Tell It to the Cleaning Lady on Monday
With the impending release of the "Scott Pilgrim vs The World" film, many people might peg this "Scott Pilgrim vs The World:The Game" as another movie adapation and immediately file it under their "ignore forever" section of their brain. However, this downloadable brawler is more then a little extra revenue being squeezed from a film IP, and is instead entirely worthy of the $10 (in Canadian monies).
Scott Pilgrim vs the World: The Game is a video game retelling of the six part Scott Pilgrim comic series. And by retelling, I mean it has the same extremely ignoreable story that all brawlers from the SNES era has. Technically, Scott Pilgrim, a 23 year-old slacker, wants to date Ramona Flowers, an Amazon.ca delivery girl who uses his brain as a sub-space highway (yeah, read the book some time), but first must defeat her seven evil exes. But guess what! The story really never comes into effect at all throughout the entire game and essentially boils down to beat up everyone. This never is much of a problem, as most brawlers don't have nor do they ever need to motivate players to continue the story beyond the usual "if you don't kill these dudes, they win". Howver, this isn't to say there's nothing for fans of the comics. There are a lot of winks and nods for those rabid fans of the series, such as the ridiculous mithril skateboard or even the Vegan Police warning in the intro. Also there are a bunch of easter eggs for old-school gamers in general, such as the adorable broken pixels in the subspace highways.
Gameplay-wise, Scott Pilgrim plays very similar to "Castle Crashers" with a few tweaks. Your buttons are mapped for light attack, strong attack, jumping, and blocking. But instead of magic, you have a special tornado spin attack and also a character assist, in which series mainstay Knives Chau will jump in and, well, assist the character depending on who you are currently playing as. As you level up, you unlock new attacks (ground attacks, rear attacks, etc.) and combos. All common fare. Movement is where Pilgrim differs a lot from "Castle Crashers", in which it seems a lot smoother, with dashing being linked to how far and high you can jump, and a vertical plane dodge that helps with later bosses. Also, stats do not increase as the character levels up, and is instead controlled by items bought in stores, found during stages. For example, one needs to buy an item such as "The Vegan Cookbook" to increase defense, otherwise your character will remain at zero defense forever.
The artwork and music are what really shines in Scott Pilgrim. The soundtrack was composed by Anamanguchi (sp? maybe), a band consisting of three guitarists and a hacked NES. The music sounds extremely retro without being cheesy, and really fits the retro SNES feel the game radiates at every turn. The art essentially copies the style from the comics, and is always colored nice and bright, a nice reprieve from the dreary brown and deserty pallette modern games love to use. Every chance given, the artists used very obvious pixels, such as the overworld being a nod to Super Mario 3, and even the Universal and Ubisoft logos. Its all very precious, and brought warm feelings to my heart.
The game isn't without some flaws. There's no online support other than rankings. Why this wasn't included is puzzling, as the game is infinitely more fun co-op. One common opinion seems to be that making everyone play in the same room is more in tune with the SNES feel, but this seems to be at the expense of gameplay unlike other retro additions to the game. The game is also an ungodly glitch festival (as of 12/08/2010), with characters being alive at 0 HP, levels just stopping without being able to continue, music not turning on, map glitches, and just completely system freezes mid gameplay. Hopefully, this gets ironed out with patches, but for now its rather infuriating. Also, I guess they couldn't get permission to use a lot of the name's of properties. One of the cooler things about the book was the fact that characters visited places in Toronto that I too frequent. However, Lee Palace gets renamed Leo's Place, Sneaky Dee's becomes Dee's, and so on.
If you loved the comics or even the movie when it comes out, Scott Pilgrim vs the World: The Game is a must buy, especially at $10. If you feel nothing but apathy for either, $10 is still a great price for a competent brawler. Just make sure you have extra controllers and somene else you can con into playing with you.
