After reading through the Scott Pilgrim comic book series and seeing the great movie, I had to play the Scott Pilgrim video game just to complete my indulgence.  I already knew from previews that this wasn't going to just be another movie cash-in, and after playing it a while, I can safely say that it's amusing and creative, and has an excellent soundtrack.  The pixelized character art and unique sense of humor make it a joy to experience. 
 
To -play-, however, is another thing.  I'm very much aware that Scott Pilgrim is a faithful homage to River City Ransom, but my first impressions of the game were "Okay, how is this any different from every other beat-'em-up released in the past few years?"  You steadily walk to the right, beating up foes, gaining money and experience points that get you new abilities and items and...*yawn*.  In the end, all that's setting the game apart is its setting, which is really strong, don't get me wrong, but there are so many fundamental problems with the genre that very quickly turn me off.  I'm only halfway through the game, but I'm already required to grind my ass off in order to progress, which pretty much kills the fun.  It's the same repetition that caused me to give up on Castle Crashers, another XBLA beat-'em-up that's very similar to Scott Pilgrim. 
 
My main problem with these beat-'em-ups is that they reward persistence, rather than strategy or skill.  In a large crowd of enemies, it's difficult to defend yourself.  Most of the abilities you acquire require you to button mash even more, not less, as trying to pull them off as part of a combo is annoying, and it's more effective to just hammer the punch button until everything is dead.  Thanks to the art style, it can also be difficult to tell whether you're actually next to an enemy or on a different plane, so precision moves are left in the dust as the more reliable punches and kicks continue to take precedence.  The block button's nearly useless, and trying to pick up a baseball bat to defend myself is difficult in a large crowd of enemies, considering you have to be pixel-perfect before the game figures out you're trying to find some strategy.  Add to this an annoyingly sluggish Scott, and the basic gameplay is an exercise in tedium. 
 
Of course, the "classic" style beat-'em-up is so etched in our minds that it's hard to imagine what the more modern versions of the genre are.  To be completely honest, they're everywhere.  Batman: Arkham Asylum fits it perfectly.  God of War.  No More Heroes.  Even Kingdom Hearts is a damn Beat-'Em-Up.  You really wouldn't think it looking at them, but don't all of those games require you to run into a bunch of enemies and rapidly mash "attack" until everything around you is dead?  The fighting is a core part of their gameplay, just as it is in Scott Pilgrim or Castle Crashers.  But those games also realize that fighting tons of enemies can't hold the game up on its own.  Batman has stealth elements and a Metroid-esque maze, God of War has plenty of platforming and puzzle solving, Kingdom Hearts has the whole "RPG" aspect down with its character development and boss fights, and No More Heroes...is probably the weakest of the games I just listed.  Not coincidentally, it's also the closest thing to the classic beat-'em-up formula.  Even the core game mechanics offer a level of depth that Scott Pilgrim can't compete with.  Batman throws tons of enemies at you, but it also lets you know when an enemy's about to attack so you can counter, and gives you warning when an enemy picks up a weapon to throw at you.  All of these elements communicate to the player the information he needs to get through the fight.  Comparatively, Scott Pilgrim's battles may as well be obscured by a cartoon dust cloud. 
 
Don't get me wrong; Scott Pilgrim's not a bad game.  At 10 dollars, I don't feel ripped off, and it's certainly got plenty of charm in its art and music.  The problem is that it doesn't want to evolve; it's an homage to old-school gaming, and with it, takes all of the flaws with it as well (I might as well mention Dragon Quest IX here, which also has issues growing up).  As a game to blow off steam, it works well, though the necessity to grind in order to finish the game doesn't help its case.  As a comic book adaptation, it works pretty well, and I really can't see any other ways the series could be adapted to a video game format.  Just remember that "retro" is not synonymous with "quality".

In my opinion, if they wanted the game to be an "evolved" beat-em-up game, then they wouldn't have designed it to be an old-school game.  They could've just designed Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game to be a modern beat-em-up.  So in order for it to be an old-school style game, it will have its flaws like no online play, hard to determine planes (like Double Dragon), hellish wave of enemies (like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games), button mashing, true grinding to level up, and even graphically, they intentionally showed graphics glitches (in subspace), but at least you can save your game progress lol!  And it still did improve some aspects like controls, the variety of the moves and animations and overall pacing of the game. :)
 
Although there are game-breaking glitches like the game hangs or a part of a level won't proceed or profiles get overwritten.  These are the quality-issues in developing the game that shouldn't be there coz it basically breaks the experience. 
 
For me, I think it's an old-school beat-em-up.  It's not trying to be modern to pay homage to old-school gaming.  They designed it that way for old NES and SNES fans to appreciate and be nostalgic about old-school gaming, even with the flaws since basically, both the game and the comics are targeting an audience of old-school gamers. :) 
 
As for Castle Crashers, I only played the demo for the PSN.  Well I think it wasn't intended to pay homage to old-school beat-em-up games, so I guess it should have that evolution thingy to make it modern lol!  So I really can't comment on the game since I haven't really played it. lol!

