity of its inspirations.

I still liked it though, because I like garlic bread.

Scott Pilgrim EX's campaign is a hefty five-ish hours—that's short in many genres, but quite long compared to beat 'em ups in coin-op cabinets designed to pilfer $5 from you in 45 minutes. Each character is powered up by four stats you can buy at shops: strength boosts attack power and throwables, vitality increases health, willpower beefs up collectible assist supers, and agility improves your movement speed and crit chance.

When I first saw this stuff, I got a little worried. The first Scott Pilgrim game has a notoriously slow start because a good chunk of your power came from progression, and while I don’t mind a grindy beat ‘em up like Castle Crashers every once in awhile, these sorts of systems can drown perfectly good meat and potatoes in a sea of distracting gravy. Thankfully, EX feels superlatively smooth the minute you start punching dudes out, and it only gets smoother as you pile on upgrades.

Mash notes

The heart of the action is masher-friendly light and heavy one-button combos, but you have more tools than you might expect. Blocks and spot dodges make for welcome defensive options, as do invincible throws and super moves, which can be used to control a crowd gracefully. Hop attacks and specials vary from character to character, and those fighting game archetypes I mentioned earlier make the roster feel impressively varied. The game doesn't make you think very often, but it does reward you for it.

Robot-01, for instance, is a zoner who can reset enemies to a safe distance and blow them away with grenades and bombs. Lucas Lee is on the other end of the spectrum: a grappler who bypasses blocks and sends enemies flying with devastating throws. Their movesets aren’t as complex as the tags might imply, but the variety on offer pushes the player to graduate beyond autopilot without making the basics fussy.

The problem is, stat upgrades let you become so powerful that these neat embellishments don’t shine as much as they could. As I wandered the city, its various zones would be randomly taken over by hostile demons, vegans, and so on. The encounters put up a bit of a fight in the early and mid game, but maxing out a given character’s stats is trivially easy, and by that point I could shred through jobbers like it’s nothing. You can even run past most fights that spawn randomly, which reduces them to optional pinatas you can beat down if you're short on cash.

Shredder's Revenge had stats too, but it ended the campaign right as you achieved full (turtle) power and doled out limited stats for arcade mode. Scott Pilgrim EX has no arcade mode, and its adventure mode rewards mashing too much even on the hardest setting. It's a great setup for mindless multiplayer brawls, but so is every other beat 'em up, and they're usually about a fifth as long as this game or have some long-term progression beyond a few stats you can max out in a few hours. The extensive character movesets, flashy assist attacks, unique throwables, and sheer enemy variety show that the game is capable of more.

Many of those enemies are fun to work around, especially when all manner of foes randomly funnel in towards you all requiring a different approach. Grab the one that always blocks, dodge that projectile, chuck that bomb back at the guy that threw it, and so on. I was making decisions, and I liked it! But with maxed out agility and strength, I could just blaze around the screen at lightspeed and mash to kill almost everything that wasn’t a boss (who are easily melted with assist attacks).

The very mechanics that EX throws in to transcend its seeming garlic bread-ness let me turn it into an extremely garlic bread sort of game. New Game+ even lets you replay the story with all your cash and items in tow, rewarding you even more for doing less.

It’s still fun at its easiest thanks to punchy feedback in combat and the expressive character playstyles I mentioned, and I’d rather play a frictionless slugfest than a grindy slogfest. But this is where some arcadey trappings—a shorter 1CC mode, a boss rush mode, or something like Castle Crashers’s mind-searing “insane” difficulty—might have given a fully kitted-out character a proper challenge. Tribute’s last game, Marvel: Cosmic Invasion, had some of this stuff with its unlockable arcade mode modifiers, but it’s an opportunity EX leaves on the table. As it stands, the difficulty curve is weirdly inverted unless you switch characters frequently, start a new save with each playthrough, or avoid spending your hard-earned cash, which makes all the filler fights even less rewarding.

Rewinding up

Despite the modernizations, EX is even more of a nostalgia-fest than the median beat 'em up, as Scott Pilgrim's world is tick-full on a diet of yesteryear's pop culture. Save points swing around and sound off almost exactly like those in the original Sonic the Hedgehog games, and the roster of enemies draws from a referential palette tailor-made for the arcade kids and mall rats of the '80s and '90s. Robert-ombs and legally distinct piranha plants establish a long-term commitment to Super Mario references, vampires lie in wait at Casa Vania, and ‘Kaptor’ ninjas pull in the player with a chain as if to yell, "Get over here!”

It's cute, if not always funny when it wants to be. A lot of the referential humor boils down to pointing at an old thing and going, "That's old; remember that?" I infer that this works in Scott's comics because his media obsession is a signifier of his immaturity and obliviousness, but EX makes no detailed critiques in that vein, so it comes off as surface-level reminiscing—in other words, a whole lot of garlic bread. One boss just paraphrases Dracula's "What is a man?" speech from Symphony of the Night without much of a punchline, as if making the reference just to cross it off a checklist. EX remembers all sorts of videogames, but fails to say anything about them.

The city ultimately won me over, though, with bright and appealing spritework as well as Anamaguchi’s superlative OST, which massages the ears with sugary shades of garage rock and chiptune pop. The art isn’t as consistent—EX looks much flatter than most beat ‘em ups which occasionally leads to confusing perspective issues—but memorable haunts like Lord Burger's Burger Fort and each character's goofy boss fight-specific persona won a lasting spot in my memory center even as a Scott Pilgrim novice. Exploring its zany rifts would fit a friend group of series diehards like a bespoke suit.

Despite my bones to pick, EX is replayable and easy to like, with unique endings for each character and loads of upgrades to nab. But it’s so close to being an all-time great that I lament each lost opportunity, and a meaningful postgame challenge along the lines of Cosmic Invasion's arcade mode or Streets of Rage 4's survival mode would go a long way in making Scott Pilgrim's latest adventure feel truly complete.