Avatar Legends Is A Real Treat For Fans, If You Can Overlook The Rough Edges

The classic Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender was hailed as groundbreaking at the time of release and has inspired a loyal following, and its sequel series The Legend of Korra was a well-received maturation of the property. However, there have also been many lows--an awful movie adaptation, a divisive live-action Netflix series, and innumerable bad video games. This week, things are finally looking up. The movie Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender appears to be the Aang Gang reunion fans have been waiting for. And it's with that renewed vigor that we're getting Avatar Legends, which may be the first great Avatar game--with some major caveats. To start, let me get this out of the way: I am not a fighting game expert. I came up during the era of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat and like every child of that generation, I threw down in arcades and with the various SF2 console releases with my friends and family, but I never exactly ascended to the next level of fighting game expertise. To this day I still dabble in those series and others that catch my eye, but this isn't going to be a technical breakdown of Avatar's fighting finesse, because that just isn't my realm. I'm coming to this primarily as a fan of the two cartoon series who hoped this would be a fun way to experience that world. And on that, it succeeds. It's immediately noticeable that all of the characters look just like their toon counterparts, in some cases cleaned up for modern displays. They look and move like they should, and there are fun little touches for fans, like how each character can palette swap to make their outfit match the four different Nations of the Avatar world. The menu of upgradable support characters is a who's who of beloved minor characters like The Boulder, Joo Dee, and Mai. The writing in the Story Mode is chock-full of little nods and references to Avatar. This is all clearly a labor of love by people who revere the series. Aang's throw move involves an airbender-powered sneeze! It's all very playful. Korra and Zuko firebend in Avatar Legends And that reverence comes in the expression of the fighting styles as well. When I first started the story mode, I was having a hard time wrapping my head around Aang, who focuses mostly on air juggles and quick movements. That felt right for the character, but wrong for me. When the story transitioned to Korra, it clicked. True to her show's depiction, Korra is already a master of all four elements, and as a result, she is much more balanced and it was easy for me to chain moves together from the beginning. Her moves depict a comfortable blend of all the bending forms, so it's not unusual to see a fire-powered kick segue neatly into an upward water-slash. Toph, appropriately, is very grounded, most comfortable when sticking to the floor and controlling the space with powerful earthbending attacks. I'm not a fighting game expert, but as an outsider at least, it feels like there's a lot of depth here for those who want to dig in. What struck me most was the nuanced depiction of the bending forms. The original show made a point to make each Nation's signature bending form unique and inspired by real-world martial arts, while Korra implemented more modern MMA-style moves to update the setting. As a result, the bending characters feel naturally different: A firebender is fierce and aggressive while a waterbender is more defensive. But Avatar Legends also finds plenty of room to explore differentiation between multiple users of the same bending forms. Despite both being firebenders, Zuko and his sister Azula feel very different. Zuko's moves focus heavily on fierce forward momentum and projectiles, while Azula has more nuanced control with an array of lightning-enhanced moves. Similarly, Kyoshi is a full-fledged Avatar but focuses primarily on earthbending--but she is also remarkably tall, so her moveset feels very different from the grounded Toph.  I'm seein' double here, four Avatars On that note, Avatar Legends also expresses through gameplay an element that was ever-present in the show. This is a story about children finding their way in a world of adults, which introduces a power imbalance by sheer size. The game doesn't shy away from this, making the child characters noticeably smaller than the grown-ups. Lots of fighting games make characters of very differing sizes, but generally they're all teens to adults. Avatar pits 12-year-olds against 40-year-olds, so it's important to express that visually. There are elements that make Avatar Legends fall short, but fortunately, the most severe ones are fixable. To put it simply, some aspects of this game feel unfinished, at least in my pre-release build. Maybe some or most of these will be addressed in a patch upon the game launch, but I would be surprised if the 1.0 release completely transforms these rough spots. The tutorials section was incomplete. As of my playtime, only Aang's was available, so I couldn't really