The year is 20XX. The great city of Toronto is beset with three warring gangs: the Demons, the Robots, and, perhaps most fearsome of all, the Vegans. If that’s not bad enough, local legend Scott Pilgrim witnesses his best friends-slash-Sex Bob-omb bandmates kidnapped by the mysterious Metal Scott mere hours before their big gig. Can Scott, his girlfriend Ramona Flowers, and a motley crew of Ramona’s repentant Evil Exes band together and save the day? More importantly, is Scott Pilgrim EX a worthy follow-up on a beloved Canadian franchise?
As a longtime fan of the Scott Pilgrim series (and former Toronto resident), I’m happy to say it’s very worthy. Scott Pilgrim EX is the perfect storm: series creator Bryan Lee O’Malley returns to write the story, set after the events of the original manga and its 2023 sequel anime series, as do chiptune legends Anamanaguchi to compose the soundtrack after their incredible work on Ubisoft’s 2010 beat ‘em up Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game and said sequel anime. And there’s no better developer to handle a fresh new Scott Pilgrim beat ’em up than Tribute Games, who’ve proven their chops in the genre with 2022’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and 2025’s Marvel Cosmic Invasion.
But rather than simply retreading well-worn paths, Scott Pilgrim EX surprises with many of its design choices. You and a potential four friends—online or on your couch—won’t be traveling through a series of linear levels of escalating difficulty. Instead, Toronto is an open world of 2D belt-scrolling screens randomly populated by one of the three gangs, procedurally scaled to your current level. This freedom comes at the cost of level length and depth, as it only takes a handful of screens to reach each end of Toronto, and you’ll eventually be sprinting end to end in a matter of seconds.
The game’s progression, then, comes with a series of twelve quests allowing Scott to rescue each of his bandmates and use their instruments in a very Ocarina of Time fashion to travel through rifts in spacetime. This may require a bit of errand-running back and forth, like carrying keys across the city without dropping them, or bringing bombs to cracks in walls a la The Legend of Zelda to find secret rooms.
The payoff of this open-world structure is that Scott Pilgrim EX’s Toronto is a vibrant, living setting, thoroughly gorgeous to behold. Despite the 20XX label, the colorful visuals pay tribute to games of the 1990s (in keeping with the series’ retro game adoration), particularly Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter, and Mega Man. I could list a dozen other new and old games referenced (and I have, in my notes!) However, I think it’s best if players discover the tribute trove for themselves.
Best of all, the callbacks in Scott Pilgrim EX feel joyful and celebratory of gaming’s yesteryears rather than twee or winking. You can chuck green koopa shells down Queen Street to bowl over a line of vicious Vegans, and Guile-flash-kick Mortal Kombat-esque Demon ninjas and Robots that look fresh out of Dr. Wiley’s factory, and it all somehow gels perfectly. I love the visuals in this game.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out the familiarity that clearly went into Scott Pilgrim EX‘s depiction of Toronto. Casa Loma is reoutfitted as the vampire-housing Casa Vania. The iconic nacho joint Sneaky Dee’s is here presented as Tricky Dee’s, an item shop; the same goes for Honest Ed’s (here: Honest Ex’s), the beloved thrift shop that tragically went under in 2016. High Park, the Distillery District, and Dundas all appear, populated by characters of Scott Pilgrim yore. I realize not everyone will get the same kick out of the visuals as I did, but we Canadians deserve this win.
“Yeah, yeah, references. But how’s the punching?” As expected from Tribute Game’s gameography, the combat is another win. Light, heavy, grab, and special attacks are here, as are equipable assist attacks from plenty of characters who didn’t make the playable cut. What’s more, each of the seven playable characters feels unique. I appreciate that beyond Scott and Ramona, the characters from the last Scott Pilgrim beat ‘em up, now the aforementioned friends in need of rescue, are replaced with a new roster (of past villains!): Roxie the ninja, Matthew Patel the puppeteer, wrestler (and movie star) Lucas Lee, zoner Robot-01, and, surprisingly, series antagonist Gideon Graves, here a rushdown “pressurer.”
There are no unlockable moves; rather, battling and collecting or purchasing items boosts your vitality, willpower (mana), strength, and agility. Stick with one character, and by the end of the Scott Pilgrim EX‘s three-hour or so adventure, you’ll be level 300, maxed out, and flying around the screen with each jump. There are also purchasable accessories and badges to boost your stats and provide other bonuses, though nothing that flips the game on its head. I saw no reason beyond sampling movesets to play as more than one character in my first solo playthrough, as the game was rather challenging in its later quests and I needed all the stats I could pour into one character.
The first half of Scott Pilgrim EX, when my vitality was low, was a bit frustrating in my constant need to backtrack to earlier shops to buy corndogs or vegan sodas to heal my character, only to be assaulted by baddies on every street and forced yet again to waste my hard-earned loonies and toonies (that’s 1- and 2-dollar coins for you non-Canadians). The lack of a life system raises the strategic bar going into each boss encounter, but it didn’t jive with the lack of options for replenishing health.
Annoyingly, bosses and main quests are unrepeatable, meaning you have to start a New Game Plus carrying over your character stats and items if you want to, say, see all seven of Scott Pilgrim EX‘s endings. When partying up with strangers online, I couldn’t see what quest other players were on, meaning I was dropping in and out with oddly balanced levels for the sole purpose of earning more money and levels for my own roster. The crossplay coop experience was chaotic yet very smooth (a huge upgrade from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game’s choppy mess), though the game could better communicate other players’ stats.
Another unfortunate miss was the writing. I love the world and characters Bryan Lee O’Malley has created, though the jokes in Scott Pilgrim EX missed far more often than they hit. This is due in large part to the lack of romance between its key characters and lack of seriousness in the the story’s stakes. Teaming up with the former bad guys felt like Mario playing tennis with Bowser, with all past history scrubbed over so that Scott and co. could be Mickey Mouseified to appeal to new (and younger) players.
There is a win in that: this game would be a blast to play even for kids with little knowledge of ‘90s gaming minutiae. But while the lack of story focus here makes it approachable, Scott Pilgrim EX loses a lot of the magic that makes the series worth approaching.
Lastly, the music. I could have spent half the review gushing about Anamanaguchi’s soundtrack to Scott Pilgrim EX. They were my favourite band in high school (around when the movie and first game dropped), and I was overjoyed to see their return here, and with their largest-scale project ever to boot. 71 tracks across an hour and a half means that rather than delve into longer stage-specific songs, each screen and shop has its own short looping track. Anamanaguchi stretches their traditionally 8-bit chiptune sound in Scott Pilgrim EX, as they’ve been doing in their non-soundtrack discography, to make a mesh of tracks that reminded me of the cohesive chaos of Undertale or Deltarune‘s music.
The soundtrack is not always melodically complex, considering players hear short snippets of each track as they dash back and forth through Toronto’s streets, bars, and inter-dimensional subspace highways. Instead, the music favors immediate, looping catchiness and mood-setting. Combined with the eclectic and retro-amour visuals, Scott Pilgrim EX makes for one of my favourite game aesthetics, and one that reminds me why I love this medium.
Scott Pilgrim EX appeals to me in many ways, mostly in how it lets me reflect on my life in and out of gaming. It’s endlessly entertaining on the eyes and ears, and it has the best belt-scrolling combat this side of Streets of Rage 4. The swings it takes in terms of pushing its genre or reaching towards a new audience don’t always connect, but it’s still a quick, joyful experience I’m happy to continue playing both solo and with loved ones (and you random people online, I guess).