Old thread but its really funny to me the guy somewhat defending the scott pilgrim game is calling it an old school beat em up, everything that sucks about the scott pilgrim game revolves around its rpg mechanics which ARE an attempt to modernize the beat em up genre and stretch the games playtime out to a insulting degree completely destroying the gameplay loop that makes normal actual old school beat em ups good. (The normal loop being: Getting your ass kicked because you dont know what to do yet, learn from it, improve, repeat. And because the games are reletivaly short, hard and simple that loop is very short and quickly repeating which enables fast iteration and is what makes playing em addicting to our brains ...unless someone doesnt learn and keeps repeating the same mistakes that is) I love beat em ups but this game just suuuuuucks to play. "Yeah but you need to level up and grind to get better first!" Wtf does that add to anything except artificially making me do the same thing over and over just because... in case whoever is reading this didnt notice, I really wanted to like this game, everything besides how the gameplay was designed is lovely about this game but I just can not get over how shitty the game feels before you level up. And yeah you could beat the game without grinding but that way every battle takes aaaaaaages (and I know because i just straight up refuse to waste my time grinding and ive tried playing scott pilgrim like that too. It also really obfuscates anything the game is trying to teach the player imo, "am i getting my ass kicked because because im missing a mechanic or do i need to grind more?")

I also never finished castle crashers but also dont remember ever needing to grind in it or battles feeling to long like in scott pilgrim? Might be misremembering.

@lestephan: Yeah, old. I liked the game though; thought it played great. Great music too.

@ntm: Ill agree the music is great :). Like I said I adore everything about it besides playing it xD

Im curious though, did you play it through alone or with someone else?

On my own its such an awful slog imo, like I said everything seems to take aaaaaaages to beat up, and your moveset starts out so limited and takes so long to expand. I still go back to the game to try once in a while but its just so uuugh. I just cant, strangely enough. Id just rather play any other beat em up(with the exception of the nes double dragons, some steamtrash or other straight up barely designed/functioning ones) I find it especially strange how off putting it is to me as im the kinda guy that can still enjoy weird bad low budget ps1 games as long as they do something interesting (and im barely nostalgic for the thing,only got one years later when they were dirt cheap and never really bought any games for it untill somewhere in the ps3 era. My friends as a kid only had gta which I hated literally everything about at the time being 10 years old, tekken, crash bandicoot and dragon ball*shivers* final bout... xD )

Scott pilgrim to me is worse than a full on bad game haha With a real bad game I can just let it be, not think about it anymore. But with a game like this I keep wanting to give it a chance but keep getting pissed off when trying cuz when it comes to playing its like they actively designed it to personally frustrate me xD(slight exageration but you get what I mean right :p)

I also used to be a huge fan of the guy who made the sprites and animations for the scott pilgrim. Him working on a game was a dream come true.....except that in reality I absolutely hate playing it sadly...I was so dissapointed i havent looked at the guys work since and have forgotten his name even apparently xD (edit: ah looked in the wiki, paul robertson RIGHT :D and cool to see he worked on some other games ive played with phenomenal 2d animation too like sigma star saga and contra 4, didnt know that, thanks gb wiki!)

@lestephan: On my own on PS3 when it came out. I liked the upgrading system from what I remember. I don't remember having any issues with things taking too long to beat up. It has been years since I've played it. I remember not liking some of the bosses. I think.

I was always a Streets of Rage guy, so whenever i tried some of the more modern games that are inspired by River City Ransom i always thought... this is ok, but it's not as good as SOR. It's the same with Scott Pilgrim, there's something about the enemy design and feel of a SOR game that just does it for me, they captured it mostly with SOR4 but all that did was lead me back to Streets of Rage Remake which i've been playing almost every day since SOR4 came out.

I have to give a shoutout to Fight'N Rage, which is one of the best beat em ups to come out in recent memory.

I've never played this game but It seems like it was very much based on River City Ransom. In my experience, River City Ransom had the exact same problem. While in the extremely awkward renegade/nekketsu kouha kunio kun (the first arcade game) I could avoid getting hit through predicting/crowd control and different moves had different uses (even if it had balance issues), in the much more polished River City Ransom it felt like I just had to buy more items if I didn't want to get it. I don't know if there's a way to play well without unlocking everything, but I was too bored to find that out and nobody on the internet seems to tell me how the actual core gameplay works and instead tells me about the RPG mechanics. The result of the way these two are mixed is a lackluster beat 'em up and a lackluster RPG, but with extremely charming presentation that keeps you playing.

So I guess nothing new has been mentioned about Ubisoft working on making this game available again.

Yeah. Okay. Thanks.