Scott Pilgrim, Volume 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour

To be honest, reading the first five volumes of this book in about a month and then having to wait over a year to see the end is sort of an awkward way to take in the story. It might just be my own perception, but it felt like this final part flowed as its own story the worst of any of the chapters, and definitely seems like it would work best at the end of a long marathon read of the whole series. I'll probably do that at some point, but for now I'll just accept that it was a satisfactory ending to the story rather than an amazing one.

The problem I guess is that it feels really segmented and choppy, which was intentional due to the state Scott is in for most of the book. He's sort of a wreck, and the story portrays this as a series of moments rather than a more continuous narrative. It leaves any individual page in the volume seeming totally fine and up to the usual standards, the flow just seems a bit off compared to earlier parts. And so much time is dedicated to the final confrontation that there really isn't enough room left for the expected amount of character work. O'Malley does a good job of trying to at least give closure to as many relationship threads as possible, the effort just comes off a bit rushed.

The final battle itself was similar to the end as a whole, enjoyable if not spectacular. The action itself was pretty good, and the continued use of video game ideas as visualizations of character development continued to be clever. But it was a bit bogged down in its attempts to explain what was really going on with the different characters in the last year, and that bit doesn't work that well. People were explaining things, but a lot of the explanations didn't make sense or seemed to lack details that would really fit them in place. There were a couple interesting revelations, but I don't think I quite got out of it what I was supposed to. I thought the epilogue and ending themselves were pretty good, it sort of could have gone in a number of ways but I think the right one was picked. In the end, it wasn't the amazing finale I hoped for, but it did do what it had to finish one of the more original stories I've ever read.