I am someone who really enjoys the Avatar stories, the world that has been created, and of course the characters that inhabit it. Like many others, I have been waiting for a game to translate the setting of the show into a game that manages to capture what so many people have liked about the adventures of Aang and the trials of Korra. Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game, as you can probably guess, isn’t an action adventure or an RPG, but adapts the tale into a fighting game.
Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game captures the look and feel of the show well, from the animations to the characters and recognisable locations, including the likes of Ba Sing Se and the North Pole. The visuals in general are a strong point for the game, with the fights in motion looking generally smooth and action flowing well. The transitions between the different bending powers being used in battle, especially when the Avatar characters switch between them, are sublime. Watching the water, earth, air, and fire powers appear and be used in different ways by the different fighters is great. You can see the team has put in a lot of effort to making sure that the fighting movement flows well.
Like any fighting game, the animation and technical accuracy of hitboxes and netcode are fundamental, but the real satisfaction comes from digging into the roster and exploring their particular fighting styles. Avatar Legends launches with 12 playable fighters and some will be clear fan favourites while others will likely fall by the wayside. For me the faster movers like Korra, Katara, and Aang were my favourites, with the likes of Toph, Zuko, Zaheer, and Azula being close behind.
While Sokka is my favourite Avatar character, I didn’t really find him a particularly fun character to play as, along with Ozai and Kyoshi. Sokka’s lack of powers just limits how interesting his moveset can be, while Ozai and Kyoshi are slower moving characters that can be heavy hitters. Others will enjoy learning these characters and making them their mains, but they aren’t for me.
On the single player side of the Avatar Legends you have a training mode, arcade mode, and a story that is considered canon. To avoid clashes with The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, the game’s story takes place after the stories of both series have concluded, but in a realm where the worlds of Aang, Korra, and Kyoshi collide. The story is serviceable, but is not as strong as the series and while it has a bit of mystery to it, it isn’t something that hooks you.
The structure of story mode is also a bit weird. It consists of 27 chapters across three books, but some of the chapters are just one non-interactive scene and no fights, which pads the chapter count a fair bit. The story mode takes around four hours or so to complete, depending on your own skills – there’s some difficulty spikes as the opponent AI varies as well from unstoppable force to barely present. The former will trap you and juggle you at the edge of the screen while the latter will sometimes not move allowing you to get hits in. The majority of the fights though are decently balanced.
At the moment the multiplayer is still finding its feet and there is no ranked mode, so fights are unranked. There is local multiplayer as well too.
