Nickelodeon's Disappointing Avatar Video Games - The Golden Bolt

this video is brought to you in part by DraftKings more on them in a bit there are 16 different Mainline versions of Nickelodeon avatar video games and I played all of them hoping to find one single game in this lot that's more than o okay to good go further into the weeds and there are closer to 60 different avatar games and don't worry if you couldn't tell by this video's length I'll talk about those two from the infamous Xbox 360 achievement game to the 3DS's Legend of Kora of Fire Emblem clone to a top- down Zelda game there's a lot to carve through here there's even a review of the newest game quest for balance at the end of this video and it's somehow the worst one of them all besides the gotcha game review code provided by the publisher since many of these games don't get talked about much the handheld versions especially we're going to go through each and every one and talk about the avatar games themselves and their development histories because all of these games when put together actually mirror the tumultuous backstory of both the last air bender and legend of Kor shows Productions and yep we'll talk about the TV side of this history too these games have been the last two months of my life so if you find yourself having fun consider subscribing it it's free and it might help mend the hole in my soul left by some of this journey it it probably won't but it would it would make me feel better now how many of these avatar games were actually good games more than just okay I'm I'm going to say three actually actually not two this is the complete Nickelodeon avat video game series retrospective thing I I'm going to go get a [Music] beer one of the fundamental issues with the Avatar video game series is that it's based on a show whose network for nearly the entire two decades of its existence up until now didn't fully recognize what it had or how to handle it the first season of Avatar the Last Air vender began airing in late February 2005 and even from the jump it was one of the most successful shows Nickelodeon had ever had albeit with a catch see the show was just as popular with slightly older kids as it was the Network's key demographic of 6 to 11year olds that should be a good thing you would think but it also meant that the commercials that usually aired alongside Say SpongeBob might not fit as well with Avatar's audience let's give Nickolodeon the benefit of the doubt here and not say much about how the network already had an entire block of liveaction shows a at that same older demographic which should have made the process of selling slightly different ad time much smoother to handle although the folks producing the show would lean into this demographic info and provide a more mature show that could still appeal to the younger crowd Nick took a long long time to really recognize what it had with Avatar early on Nickelodeon aired reruns of Avatar episodes out of order in random time slots just like it was used to doing with almost every other show in its lineups at the time shows that didn't have a serialized story this was the first of many disputes with the showrunners who pushed to have the reruns aired in some semblance of order rather than say airing The Great Divide filler episode several times a week at least once supposedly even two times in a row after first failing with a number of other strategies the network finally caved and it immediately bumped the ratings for both reruns and new episodes go figure there are so many other examples of this sort of network malpractice for example the show was technically canceled for a bit in between seasons 2 and 3 despite posting some of the highest ratings in Nickelodeon history at the time and seeming to match even SpongeBob week to week it's what makes the more recent Avatar Revival all the more fascinating it's a franchise that quickly became one of Netflix's top shows when it first started streaming there spending an at the time record two straight months in the top 10 most watched shows list that part is arguably why Viacom showed a sudden interest in milking the series for all it's worth to try and make people pay for Paramount plus nobody is paying for Paramount plus new shows new movies a whole Cinematic Universe led by the original show creators who were poached away from the liveaction Netflix adaptation and of course new video games both of which so far are just bad worse even than the earlier games which were mostly your standard lowbudget THQ licensed Affairs we'll talk more about those new bad ones later because boy boy do I have words for them first THQ by the time the first season's finale aired in December 2005 Nickelodeon had begun working with Publisher THQ to develop an avatar tie-in game continuing a long running partnership between the two THQ as it always did released the game on every platform under the sun when it released in late 2006 the Avatar The Last Airbender video game named avatar The Last Airbender was one of the final games for both the GameCube and the original Xbox one of the first games for the Wii one of the the games for the PS2 pssp GBA and DS and a completely different game even came out on Windows and naturally building off the hype of season 2 which was already almost done by the time the game came out this became Nickelodeon's top selling game in the year 2006 which would hopefully mean that going forward the budget would bump up a bit right right altogether there are five different versions of this first game to look at which is part of why I recently started drinking THQ Australia developed the console versions fellow Australian developer half brick handled the GBA version which plays like a light Zelda styled Adventure game Japanese Studio TOA known for and this is not a joke providing zero creative input into just about any of the actual thousands of games that it turns out made the DS and PSP games each one different from one another and a studio named a Productions handled the windows release that last one is the outlier in that it just retells the first season's plot despite releasing only weeks before season 2's finale it also looks and play plays like like like like this so that's about as far as I'm going to go and talking about it because because the rest feature the same original story that starts right near the end of season 1 with Ang and qara in the middle of their water bending training at the northern water tribe one of the villages Benders has suddenly gone missing seemingly dragged Away by metal Machines of some sort Zuko and the Fire Nation attack the city and capture qara although Ang and Saka do rescue her the very next level in the process though they learn of the fire nation's plans to create an army of machines using a kidnapped architect named Lon which sends the Avatar gang on a goose chase through a bunch of Earth Kingdom Villages and mostly just Earth Kingdom Villages trying to find Leon to rescue her and all of the different people seemingly captured by those machines it saddens me to say that this console game here is one of the better avatar games even to this day because it means that we're mostly going downhill and my liver will not like that DQ Australia for whatever reason chose to make this kids martial arts cartoon an action RPG in the vein of games like balers gate dark Alliance champions of norath or X-Men Legends except without the co-op that those games have over the course of the game you'll be able to swap on the Fly between Ang Katara Saka and Haru who's just kind of here to fill a token Earth Bender slot the party members you're not actively controlling will engage with enemies on their own as well albeit in a dumb AI kind of way rather than being super helpful most of the time and everybody has their own set of basic beat them up combos unlockable ability trees and most importantly their own set of basic DDR sequences to activate environmental Secrets like hidden chests these are all over each of the game's levels and it's really fun to play The Guessing Game of which character actually opens this sometimes Ang can on Earth bury chest despite that being something you would expect the earthbending character to do for example it's it's it's really weird and it's swapping between characters during these moments that made me realize the game doesn't clearly highlight which directional button corresponds to which character one of those tiny little details that starts to grind at you when you're sick hours into the game since you almost always have two characters with you and the few times you don't they could have just added a second character and slightly tweaked the story or really not even tweak the story at all you don't really need to co-op really would have helped cut down on this game's more tedious moments but alas the RPG parts of this game simple as they are are really interesting for an avatar tie-in in that I don't quite get why this game is the way that it is but I don't dislike it each of the game's seven freely explorable levels features a handful of side quest that grant money experience or even a piece of legendary armor because this game has both randomized tiered loot drops and gold legendary armor it's again really weird to see in an avatar game objectives for both the main and side missions can mostly be completed out of order if you choose to explore first which you wouldn't really expect out of a licensed children's game where half the time everything is phoned in but no even the very start of avatar The Last Airbender on Console lets you explore and find key items like the missing water bender pouch early even before you get that Quest so that you can complete quests right as they're given to you there's custom dialogue options as well so that you can just say oh