“Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is a fast-paced 1v1 fighter where you battle as your favorite characters from the Avatar franchise. Featuring hand-drawn 2D animation true to the series’ roots, proprietary rollback netcode, and full cross-play for smooth, competitive gameplay.” – Steam Description

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is a fighting game that you can tell was made with a lot of love for the Intellectual Property. I am going to preface this review by saying I have watched exactly 11 episodes of the show, so if you want to skip to the bottom read my review score and tell me I’m wrong you can absolutely do that. The developers have done an extremely good job of making each character play uniquely and, from what I can tell, are true to their show counterpart. That being said, I haven’t even met Toph in the show yet. There are a ton of references in their voice lines, match interactions, and moveset that my avatar loving friends were excited about as they watched me play though.

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By Yourself

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Avatar Legends is definitely a game that fans of the franchise will come to. Much like how League of Legends got a surge of new players after Arcane’s success. Unlike those poor Arcane fans, Avatar Legends actually does a pretty good job of welcoming its players.

You’ve got a training mode, arcade, and a story mode. The training mode has highlights that are extensive and I hope that more fighting games take note of this. There is a Free Training mode, where you can pick a character and opponent then just press buttons; however fighting game players will notice a lack of frame data which is an unfortunate black mark on an otherwise good training mode. There are also tutorials which teach your chosen character’s moveset in full. Finally there is combo trials which are broken in to categories of difficulty from Novice to Master. Once you’re fully trained up, you can dash over to Arcade mode where each character has their own set of arcade fights with light story elements.

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If you’re still chomping at the bit for some single player content, you can dive into the main event. Avatar Legends’ story mode is an original story worked on by series creator Michael Dante DiMartino and written by Tim Hedrick, who wrote many episodes of both The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. With that level of accolade, you’d think the story would be a smash hit across the board. There was a lot of backlash regarding the story as it takes place in an alternate universe where Aang doesn’t exist and it puts a lot of characters together who wouldn’t meet or who act polar opposite from their show counterparts. A lot of the criticism for the story mode was thrown around as “Fan Fiction” and many people believed it was just some random writer’s headcanon but were surprised to find it was listed as canonical by the actual writers.

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With Friends & Maybe Enemies

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Now that you’ve beaten the arcade mode with every character, conquered all 27 chapters of the story, “What’s next?” I hear you ask. Well that brings us to my favorite part of any fighting game: Ignoring the story and training modes and throwing yourself online to press buttons “that feel nice” until you win. This is, admittedly, where the cracks are going to start to show for fighting game players.

Going online, you have 3 options. Matchmaking, Lobbies, and… well, you can see for yourself. The game did not launch with a Spectator Mode, which to be fair, isn’t a mode that fighting games launch with either. Why is this a problem? Well the lobbies are 1v1 only. Only 2 players are allowed into the lobby, so there is no way to spectate a match. This means that unless the players are streaming their match via discord, streaming service (e.g. twitch, youtube,) or recording it with a camcorder pointed at their screen DarkSydePhil style there is no way to perceive the match. This immediately killed all the launch tournaments for online communities, as they had no way to stream the matches. The Fighting Game Community (FGC) is a pretty fickle beast and this soured the game for a lot of people. Luckily, I live in Houston which has a pretty active local community so I’ve seen a lot of support for the game personally. To that point, there’s still an active community for BlazBlueCrossTag and Street Fighter 3 Third Strike here so I would take that with a grain of salt.

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Alright, our first major setback but I hear you say “Well, I can’t enter into online tournaments because they aren’t running. I can still push into ranked and climb on the leaderboards, being the best Avatar Legends player in my region right?” That’s where you’re wrong, bucko. The game didn’t launch with a ranked mode despite the marketing material promising a ranked mode. You can only utilize generic matchmaking which is a complete crapshoot. You’ll either completely dog-walk your opponent or get walked yourself. There’s not much in between and it’s very disheartening if you’re new to fighting games. Going from playing the CPU in story and arcade, which doesn’t have a harder difficulty either, to getting set up basically the Daigo of Avatar Legends? I don’t blame a lot of the people I’ve seen put this game down or request a refund.

I had a pretty good record with Toph but the lack of ranked mode or online tournaments for me to flex it has made me put the game on the back burner too. Which is a shame. It’s a wonderfully built game and it has the bones to be a real contender in the FGC.

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Characterization

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There are 10 characters in the base roster for Avatar Legends but it’s listed as having 12. The other 2 are Avatar Aang and Nightmare Korra, which you unlock through the story mode. Each character plays different and they are unique enough that I would encourage you to play each one to see which you click with.

Each character also has a supporting character which can change how you’d play the game. This was done previously in Mortal Kombat, you could have character variations which could change how you’d play. For example:

None of them are game breaking or game changing but can really help you lean into the playstyle that you like for that particular character. It helps you specialize which I think is a wonderful addition to a fighting game and can really help the mirror match because an Appa Aang might have a different gameplan than a Gyatso Aang.

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The praise for the characters does end there unfortunately. The final 3 characters that were added are unfinished. Ozai doesn’t have movements in his movements and even though I tried to main Ozai launch week, I couldn’t help but see Invincible Season 4 every time that he moved as just a static png across the screen. Avatar Aang just has Aang’s movements. Nightmare Korra uses water whips but the developers have insisted it’s supposed to be chains.

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• Graphics– The game is drawn to be extremely close to the show. Which is excellent, and I think the smear frames when you lose a round are hilarious. I laughed out loud when I first saw it and immediately took a screenshot.
• Gameplay– The fighting game has some good bones, I think it just got a terrible launch. I think it’s missing a lot of core features but what IS there has some good fundamentals. As long as the FGC doesn’t hard abandon it, I think it can have it’s own foothold somewhere.
• Sound– Sound is on the weaker side. They were unable or chose not to get the original voice actors. Whatever the case is, the game suffers for it overall because even when someone is excited to choose their favorite character, they frown because it’s not right.
• Controls– This game is hard, the tempo for combos takes some getting used to. However, there are a number of tools to help you learn the tempo and practice the combos. This is for sure the type of game that you get out of it what you put in.
• Story– The game’s story is a little thin in content to me but there IS a full story. I just think it could have and should have been a better story as someone who has been watching the original show for the first time.