Why the hell did we want the Scott Pilgrim VS The World game back? I remember loving it when it first came out. It was a blast. I wasn’t even a fan of the series. I never read the comics. I bought the game before seeing the movie and I got a lot of my friends in college to buy it as well. All of us would play it non-stop for a while and we loved it. We bought the DLC and everything. When it came time to beg for it to come back I was right there begging with everyone else. I loved it in college! I wanted to buy it and play it with friends again, but… why…? The game is awful.
First I will go over why it took me so long to play it after the re-release dropped. For the longest I just didn’t have time to play it. Then I wasn’t in the mood for beat ‘em ups. I have the Capcom collection collecting dust. Same with a lot of other beat ‘em ups on my Switch. These days they just aren’t fun single player experiences anymore. I feel like I should be doing something better whenever I play one single player right now. This is why I’ve not bought Streets of Rage 4, yet. A few days ago my wife’s brother came over and wanted to play a team game. We played Scott Pilgrim.
Upon booting it up I was greeted with the famous vegan opener and the wonderful Anamanaguchi soundtrack. I am humming along and reliving one of my favorite games from college. Then we go to the how to play section and there are 13 fucking pages of walls of text on how to play. Some of the shit wasn’t working. Even after we went back and reread the walls of text. For example: The coming back to life by stealing life from another player. It refused to work. So, we then looked at the controls, turned off friendly damage, and played. I remember in college playing on the hardest difficulty and enjoying it. Today we did average joe because I was playing with people who were new to the game, and beat’ em ups.
I am then greeted with the Mario 2 character select screen that I loved, the wonderful music, and choosing my favorite characters again. Then comes the beautiful overworld to get us ready to start the game. Next I am humming along to “Another Winter” the second the song starts and looking at the absolutely gorgeous pixel art. Then it starts. An enemy AI charges and knocks me down before the block button registers. I am then laying on the ground waiting to get up. It takes way too long to get off of the ground in the game. No matter if I am mashing jump or block I do not get up faster. Every screen transition, or new spawn of baddies, this happens. I just started to block the second we finished off the baddies to prevent this from happening. Then we kept knocking down the baddies. We have to wait for them to get up because we didn’t unlock the duck attack yet. This meant everyone would just pick up all the baddies and carry them because they kept trying to hit them on the ground since they were laying there for so long. Due to them refusing to get up, this caused every fight to drag on.
I never noticed this before but the game actively encourages you to hug the top of the screen. To the point where you will take a lot of damage if you’re walking in the middle of the screen, or you will miss bonus stages. It seems almost every stage has some alert where you need to get to the top of the screen to prevent you from getting run over/trampled/injured in a bullshit way. Now, since I had played the game before I knew to hug the top, just to check for bonus stages. I had completely forgotten about the shit that runs you over. The others were constantly getting run over because they gave you very little time to react. By the time the !!!’s leave the screen something is speeding across the stage. The other issue with the level designs is there are regular people in the battlefield. You can hit these people and they react. You can’t kill them and they do not fight back. Everyone kept trying to kill them at first, because we thought they were baddies. The other issue with this is that after they’ve trained players that there are some people on the field who will just stand there and won’t hurt you they start to introduce new enemies this way. As you walk near people and they sucker punch you. By this point people were no longer wanting to play. The game was introducing designs and then breaking them shortly after.
If you noticed above I said we turned off friendly damage. It turns out this doesn’t turn off friendly damage, and knockdowns, for weapons. People kept hitting bar stools, trashcans, throwing balls, bats, and baddies into each other. Each time it hit one of us we would take damage and get knocked down. We were being punished for the other player wanting to do a heavy attack that doesn’t exist for weapons or by them doing combos and knocking people into items. This was happening constantly on the third stage with the bar stools and made it unbearable. Not only that, but in the second boss fight the skateboards can hit each other. If you hit an enemy into them when this happens they take a hit and get up. When they knock you into them you take constant damage until the skateboards finally stop colliding. We also had an issue of people picking up and throwing baddies because they fell and took a nap on the ground constantly. When people would throw them we would get hit and then we were taking naps too.
Finally I’m going to round this off with the awful RPG mechanics. Yes, I know you increase your stats by buying food. However, your stats do not increase by leveling up. This means after you beat a stage you NEED to go back to stage 1’s shopping district to spend your money to raise your stats. This is just a massive waste of time. Especially if you wish to shop at the secret shop near the exit. Not only does this waste your time but the items don’t tell you what they do until after you buy them. This means unless you have an amazing memory, or a website opened to help you manage what to purchase, you are just guessing and getting random stats. There is also a massive difference in optimized purchases vs just buying whatever. Most people were dealing 1-3 points of damage and taking 12-18 points of damage by stage 3. Where people who guessed and just loaded up on STR and DEF were dealing 6-9 points of damage and taking 6-8 themselves. This meant some people were just a waste of space that was harming the team by causing damage, and knockdowns, due to the items.
Everyone was done with the game by the time we got to the vegan boss. People were tired of constantly taking naps, waiting for enemies to get up, taking too much damage, not dealing as much damage as others, needing to fight each other over money, sluggish controls, and more. We were just done. Everyone was so turned off of the game that they didn’t even want to play another game. It was about 2 days before I wanted to play another game. Sure, I could grind up the characters and up everyone’s stats to be as optimized as possible, but why? I shouldn’t have to do that to enjoy a game. When I play Streets of Rage 3 I can just walk right and beat ass. With Castle Crashers I can walk right, beat ass, and customize my character without needing to grind and stay relevant with everyone else. If everyone is level 10 in that game we have the same power scale. Not in Scott Pilgrim VS the World.
Scott Pilgrim VS the World is not just an awful beat ‘em up, but an awful game. It shows what is wrong with the modern game industry. You have companies making it so you chip away at every bad guy’s HP, until you level up the right way .You have pointless RPG mechanics that just bog down the fun in every way. You need to unlock core moves, like the ducking punch, forcing you to just wait. You have to needlessly backtrack to a specific area constantly because it was the place designed to up your stats. Like most games released these days it feels like they needed to check off 5 things from a list to say we have these features in fear of gamers not wanting to play it. Instead of just being a good beat ‘em up. Meanwhile Streets of Rage 4 is doing gangbusters and so is the new Ninja Turtle one too. I’m not even sure if there is a good beat ‘em up at its core either. It’s hard to tell with all of the useless mechanics bogging it down.