I have that already in the same conversation which you just it's weird it's good RPGs don't do that sometimes there's a crafting system for both items and gear the merchants have a buyback option in case you accidentally sell the wrong one of your 40 different Panda robes you picked up in fights it's all more involved than you would assume going in the combat not as much but it's at least okay outside of a basic one button combo that just gets longer as you level up and a block button the game's main appeal is in the character's unique abilities that utilize your CH meter everybody has a set of offensive and defensive moves that are unique to them using their bending or Saka club and further still each character has a unique third set of abilities Ang's only an air bender in the storyline so he can distract enemies by zooming around on an air scooter qara can heal her allies Saka well well he has more Club moves but they function more like temporary stat Buffs than just throwing the club more Haru uh again and he is just kind of here so he doesn't have a third move set to upgrade I do wish we got a combat system a bit more expressive or combat more representative of the really cool martial arts stuff you see in the Avatar show but given the style of game this was probably the best way to highlight each character's unique traits it's just weird that for example we never use Ang's air glider in gameplay one of those things that you just expect would exist for at least some platforming or something and yet almost none of the avatar games ever touch his staff or air glider really at all most of the enemies you'll encounter in this game will be Fire Nation soldiers or wild animals like the Platypus bear those guys in particular give a ton of experience but as the game goes on you'll encounter more and more of that machine Army the game kind of implies that they're Invincible but they're not they're just a little harder to take down since you know metal and each type of mechanical enemy corresponds to a different element as if their designs were based on Benders also in the omashu city level there are just a bunch of stray cats Saka apparently takes joy and beating up cats you deserve that the levels can get a bit syy in the middle of the game like when we jump from an earthbending Village in Chapter 2 to an earth bending Village in chapter 3 this time in a slightly different Forest but by and large they're really fun to explore omashu may get a bit Mazy at times and the air Temple level and surrounding Village actually underst stay their welcome a bit despite coming during the more tedious let's end the game already please chunk of the game but as a kid and even today I really enjoyed getting to run around in some of neatest looking areas or concepts of areas from that first season plus you can get arrested for destroying the Cabbage salesman's cabbage cart which is just great another neat thing that again you just wouldn't expect from a licensed game like this is that as you level up by default the game automatically assigns your upgrade points to specific ability unlocks or Buffs you know the kind of stuff you might expect them to want to do for a kids game that maybe doesn't need to be as advanced as they made it but if you swap to manual upgrading you can actually undo where prior experience points went to better fit your build I just wish that customizability and attention to detail mattered much in a game where say you could revisit old level hubs here once you move on you are not ever allowed to go back yeah for as many small details that this game May nail little bits of World building like having you sneak into a fire nation camp in armor and learn that there's a bit of infighting between a corrupt Captain who keeps upping local taxes on The earthbending Villages and a just Captain who wants to see that stopped or little bit of dialogue that fit well with the tone of the show Saka especially or even just that when you play as Momo to pick up fetch Quest Collectibles humans all have that same Charlie Brown style mumbling that they do in the show whenever you see Momo's perspective sadly for as many of these sorts of details there are at least as many that get missed more in line with the stuff you would expect from a licensed game the game has huge balancing issues where some attacks just absolutely wreck the game and give you no reason to experiment I mean I never once used any of the defensive abilities for any of the characters because they didn't matter they just they just made the game last longer the character models are definitely a little bit off even by wonky 2D to 3D translation standards and the returning voice cast from the show definitely didn't get much help by way of Direction this time around and that's compounded by the game having that thing where not much effort was ever put into sound design so all the cutcenes that do have voices are just played over awkward silence a lot of the game just doesn't have music at all it's it's kind of weird and as fun as it may be to explore on your own before picking up any of the quests one or two side quests can in fact get soft locked if you do bits out of order meaning you'll never get to 100% completion on that chapter that you can never revisit anyway the horror moreover pieces from those special gear sets sometimes are only given to you by an unmarked character well after finishing a quest which means that you can easily miss them if you don't think to leave and come back and talk to a person a third time after they've already thanked you the gear and Shop menus ambitious as they are aren't exactly good as the d-pad swaps your current hero like I mentioned earlier and the analog stick is sensitive in this game so you'll frequently find yourself swapping between menu tabs on accident when just trying to scroll up or down that page of your inventory and swapping tabs resets you to the top of the list that happens quite a bit it's actually really annoying none of it hurts the game individually besides that one but it adds up on top of an okay enough gameplay experience to take away a bit of the game's charm Factor the replayability stuff especially and that drives this game from something that I would actually call pretty good to yeah it's all right but still somehow disappointing how many times do you want to bet I'm going to end up saying exactly that in this video speaking of bets you can place yours with the sponsor of today's video DraftKings well not how many times I'm going to say that an avatar game is disappointing but but bets and you know what I mean roll the ad now if there's anything that goes hand inand with video games it's gambling ask loot boxes or or or Hedgehogs that dude's been in casinos from day one and since all of us here like to have fun without leaving our houses why not responsibly check out DraftKings Casino it's America's number one online casino with hundreds of different real money games for every new customer who signs up using the promo code golden bolt and deposits at least $5 DraftKings is matching that deposit dollar 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and just make things a little bit easier here that Lyon girl making the machines well she's the villain which is obvious pretty quickly in this game she's actually got some interesting motivation though fearing that Ang won't have time to finish learning all the elements before the Fire Nation wins the war so she teams up with some of those quote unquote kidnapped Benders to create the machines and eventually creates a mechanical a AR analog to try and take down the fire lord problem is this plot Revelation kind of comes super late in the game after a bunch of goose chasy runaround there's never a true encounter with Zuko either he just kind of appears every two to three levels just in time to miss the Avatar gang or to get knocked out by something else kind of makes him feel like a geek and speaking of Geeks Haru is still just here like he's looking for his friend that's his plot motivation and that friend turns out to be one of those earthbenders working with the machine maker but his part of the story is so shoehorn that he's an NPC in the game boy version That's how little he matters and in this game at least the mechanical Avatar boss fight is way easier than you'd like to see out of something that's trying to replace the Avatar it works out well that the game addresses a lot of the same concerns that the show would end up doing in seasons 2 and three about whether Ang can finish his training in time and it showcases really well the plate of the people that have been forced to live under the fire nation's boot for years or decades but it's also using season 1 Ang characterization where he's a little bit lazy and likes to Goof Off in better hands the story could have been more interesting than the mostly nothing it ends up being at the end an goes into the Avatar state after qara gets knocked out defending him he absolutely wrecks the mechanical Avatar that was already easy to begin with so it doesn't really feel super cool or anything and then he waxes about how everybody has a role in getting him ready and now he realizes he can't mess around too much seemingly to try and make the game fit nicely back into the plot of the show as if this could be semic Canon thankfully the GBA version of this game is something that I can actually recommend in general as it's a far better game than the if you played it when it came out and want to Nostalgia hit pick it up energy that the console version exudes that's because half brick the Australian developer that later went on to make fruit ninja of all games chose to make Avatar into a Zelda game kind of as I usually try to do with my videos I reached out to some of the folks involved in development