Bread’s Game Journal 04/28/22: Boy, That Scott Pilgrim Game Has Aged Weird.
The year is 2010, I am still a teenager working at the local amusement park. I am not paid a lot, but I bought and read every volume of Scott Pilgrim, the movie is coming out, and I couldn’t be more amped! I even bought and played the fantastic tie in game, with excellent music and impressive sprite work to spare, I have a great time with it all. Years later, it’s delisted, and quickly the Scott Pilgrim movie tie in game becomes a holy grail for a lot of people.
The year is 2022, I just finished playing Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World with a friend of mine on my Nintendo Switch, and it’s…..not great. I am no longer having all that good of a time! So yeah, my revisit of the Scott Pilgrim game didn’t exactly go as I had hoped it would. Somewhere along the line my brain must have simply forgotten the cheaper aspects of this game, and boy are there a lot of them.
To lead off with something positive, what I said about the music and sprite work holds true. As a piece of visual and musical art, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World holds up beautifully! The problems arise when you get down to actually playing the thing. Most notably, this game is brutally difficult, and explains itself very poorly! I guess we all must have forgotten this, because I can tell you that I sure did. What looks outwardly like a classic Beat ‘Em Up game is in fact this awkward pseudo action RPG, that has very little chill.
Me and a friend went through the game on a pretty direct path, and even though I remembered that you’re supposed to spend the money you pick up on food for extra XP, by the last few levels we were severely outpowered by even the basic enemies. Making matters worse is the enemies tendency to exploit the fact that this game inexplicably doesn’t have any kind of grace period after being attacked, unlike many other in the Beat Em Up genre, we would get combo’d down pretty fast by random mooks and be dead before we even really had a chance to respond to what was happening, it made for a lot of frustrating moments in a game I really remember being a lot more fun than this!
This post doesn’t really have anywhere to go, other than voicing some frustration with a game that’s aged a little worse than I think a lot of us assumed it had. It’s compounded by the fact that it’s become this kind of holy grail after it’s initial de-listing. I guess after all this time, I was hoping for something to bring me back to that fun time. Instead this just reminds me that we omit some things from some of the classics we like.
Except the things I like, of course. Those are flawless.
