One of my favourite pieces of internet television last year was Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, a Netflix anime series that pretends to be just another adaption of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels before, rather brilliantly, pirouetting into a warm and sincere (but not overly self-flagellating) study of the original story’s tropeyness. One of the beneficiaries is Pilgrim himself, who’s forced to confront his own immaturity and entitlement: a reckoning that, one suspects, mirrors that of O’Malley himself, not to mention lapsed fans (hello) whose ability to parse these faults needed time to develop.
It’s a growing-up that continues in Scott Pilgrim EX, the 2026-bound sidescrolling action brawler from Tribute Games (a studio packed with devs who worked on Ubisoft’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World: The Game). While not a direct continuation of Takes Off, it’s apparently set not that long afterwards, and sees the new, more likable Scott teaming up with friends and foes to biff around demons and fitness bros on the streets of Toronto. I played about thirty minutes at Gamescom, and compared to Ubi’s 2010 beat ‘em up, EX appears to have done some maturing of its own.
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For one, it’s not just about punching dudes as you scuttle from the left side of the screen to the right. There is a lot of the former, which seems technically sound: I played as Roxie Richter, an ex-gf of co-lead Ramona and ‘half-ninja’ whose sword slashes flow into elegant combos and connect with a pleasant crispness. Enemies also seem more numerous and aggressive than in the previous game, making for a faster tempo while boosting both the need and the opportunities for flashy combos.
Structurally though, Scott Pilgrim EX has gained an appreciation for RPG-lite questing, as well as a more open structure where your party can move back and forth between districts without lurching back to an overworld map. The demo tasked our crew – me as Roxie, with a developer and fellow press hack as Scott and Ramona – with blasting apart an interdimensional iceberg that was harshing everyone’s mellow at the beach, leading to a fetch quest of sorts where we fought from the shoreline, to the streets, to a burger restaurant that could spare the use of its Giant Adam West Bomb dispenser. Returning and detonating the ice subsequently opened a portal to an ancient tundra, where we battled, and lost to, a fop-haired vegan dinosaur.
I appreciate that last part sounds like the opposite of maturing, but it’s less lol-random in the context of the dino being an alt-universe version of another familiar character, Todd “Dust By Monday” Ingram – time shift shenanigans being yet another carry-over from Takes Off. More importantly, the roaming structure permits a lot more scenery and enemy variety within individual missions, while making room for little twists (like wave sections or object pushing puzzles) that nestle within the action, rather than being split off like Vs. the World’s minigames.
Amidst all of this, I didn’t get the impression that EX will continue with the anime’s introspective tone specifically, but I do think it will benefit from occupying this new, drastically less problematic era of the Pilgrimverse – one free of creepy age-gap romances or pixie dream girl framing. It’s especially nice to see Take Off’s true protagonist, Ramona, take on a level-headed leader role here too. Her emotional legwork in the show has, even on a purely mechanical level, aided this game by justifying the addition of former enemies (Roxie included) to the playable cast, making for a more interesting roster of specialised fighters than the 2010 original’s assortment of mostly normal Canadians. And the title character being far less of a knob can’t hurt either.
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