to get an idea of why they took this Zelda approach and what it was like making the game on a shorter timeline go figure The Game's director John cartright is a pal of mine he had this to say oh I didn't work on that that was a different John I would have been like six and I've never lived in Australia the game boy version of Avatar follows the same story as the console game with some levels removed such as the entire Earth Bender Village that we find Haru in which made me laugh because again he just has no purpose in this story at all it's not even his village we went to in the console game he just happens to be in a different village that the Avatar gang just shows up anyway instead we control just the main Avatar Trio in a sort of four Swords gameplay style where all three characters follow around at once at certain points like utilizing Saka unique ability to open a lever you can split the gang up to solve solo puzzles and open dungeon doors or find hidden Health upgrades I do wish the other characters didn't have active health bars during regular combat since they don't fight on their own and anyone dying at all means that you go back to last checkpoint but that just makes your spacing a little more important as all being on a system with four total buttons the combat is pretty simple but the puzzle part of this adventure makes up for that by showing off each Hero's skills qara can build progressively longer ice Bridges to travel across or simply move water from one container to another in order to for example give a block enough weight to push down a switch Ang's got an air blast that can easily push heavy blocks out of the way and later he can push air through vents Saka gets a circular Boomerang throw to operate multiple switches at once and later he gets bombs because again Zelda we all know that Zelda invented the concept of bombs I was continually impressed with how the game organically introduces new wrinkles to the adventure and to the puzzles frequently splitting the gang up and having you swap back and forth between them as one opens the door for the other who opens the door for the third Etc while avoiding any soft locks that could have easily resulted my favorite part though in this game those machine enemies are unkillable through regular combat which is what the console game kept saying but never actually showed us instead they too are puzzles you'll have to guide the tank enemies onto event so that Ang can flip it with a well-timed Air Blast qara physically pulls the water out of the water bending machines which makes for some fun puzzles as you force it to chase you through an area just to transport the water that you need to progress at the end even one of the early game bosses at the northern water tribe goes from being a thing you hit a bunch on Console to a more thought out encounter where you have to knock it down from its perch to be able to start damaging it avatar on Game Boy may be only three hours long but man it is such a fun three hours only a few times that I feel it actually slowed down at all particularly near the end when the game forces you to operate all three characters simultaneously and perfectly as you run with again near perfect timing to avoid a giant Mech chasing you down a corridor it is such a tense section of the game that I really enjoyed it first before it quickly became annoying when the controls start to let you down a bit but it's still worth it to get through that final dungeon to fight the final boss a three-pronged puzzle where each hero takes down part of that mechanical Avatar bit by bit before Ang deals the final blow that brings us to the TOA developed versions of avatar on the DS and PSP the DS version is cut from the same mold as the console game but obviously scaled back significantly unlike the console game you can surprisingly control the camera here in that Xeno Gear's kind of 2D art mapped over a 3D World sort of design enemy encounters are pushed out from the Overworld into their own battle arenas as if it was was a jrpg as well and it feels a bit punchier as a beat him up game compared to the console game at the cost of being much weaker as an RPG there are also a few additional text cut scenes that help flesh out some of the gaps in the console version story mainly explaining better the stuff that leads you from one chapter into the next and these bits of text feel fairly accurate to what you would expect from the characters which is always nice considering half the time licensed handheld game dialogue from this era felt just so forced simply to get from point A to point B with as little effort as possible I would not at all be surprised if these scenes were things written for the console game that just got cut to limit time in the voiceover Booth or something now there's not a ton to say about this version it's very cookie cutter it does have a couple other changes like a weird herb mixing mechanic in place of all the randomly generated armor and loot on Console by mixing different herbs together you can get more powerful Buffs or healing items however every herb is named herb a b c Etc rather than anything descriptive remember toce Prides itself on not adding anything to its games it does exactly what it's told and nothing more needless to say once I saw this I stopped combining the herbs since it was already a bit unnecessary to begin with with how easy the game is the last thing I'll add is that there are once again a bunch of side quests like in the console game and there's even a different version of this in Universe board game called for Nations on Console four nations was essentially Domino but with the four elements either match the tiles till you run out or until the opponent has no matching tiles left and L loses here on DS it's a different game called four nations Force which is this weird four versus 20 Checkers kind of game if you're the side with four representing of course the four bending elements the goal is to defeat enough enemies by hopping over them checkered style before the other player can finish placing one of their pieces down on the board once per turn if you're the team with 20 which represents I guess regular people the goal is to surround the four before losing too many pieces so that the four can't move it's kind of neat although the AI is a bit too good and the board a bit too small for you to really be able to win as the four-piece side even in the tutorial honestly one of the worst parts of putting this video together was discovering that the console for nation's miname wasn't as cool as I remembered it being as a kid somewhere along the line I guess my brain turned it into something far bigger than it actually ever was maybe I was drinking back then too part of why I saved this PSP version for last is that it's a weird Fusion of every other release except maybe the windows one it uses level layouts that are closer to the DS game which makes sense cuz it's made by the same Studio at TOs and it also uses an armor crafting and upgrade system similar to that DS game but it features an inworld battle system like the console game had rather than loading you into a separate Square combat area the other part of why this one is last is because I kind of just assumed until about the 11th Hour that this would be another scale to back console Port like most PSP games were by 2006 turns out no I'm I'm glad I checked and by glad I mean I am not glad that I checked but but here we are like the DS game this one features there's a handful of cut scenes also not in the console version and it even does a few of them differently from that DS version for example in the second level on every version except for Game Boy Advance where the second level doesn't really exist Ang and Saka put on some fire nation solders smelly armor to sneak into the jail on Console they use the armor more for a completely unrelated base in the level that's not featured in any other version on DS Ang flings Saka across the pond to sneak into the back door instead of just walking right into the main base using the weird invis ibility stealth button that the console game also has didn't mention that earlier yeah you just you just press Circle and you go invisible don't know why meanwhile on PSP Ang uses his staff to Glide across while holding Saka who loses his grip and falls into the drink anyway where the console game features a voiced cut scene to show the smelly soldiers in question being yelled at by their boss the PSP game has a fight sequence just outside of the bath area where you steal that armor there's even a PSP exclusive side quest which I can guarantee you is not on the back of the box that requires you to sneak back into the base to retrieve a lady's stolen precious gem which itself features a different cut scene where the Fire Nation has now blocked that back entrance so Ang says that he and Appo will cause a distraction while Saka runs right in the front door and fights his way to the treasure chest alone it's kind of annoying that unlike the console game you can't achieve most mission objectives early so you can't grab that gem before you actually get the quest to tell you to grab the gem and you have to go back later and speaking of the side quest this game also has a bit of a different experience and move set level up system where in completing quests actually does something more useful than sometimes give you some cool armor or herbs on DS here leveling up simply bumps up your stats and you instead need to use this separate upgrade currency to buff the power or speed of each character's moves you only get that upgrade currency by finishing things like side quests and the entire party shares that pot so you can just move to make one character overpowered early at the cost of the others potentially struggling a bit