Scott Pilgrim EX Is A Perfect Encore

I’m at the age where halfway through a concert I start checking my phone and doing the math on how many more songs are left. Where the music once felt like a soul-transforming rift in space and time stretching out before an endless night, I now dread the performative wait for the band to come back on stage and play its final post-credits bonus tracks. Scott Pilgrim EX is a window back into the mindset of a young 20-something who is not tired, cynical, and consumed with rage over Uber surge pricing. It’s a bite-sized adventure full of retro joy and simple problems with familiar solutions. Also a parade of nostalgia-tickling references to gaming’s past.

Scott Pilgrim EX is a side-scrolling beat ’em up from Tribute Games, makers of pixel art action games like Mercenary Kings and Flinthook, though the studio is best know for its collaboration with Dotemu on the best-in-class Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Marvel Cosmic Invasion arcade brawlers. Talent who worked on the 2010 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World movie tie-in game from Ubisoft cofounded the studio and worked on EX, while Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley was also involved. Renowned pixel artist Paul Robertson also contributed, and chiptune pop rock band Anamanaguchi did the soundtrack.

The gang’s all here, in other words, and Scott Pilgrim EX, out March 3 on PC and console, serves as both an admirable spiritual successor to the first game and a refreshing evolution of traditional beat ’em up structure. Instead of a sequence of isolated levels with linear action bookended by brief animated vignettes, Tribute’s latest game takes place across a single connected map. Part Castlevania, part River City Ransom, the open-world feel makes exploration more interesting and rewarding. This new relationship to the environments as you run back and forth across a colorful Adult Swim-cartoon-like rendering of Toronto brings a fresh energy to the stuff you spend 99 percent of the game doing: punching and kicking bad guys.

The animations look great, the music is excellent, and the action feels surprisingly fresh. The city is home to three factions—robots, demons, and vegan gang members—and much of my time there was spent K.O.-ing them for money to buy cheeseburgers and gear to upgrade my stats. The loose RPG elements offer just enough of a sense of progression to keep you fighting enemies as you run back and forth between objectives, but it helps that the brawler formula here is inching in the direction of a 2D fighting game.

Scott Pilgrim‘s move list doesn’t just rip-off Street Fighter‘s Ryu for fun. Stringing together light and heavy attack combos and peppering in blocks and aerial attacks make a huge difference in combat vs. just mashing punches and special abilities. A laundry list of items you can pick up and bash enemies with, from Mario Bros. 2-looking turnips to black mage wands, offer plenty of other advantages to mix fights up with. The early boss fights ramp up in difficulty, too. While none of it’s hard, it doesn’t feel perfunctory and it rewards playing with a friend in couch co-op or online (up to four players, though you can’t mix and match).

I’ve gotten pretty far without telling you the actual premise of Scott Pilgrim EX‘s story. That’s because, for better and worse, it’s mostly pretty ancillary to the experience of playing it. That might be a bummer for Scott Pilgrim fans mourning the cancelation of the Netflix anime series, but while the dialogue is minimal it’s also sweet, funny, and perfectly expands on the tone of the source material. The story begins with mechanical nemesis Metal Scott taking Scott’s bandmates and scattering them across time and space. The only way to rescue them is to find relics and play tunes to open portals and travel to various settings—prehistoric, fantasy gothic, sci-fi—to get them back. It’s a perfectly executed homage to Chrono Trigger that, like a lot of Scott Pilgrim EX‘s references, feels genuine and earned rather than distracting.

Though brief at only 5-8 hours for a completionist run, I still haven’t finished Scott Pilgrim EX yet so I’m not slapping the “Kotaku review” label on this post yet. I’m looking forward to savoring it a bit more and playing with other friends online. Like the original Scott Pilgrim game, it’s the kind of game I love to hop into after coming back from a night out, reminding me of what not feeling old used to feel like. It’s a silly 16-bit-looking playground where every mean thing can be punched in the face and every problem is wiped away the second you scroll far enough in one direction or another. I thought I was getting burned out on retro beat ’em ups but Scott Pilgrim EX is too delightful to skip.