there's a decent variety of moves here for you to choose from and upgrade and Ang's air scooter is unlocked right from the start and for once lets you speed through the Overworld rather than slowly half walk walk half jogging Saka bombs which only appeared in the GBA game show up at the start of this game as well and they're immediately needed for progression although this side of the upgrade stuff is cool the armor upgrade crafting system thing is a bit Superfluous which is what makes it nice that sometimes there are repeatable side quests where characters will ask you to trade them those materials for some of that move set upgrade currency instead I didn't really understand what the intent was with the armor in this version outside of the surface level armor stat go up because every piece also defends against one particular element this is in a game where you don't really fight enough of those machines for that to be worthwhile and where the only other enemies you fight are animals that don't have bending or the Fire Nation so you should just beef up all of your fire defense armor and win even then though most of the Fire Nation soldiers don't actually fire Bend so I'm not even sure if their regular hand-to-hand attacks or Spears or whatever would actually have lower damage there huh in general though if the combat wasn't kind of dreadful I'd actually say this might have ended up being the best version of the game you've still only got one button for regular attacks that's your entire combo button and man the attack motions for each character are are just kind of hilarious Ang simply flails his arms around no wonder he's only doing one damage per [Music] hit enemies frequently fall down after a one or two hit combo and you have to wait for them to get back up they're all damage sponges reinforcements show up several times per fight sometimes it's all it's all just chef's kiss the reinforcements part does hit well on the idea that you're fighting an actual Army team Avatar should be overwhelmed by the Fire Nation but the fact that I had to spend essentially my entire upgrade balance from the first third of this game to get Ang's hand toand combos to do more than one to two damage per hit when any other attack besides your basic hand inance requires CH to fire off and does 10 times as much yeah yeah it's not not very balanced at all not to say the game's hard or anything it's very very easy just uh call it Final Fantasy 10's protagonist tedious altogether if you could fuse every version of this first avatar game together this weird PSP Fusion included you would probably have a gem on your hands but also if you could do that you'd probably have an equal chance of creating some unspeakable monstrosity so just play the GBA Game if anything let's move on to oh oh it's the it's the achievement game avatar The Burning Earth the Season 2 tie-in game which released near the end of 2007 right after the show's third season had premiered this is somehow a timing Improvement on the first game due to that semian cancellation of the Avatar franchise after Season 2 Season 3 started airing in the fall TV season rather than in the spring like the first two had by chance with the way things shook out weeks before Avatar season 3 premiered Nick found another ratings Juggernaut in I Carly a show that broke just about every ratings record the network has ever had a ratings Juggernaut whose seemingly successful Paramount plus Revival was just canceled after a few seasons I'm sure that boats well for the Avatar Cinematic Universe woo anyway one last nugget of TV lore before we get to the game here fun fact in case you don't recall this the first half of Avatar's thirdd season aired weekly like most of the series did the second half was burned in a single week from July 14th to 19th 2008 and despite that it proceeded to draw 19 million total viewers across that week every episode on average reaching more than 7% of all kids watching TV at each episode's airtime in the US golly G boy oh boy I hope this is the last time they burn an entire season of an avatar show all at once just to get it out of the way I mean that can't ever happen again right right The Burning Earth has three distinct versions another DS game developed by tosa another game boy game developed by half brick and another console game developed by THQ Studio Australia let's get the single thing anybody knows about this game out of the way first the Xbox 360 release was one of the first achievement games because you could get all 1,000 gamer score in the tutorial simply by executing an easy 50 hit combo back in the day when people still thought achievements mattered you would look at somebody's profile and if you saw this game you immediately discounted them as a fraud when asked why the achievements were so pathetically easy to get THQ Australia's director of production John cartright had this to say I already told you were're not the same guy read the [ __ ] line John ah we weren't overly surprised that adults could get the achievements as quickly as they did if someone's been playing fighting games for years then the achievements in Avatar are not going to challenge them too much but again we're not targeting that gamer we try to focus on the throw a young kid would get when he/ she gets his/ her first achievement can I go now please in fact it's functionally impossible to beat this game without getting all of the achievements 3ars of players who have ever played The Burning Earth on Xbox 360 have every achievement and that's counting the 6% of accounts who loaded the game up and then seemingly never got past the title screen that's a weird thing that happens with games if you look at any game's achievements ever like 10% of accounts never get the first achievement it's wild that 75% completion rate is why I went out of my way to avoid getting any achievements for as long as possible here it was a point of Pride for me more on that in a sec first avatar The Burning Earth despite being a season 2 game only covers the first half of season 2 up through the drill episode it does so in a way that doesn't even complement those episodes either because they just jump from one plot to the next without any of the connecting tissue this is an issue for actually almost every other avatar game from this point on as well yay it is the worst kind of licensed game tiin FAA a game that fully expects you to not only have seen but also fully remember every bit of the media it's tying into in order to not be lost character randomly show up sometimes as if they've been in your party for the entire chapter despite never being acknowledged once Zuko and iro outside of one cut scene are missing the entire game up until the very end jet shows up with no explanation at all of who he is Hell there's an entire level in the swamp that focuses on you playing as qara and Momo which leads to a bit of whiplash not just because you're fighting as Momo but also because jet shows up during this mission to get him in the playable crew faster despite this being 10 episodes before he would actually have appeared in the show the game also suffers from what I call being a Nintendo Wii game the version I'm playing here on 360 is simply a graphically improved version of the PS2 and Wii version but because the games are otherwise identical there's no camera control and the right stick which doesn't exist on the Wii has no function at all in fact much of this game is paired back and simplified from the original avatar game now just being a generic beat him up there's technically leveling up but just by playing the game you'll obtain more than enough of the yellow experience orbs needed especially when things like hidden treasure chests or health upgrades are almost always right in plain sight rarely even hidden behind a puzzle or platforming challenge they're just right there you can upgrade your ranged attacks combo power or your special moves each of them three times for nine total upgrades except there are only like five combos in the game which are the same for each character and the special moves don't even really matter until near the end of the game since you can only use them when you pick up a special item the chapters are mostly linear there's not really any reason to backtrack it's just a 3ish hour straight shot of a video game thankfully at least this time around we've got full Co-op but that actually means more chances to rack up Combos and accidentally score an achievement the idea of not getting a 10-hit combo in a beat him up game already sounds kind of hard but it's harder than it sounds you have to pay constant unwavering attention especially since hitting multiple enemies at once surprisingly correctly counts as multiple hits toward that combo meter these aren't times sensitive combos either the only way to reset your combo is to get hit or to swap characters if you're playing alone the consequence of avoiding combos in Burning Earth is that in this game your damage dealt is proportional to the length of your combo meter if you're actively avoiding getting the achievements things like this boss fight in the swamp take 15 plus minutes it was during this boss fight that I accidentally got the 20 hit achievement because my brain just turned off for one single moment and that's enough to do it I'd already gotten the 10it achievement earlier in the game when I got greedy during an 8it combo and accidentally hit one too many enemies instead of just swapping characters and being safe and at that point since I already had that achievement I took advantage of it and went for 15 hit combos to Speed the game up after messing up and getting the 20 hit achievement I was clean for the remaining 2/3 of the game so I only have those two achievements again though this was harder than it sounds because there are several segments where the game wants you and your AI or human partner to line up in several spots on screen where you're shooting bending attacks over and over again where the AI allies are sometimes useful outside of boss fights when they just jump in the air a bunch for no reason during these particular sections they're hardcoded to run right to these context sensitive pads it makes sense you don't want the AI to not do the thing it needs to do for you to progress like when Momo and qara are putting out fires together still can't make that one up but you cannot swap characters once the AI partner is in place during those things until they get knocked out of them or choose to leave and if you're going for an achievement L run this could be the run killer from what I found online I haven't seen anybody that's actually pulled it off I know that it's doable for a fact I know there's a way to do it it's just that if you fail you have to create a new Xbox account every single time to start over there's not too much more to add about the Burning Earth despite not saying much about the game itself I do like that Ang can water bend on some context sensitive points and although he just kind of learns Earth bending immediately here that's that's always great he can also do all of the earth bending context pads too I don't know it's nice for the Avatar to be able to actually use more than one element that's rare in this series somehow now the game's ranged attacks being Far and Away the dominant strategy aside I appreciate that the game at least uses the fact that Benders have range which so many avatar games never do hell the Nickelodeon Smash games barely give the Benders much range either I'll also say the library level is easily the best part of this game it's honestly really neat it's one long string of puzzles rather than simply mindly pressing the punch button over and over and over again like most of the rest of the game it's nothing super special or anything but it at least had some atmosphere to it what else is there oh oh There are some Opa flying levels which is nice two of them on Xbox to be exact there's apparently a third one locked to the PS2 game as a cross- save bonus with the first avatar game I didn't care to go do that since I'm pretty confident you could win these sections without pressing any buttons at all that's that's how easy they are the boss fights are okay I guess my favorite is the one where you can defeat the boss via ring out any chapter that ends in a boss fight pretty universally ends the same way a boss attacks qara during a qte Ang immediately turns around in the Avatar State saying yo you up and does the same finishing attack for every single boss and that's it that's the that's the boss fight yay it's especially egregious later in the game when you fight Zuko and aula on top of the drill and Ang does the exact same animation to end both fights back to back it is really funny at least seeing how little effort went into making the buttons pop at all on screen like the QT prompts look so dull there's no animation to them it's the lowest budget thing about a game whose cutcenes almost never even have lip flap movements besides the whole mouth's not moving thing the character models look pretty okay with some exceptions where they do end up off model I was almost able to praise the depiction of bossing say city streets up until I moved the stick and the game started chugging at like half of its frame rate and I ran into all of the invisible walls and identical doors that are sometimes enterable sometimes not great the voiceover work again isn't quite up to the quality of the show which is funny since the actors are usually rereading lines they'd already read for the show oh and I guess you could fight in the arena against your friends once you're done with the game if you really want to it's not not going to be very good but hey it's there obviously these are still all children's games but kids deserve better it's a shame this one veered so hard into being an obligatory licensed cashion because I really do think for all the problems the first avatar game had it just needed some tweaking to be something pretty memorable for this game to phone it in badly enough that the story beats are out of order or don't even make sense for it to be half the length of that first game it's just a let down presumably it was also a let down sales-wise too because the next few games locked themselves into shovelware purgatory and only released on DS Wii and PS2 speaking of burning Earth's DS Port was once again developed by tosa and it's mostly the same game as the first DS Port although without the ability to control the camera this time there are a few fixes here and there for some smaller details that I didn't hit on earlier such as the bottom screen map being much more functional here or moving healing items to pause screen only that that one sounds like a negative but the first game tried to keep you running around with the d-pad while pulling out your stylist to swap menus on the bottom screen and drag a healing item to a particular character and it wasn't very clean the DS game follows the same plot up through the drill although where the console game used the first episode entirely as Combat tutorial here there's a bit of exploration and side quest fodder even a touchscreen based qara healing mini game oh and if you find all 20 cabbages throughout the game and give them to the Cabbage salesman you'll unlock the final tier of upgrades for each character I didn't do that moving on to the GBA game developer half brick sadly wasn't able to carry things this time around and make a game I could actually recommend it follows the same visual style as their first avatar outing going for a top- down action adventure approach but this game sort of cuts out most of the Zelda Puzzler inspiration and instead becomes more of a time sensitive beat him up sort of it still very much wants you to think of encounters as puzzles in its own way because of the score bonuses you get for defeating multiple enemies in a chain enemies appear on screen in a set pattern that appears like half brick wants you to memorize and learn to optimize around using the Game's new support combos one example they come back to frequently is when you play as Saka and Ang together sasa's Club can stun enemies and then by pressing R you can send Ang out to do his Dash attack which sends those enemies flying into one another sort of like bowling pins if you fight normally and don't utilize these support combo strategies or stuff like aiming toofs earthbending attacks in such a way to take out multiple enemies at once good luck on getting a ranks in any level see here the game doesn't register combos unless you kill enemies within essentially milliseconds of one another and even then sometimes it doesn't seem consistent additionally in an odd twist your health is actually tied to this combo meter you might think your health is the number next to this green potion but that's actually just a timer for bonus points it's the number on the top left of the screen that's your actual health bar every time you take a hit you'll lose 10 from that score and every time you defeat enemies you'll earn points back depending on the combo number it's a rather unique setup but one I actually did enjoy even if I would have liked to see them do another straight up Zelda game it also would have been kind of rad to let you mix up your party during level replays but with how many levels straight up require something like io's fire breath or Zuko's Perry to solve specific puzzles for those characters I get that it wouldn't have been feasible that said there is an a rank bonus if you complete every one of the game's levels up through the drill with an a rank and that's far easier said than done with how touchy some of the seeming necessary bonus puzzles are four more levels are then unlocked that tell the rest of the season 2 story why is that content locked in a game that's only an hour long I have no idea I guess you could argue replayability but if we're being real here this game launched at like 20 bucks replayability was the last thing on thq's mind when shipping out one of the final 10 or so GBA games ever released now although the Game Boy Advance died half brick wasn't done with avatar games just yet as they would be rewarded with contracts for the next two Avatar DS ports one for the season 3 game and one for the much anticipated movie that Nickelodeon's Executives were certain would keep the franchise relevant for years to come first came October 2008's Avatar Into The Inferno which also released on PS2 and Wii as developed by THQ Studio Australia once again we'll talk about the console version second this time around because I'm Happy Well content to report that half brick returned to its puzzle Adventure Zelda Inspirations this time around the trade-off is the game uses the Chibi art style featured in some non-canon DVD bonus Parody episode things so it's not really fun to look at like with the second game you'll take control of two set characters per level utilizing their different bending abilities or skill sets and you're able to split the Duos up at any time to have one operate switches or solve puzzles necessary to move the other forward sadly the levels are a bit too long in my opinion and pretty repetitive at that like the first two levels together are essentially 30 to 40 minutes of the same Fire Nation mechanical interiors and there isn't enough puzzle variety to justify the lack of visual variety it is fully Co-op at least which is really cool for a DS game and that would help cut down a bit on the back and forth tdum when you have to cross an obstacle course with each character every level has five collectible pie show tiles hidden within almost as if they were going for a collectathon undertone for the game if you have enough coins at the end of the level you'll even unlock a bonus sixth one which I thought was going to be like a Mario 64 sort of Coin Star bonus before I soft locked myself messing with Ang's tornado launch move just to see if I could do that it turns out that I can that's when I learned that dying subtracts 30 coins from your score if you choose to respawn rather than start the whole level over it's also when I learned this game doesn't have checkpoints you respawn exactly where you died so so that was a fun 15 minutes of gameplay that I had to redo to get back here the puzzles may be on the simple side but I still do appreciate this game following in the first GBA Game game footsteps and having you actually control things like water at times by pulling it out of containers and using it to hit enemies or switches it's admittedly not much but I'll take what I can get considering most avatar games barely use the bending abilities at all plus qara can bloodbend enemies in this one making this the most traumatizing game in the series despite the visuals last but well kind of least actually the game has a multiplayer only volleyball mode set on Ember Island and here's where you use those collectible pie show tiles you can unlock different costumes for the main story such as the Painted Lady outfit that qara wears in the second mission which hey it's more than the bare minimum so I appreciate that they even have costume changes to fit the story cuz the Wii game does not do that or you can use the P show tiles to unlock bonus characters for the volleyball such as human proportions chibi apaa okay yeah that settles it definitely the most traumatized game in the series the DS version is also better than the Wii game at actually telling the story of SE season 3 since this one actually adds some conversations between the gang leading into and out of each episode in the Wii game things usually just happen like suddenly Zuko and Saka are just at the boiling Rock without any explanation of why or when Zuko teaches Ang firebending entirely offscreen explained away in the Overworld chapter select conversation let me tell you the Whiplash of going from this game's opening cut scene which is the actual ending of season 2 but completely reanimated in 3D and done pretty well at that the Whiplash of going from that to everything else about this game is something else for whatever reason THQ Studio Australia thought it best to remove the concept of dodging and blocking entirely while still keeping this game's core as a beat them up experience there aren't any real combos the dominant strategy is to jump and then do your slam attack to knock enemies down there are some upgrades that you can buy that are mostly superficial and like avatar on PSP of all things enemies have far too much health and are completely invulnerable once they get knocked down until they get back up which leaves you waiting constantly of this game's maybe 2 and 1/ half hour runtime I legitimately think you could shave at least 20 minutes off just by speeding up the enemy wake up alone so what you might ask is this game's gimmick well it's a Wii game first and foremost so the gimmick is poorly implemented motion controls here in the form of grabbing water or rocks or or or or fire and taking it from one container to another to solve every puzzle you would think using a fire Bender's flame punch attack would light candles but no no no you got to slowly walk while carrying this fire you found across the room and make sure not to bump anything or else you might knock it over and have to start over this emphasis on Wii remote bending extends to the combat too as the game wants you to grab nearby elements and fling them into enemies to damage them even though you're then a Sitting Duck who can't move fast while you're bending strangely the emphas is on controlling your Wii remote that's something they actively push you to not do any other time in the game except when holding an element for a puzzle almost everything in your surroundings whether it's lockers or chairs or papers on a desk it's all interactable or closer to destructible really and the game rewards you with hidden Collectibles and money for flailing your controller around whenever possible think of it like a Lego game but far worse I shudder to think about what it's like to play Into The Inferno on PS2 where I'm assuming the analog stick replaces all the motion controls no no thank you the most disappointing part is that it doesn't even follow its own rules at times despite being so short that it shouldn't have any trouble following any rules it sets up early on in one of the levels you're taught by the talking Samurai Momo tutorials that swinging water around quickly turns it into a good cutting tool and later in that level you're asked to both fill metal containers with water and also cut some of those containers metal chains in the same puzzle you would think that means means that you have to cut the chain with a fast water slice since that's also straight up been done in the show before nope you use air here it's the only time you do that the amount of times the game teaches you one thing with the tutorials and then later in that level actually wants you to do something completely different in the same situation it's it's bafflingly poorly designed out of the entire avatar game series even up through now this has by far the best cut scenes and it actually has the most uses for bending as puzzle elements out of every 3D game as well and yet since the puzzles actively fight the rules the game itself has already set up for you the cut scenes are the only thing Into The Inferno has going for it which is just Stellar since they also completely butchered the story rendering those cut scenes also kind of worthless actually I lied the only other thing this game has going for it is that it lets you airglide in this pilot Wings styled bonus area I don't know why but it's the most fun part of the game and it's one of the only times that there's an official avatar game that actually lets you airglide so I I'll take it there's nothing more symbolic of how little this game seems to care than the final cut scene where Ang defeats ozai this epic series conclusion played to underwhelming music and then rushed along so quickly just to get you to the credits that they superimpose oai into a jail cell to skip the entire rest of the ending in incredible awful both before we move on to the Last Airbender movie tie in games it's time for the rapid fire round see although There are 16 distinct games SL versions of games that I'm covering here I did say that we were going to dig through all of the avatar games and there are another 40 something that I'm not going to count as proper games for example because this series existed in the mid 2000s there's of course an avatar plug-and-play console some of these games I've played some of these I haven't I'll let you guess which ones are which and many of them straight up don't exist anymore because they were flash games and before you ask no I'm not counting any of the Nickelodeon crossover games here just to pad the numbers first there are two full boxed PC games I don't think I'd call them full games myself called avatar The Last Airbender Bobble Battles and avatar The Last Airbender the path of Zuko which both use the same Chibi art style featured in the DS version of the season 3 game the former is a sort of strategy game obviously not a very complex one and the other is a super basic Zelda clone that uses only your computer's Mouse there are also a few nonv video games that are more worth mentioning than the list that's about to come so I'm going to mention them such as the avatar Legends tabletop RPG that released in 2023 after a successful Kickstarter back in 2021 there's Fire Nation Rising a co-op card game that released in 2022 and that's in addition to two other trading card games made over the years both of which are actually weirdly enough crossover card games with other media so I guess I shouldn't mention them if I'm abiding by my own rules but but I'm still going to mention them because the original card game from 2006 utilized upper deck's short-lived quick strike concept which only made it to three I P before being canned so if you ever wanted to play a trading card game that's for some reason 90 minutes long where you can combine Avatar and Pirates of the Caribbean boy do I have the discontinued game for you and there are no fewer than three Avatar board games currently and that's excluding Avatar Monopoly okay now for the true rapid fire round also known as the my editor Hates Me section of this video the rest of these have all appeared on Nickelodeon websites over the years I'm not going to explain what every single one of these are since very few of them even have footage that exists anymore there's an on there's the UK exclusive amulet quest which uses the Avatar The Legend of Ang branding instead of the last air bender there's Avatar Arena where you could create your own Bender there's ashes in the air Autumn Twilight barge barrage bending battle black Sun Siege boiling Rock rescue clash of the Benders dangerous Dash dark into light Earth healers Elemental Escape escape the spirit world sometimes called escape from the spirit world not to be confused with another game also named escape from the spirit world which is a completely Canon story line that addresses what Ang did in the spirit world between seasons 2 and three after he got hit by aul's lightning there's Fortress fight and Fortress Fight 2 four nations tournament hangman it's it's just hangman there was a full MMO called avatar Legends of the Arena there's masters of the elements I'm sorry Master of the elements I said it wrong there's Nick tun's Avatar State brain Blitz there's just P show but not actually the real P show the avatar version of P show there was an online avatar Quest Creator game where you could create quests and share them online I'm not sure how that would have worked but this particular screenshot gives me Age of Empires Vibes so I'm kind of into it there are a couple cor games called Republic City Rescue and Republic City run there's rise of the Avatar rise of the Phoenix King San's Echo The Last Stand Treetop trouble sorry in advance to any Spyro fans out there there's a game titled trial of serpent pass another one called Welcome to Republic city which is once again a COR game there's Avatar word search and last but not least there's Zuko's dragon fight which takes place during kora's third season I need to breathe I would not be shocked at all if there are another 50 even deeper cuts out there either this is simply what I was able to find on of the 2010 Movie game we can't put this one off for too much longer now I'm not going to give the movie's backstory to the same extent that I did the show I I have to draw a line at some point the short of it is that M Night Shyamalan butchered Avatar's first season so badly with this movie that he couldn't even get Ang's name pronounced properly my name is z the show's creators were pretty much snubbed the entire way despite initially being involved in the process and they've since thrown some very UNS subtle shade at other facets of the movie's lack of Direction Shyamalan meanwhile blamed the movie's quality on the source material IAL being too long the movie was an absolute dumpster fire not just an insult to the series but an insult to anybody who enjoys movies period massive chunks of season 1's plot are just relegated to Exposition the movie kind of focuses more on Zuko than Ang there's there's nothing redeemable about this film well except maybe the DS game this was one of half Brick's final titles before it went fully into its Fruit Ninja era like with Into The Inferno this game does a far better job at telling the story it at hand than the Wii game did even if in this case it's telling a flawed version of Avatar's first season I mean for one Saka and qara are actually here at all they they essentially don't exist in the Wii game where the entire story is Zuko telling you his side of the story then telling Ang's side of the story and then explaining anything and everything else in the pre-level cut scenes in order to leap over the entire rest of the plot the Wii game even gets basic story beats out of order and I don't mean out of order with the show I mean with the movie too half Breck though they we created a pretty decent Adventure game here I I have to admit once again I always give bonus points for anything that uses the air glider whatsoever because man the air glider is just a huge missed opportunity with these games most of the time here there are both some platforming sections that require the air glider and an obstacle course during a lengthy flashback level that puts Ang back in the air Temple before he was frozen for a century the Zuko sections are more platforming focused with loads of wall climbing and whatnot where Ang sections tend to lean a bit more puzzly in fact by the end Ang's even waterbending moving bowls of water from one container to another to progress just like in half Brick's other games it's kind of neat to see at least one avatar game series keep to its DNA without butchering it or changing it up as time goes on there are even side quests here which will reward you with experience points that you can use to level up Ang or Zuko's move sets the combat is basic touchscreen tap-based fighting but the only thing I care about here is that there's an upgrade that lets you instantly defeat enemies who are knocked down this game's even out here solving problems that the non half brick versions had I I got to respect it it's still a game that's completely hamstrung by the bad Source material but you can tell they really tried their damnest to make something worthwhile I also want to shout out some smaller touches like some pretty solid Tunes in the background that gave me some jrpg Vibes the dynamic camera pens stood out to me compared to other DS games I can recall from this era it was honestly pretty cool plus OA looks depressed and I can relate to that now the Wii game the only thing I can say about it that isn't a negative is that it was composed by Mick Gordon of all people that doesn't mean I remember a single track from this game but but hey I'm not kidding when I say the entire story is relay to you in the pre-level cut scenes by Zuko to the point that qara and Saka straight up aren't in the game pretty much whatsoever even story beats like Ang surrendering to Zuko's troops to spare the water tribe that's all explained with a still image and Zuko talking over it the single least effective way to highlight Zuko's Stellar character Arc is to tell this entire story from his perspective the perspective of the bad guy for at least the first season SL would be first movie doubly so if you're just going to make the character whiny Zuko also gets a 64 advantage in playable levels since there's an extended blue spirit level in level three great great pacing but it's not just that it tells the badly told story just as badly if not worse compared to the movie because the game is a travesty against game design in a bunch of ways from THQ Australia once again excluding the ability to dodge or block so your best way to avoid attacks is to just jump like an idiot or there's your powered up rage move State not having even startup armor so you can get knocked down while activating it which wastes precious time the game pretty consistently uses these same levels or visual styles of levels twice in a row such as Zuko fighting Traders on his ship in level one followed by Ang escaping that ship in level two and then repeating this in levels three and four where Zuko's entire level is saving Ang and Ang's level after that is escaping the level that you essentially just did moments ago that first tutorial level by the way it's like 30 minutes long and it ends in a boss who throws explosive barrels at you barrels that are filled with health pickups great the game even has the audacity to feature in-game achievements as if you would dare to actually care when playing the game mind you this only came out on the Wii so those achievements cannot transfer anywhere the game's inexplicably full of on Rails firstperson shooter set pieces also so hope you like that enemies have too much health even though I went out of my way to play on easy because if they weren't going to try why should I not the combat is difficult mind you it's mostly pressing one button and then occasionally ending with a motion control qte I I guess it's cool that armor pieces break off and fly away as you deal damage but but I'm not going to stretch for things to say the game already finds a way to never shut up as it is this was the only one that I straight up stopped playing that I did not finish and it makes me sad to report that this wasn't the worst avatar game I've played it did somehow get worse later with one that I I did finish oh sorry the worst the avatar game that's how it's pronounced here I forgot and now it's time for some more Whiplash because we get to go from one of the worst avataravatar games to ever be made to maybe my favorite overall Platinum Games legend of Kora this was a budget title that I think got a really bad rap when it first came out back in 2014 many of the criticisms are that it's short and repetitive both of which are definitely true don't get me wrong but a 4ish hour Platinum game that costs only 15 bucks and is meant to be replayed a few times over to really get the full meat of it looking back now hell yeah I will absolutely take that especially now when the game costs pretty much nothing at all by that I mean it does cost nothing because Activision Dlisted it when the license expired so you can't get it anymore yeah this was the first avatar game in the post THQ era if you want some more info on thq's downfall I just made a video about it actually so go check that out when you're done here but Activision picked up the license for this one as well as the other Kora game more on that one in a bit first let's talk about kora's Rocky history for those unfamiliar with kora's show and the constant issues it had with Nickelodeon take everything I've talked about with Ang series and multiply it tfold originally green lit as a 12 episode miniseries showing the Avatar World 70 years after the first series and of course featuring a new Avatar to highlight this changing Industrial Revolution inspired post-war World core was announced at 2010's ComicCon only a month after The Last Airbender movie had released and bombed by that measure it was clear that Nickelodeon realized the movie's inherent flaws weren't with the source material or the series popularity and that it should continue to try to build the franchise up fur further also fun sidebar the show was briefly for some reason planned to be called The Last Airbender Legend of Kora despite there being more air Benders now now although it started as a one-season miniseries Nickelodeon quickly asked for another season after Kora became the US's most viewed animated show per episode in the year 2012 part of the show's impressive ratings is simply that the show's target audience had expanded cor would aim to be a slightly more mature show than even the first avatar series that would reach the now grown fans of story as well as Nick's usual younger viewers this was by Design and Nickelodeon explicitly targeted those older viewers mind you kora's first season still aired on Saturday mornings you know who's not waking up on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons 16year olds the fact that this was doing numbers comparable to Ang's Peak despite Nickelodeon falling from being the top basic cable network in 2008 to well far lower than number one four years later thanks to the at the time slowly accelerating cord cutting it was more than anybody could have hoped the ratings took a dip in season 2 which aired 15 months later in the fall of 2013 in the Friday night death slot Nickelodeon apparently thought the best way to follow up one of its most successful news shows in years was to put it in an even worse time slot for the main demographic they were targeting but it was still successful in spite of that so Nick once again asked for two more seasons after season 2's story had already been set in stone and production was mostly complete which led to a bit of a disjointed feel in the storytelling series wide since you know they had to create both of the first two seasons as if it was going to be the definitive ending of the story this ended up leading to a messy production I mean duh but messy enough that season 2's final episodes were being finished while work on season 3 and even Four's episodes was actively underway at one point the studio was working on 30 episodes of this 52 episode show simultaneously and it meant that apparently the final touch-up work for the finale was still going on the very day the finale was set to air this constant shift in production scope also meant that the original Animation Studio that handled the first season briefly left due to a work overlap prioritizing the other show it had signed on to do first The Boondocks of all things because it was a much easier job to do than the animation intensive Avatar so season 2 ended up looking a bit sloppier due to two different Studios working on different episodes but we're not done yet it only got Messier from here as parts of season 3 were accidentally leaked online a few different times and with Nickelodeon's ratings in general continuing to decline cor is included the final chunk of season 3 and the entirety of season 4 were all released on Nickelodeon's website to burn through the episodes and get the series over with the cor of video games both share a plot which takes place during the gap between seasons 2 and three in the timeline although they released a few weeks into season 4 airing okay we're caught up again so the Platinum game is the most Platinum game to ever Platinum game it's a beat him up game with a number of combat encounters per chapter Each of which gives you a score and a ranking based on how well you perform in between levels you can purchase a bunch of equipable modifiers that do things like have your health but double your damage output or have your damage output but double your experience stuff like that there's not a huge enemy variety either and sadly the game suffers from the decision to take all four of kora's elements away early on forcing you to unlock them at set points in the story also there's a weird endless Runner where cor rides on her polar bear dog Naga because endless Runners were all the rage back then keep the endless Runner thing in mindz somehow that's coming back too a lot of this may not sound compelling but in motion it's the closest that an avatar game has come to showing the power of each element attacks are weighty and satisfying you can swap on the Fly between the elements you've unlock to do some combo chains and each style has its own experience bar to further unlock new abilities and options as you go through the game's eight chapters the game actually starts out a bit on the hard almost unfair side quickly throwing you into fights against three sub bosses at once each one using a different El element to further make things a pain to manage it's kind of hard to focus on the slow Burly Earth Bender when there's a water bender shooting icicles at you every few seconds crucially though this is the kind of game that gets better on replay since a there are some treasure chests hidden in each level behind certain Elemental doors so that you have a reason to come back later and B you are straight up not going to max out all of your Elemental stats in one playthrough because the point is to struggle through it once and then come back a second time as a Powerhouse I don't necessarily agree with as a design decision I think it's a bad decision frankly but it does work here if you can get over the fact that the middle of the game puts you against the same repetitive few enemy types over and over again it forces you to learn each element slowly so that you can get a really good feel of fire bendings super fast-paced melee attacks water bendings ranged Supremacy Earth bendings slow but incredibly powerful bulky moves and air bendings well actually air bending is honestly just kind of overpowered in this game it's fast like fire bending strong like Earth bending and it has water bendings range not quite sure why that's the case here but by that point you know what I'm already hooked into the combat Loop so I'm kind of cool with it it's not even close to a Flawless game the villain who I think is technically Canon because he was created by the show's creators is just kind of a spooky Wizard and the game spends most of its runtime Meandering about in Republic City the neutral zone built by Ang and Zuko after the first Show's ending although I like Republic City a ton both in the show and the game both of them run into the same issue where just a bit more variety would have really gone a long way espe in the game since the seventh of again only eight chapters is a filler chapter retreading all the areas you've already visited it almost feels like Platinum was given a Time quota that they were tasked with hitting rather than a Content quota but I do once again have to give a bit of credit because retreading those areas with all of those elements fully unlocked during that seventh chapter it shows you why you struggled earlier and it gets you to appreciate just how strong Kora is as the Avatar by the time you reach the end of the game and get to use the Avatar State you're just in pure god mode and it's one of the few times you can actually play in the Avatar State it's more than worth the wait this game it just feels fun to play and that bypasses all of the other little issues that add up I don't blame anybody who maybe never went back to New Game Plus but that's definitely where the game lives and breathes oh and also there's a prob bending mini game featuring the sport right at aora show which I really appreciate it's definitely not platinum's best game but for a quick In-N-Out project they made sure the parts that mattered felt the most satisfying it's just a shame that the most enjoyable way to mess around with the four elements in an avatar game is in a game that no longer exists but at the very least you still can find the PC files out there if you search for them now the other cor game that one still exists and honestly that's probably kind of a shame too this 3DS cor game was developed by webfoot Technologies a company whose only notable contribution since then was teasing a Dragon Ball Z Legacy of Goku 4 for a few years to capitalize on the cult following the first three Legacy of Goku's games had when they made them way back on the Game Boy Advance this fourth game very clearly was never in production and if that's not a good enough indicator of how this cor game turned out webfoot most recently spent its time pedaling nfts sorry NTFS Color Me surprised when I found out that the 3DS cor game was a fire emblem clone yeah instead of a weapon triangle there's a bending square with super effective attacks dealing direct damage to a character's Health otherwise if you're not dealing super effective damage you first have to attack a few times just to whittle down the enemy's Shield stat the greatest strength this version of cor's game has is that it actually features the rest of kora's cast where the Platinum Kora title really only features Kora outside of a couple cut scenes where maybe one or two other characters from the show appear here by the end you've got Kora Mako Bolin Lin B Fong Ang andar son tenzen and their daughter Kaa each has their own ability set with Lyn for example utilizing her metal bending whip attacks that she uses as the city's police chief this version also does a bit of a better job of of telling the story intended for these games compared to the Platinum one it's still nothing special just spooky wizard man taking out a Thousand-Year Grudge on the Avatar but there's a bit more texture here thanks to the well text boxes there is some wonkiness to the controls with tutorials for some reason using the touchcreen but the actual gameplay not using the touchcreen as well as some other General UI issues like having to equip attacks before you can use them which for AOE attacks breaks things that's because there's some sort of bug with AOE attacks where to unequip them you have to prepare to attack then cancel that attack action to be able to use anything else or an item oh and the cut scenes are [Music] uh yeah the real backbreaking issues with this game are that a each character can only have four items on them which gets a bit rough later B you often have to choose which of two moves or permanent stat Buffs to add to a character's move set when they level up except most of the time the moves that require more chi in this game actually deal less damage than your starter moves and there's no way to ever go back and get the other mover stat that you turn down and see the idea of a bending rock paper scissors system is cool until there are non-bending enemies that also do extra damage to Earth Bender specifically and when cor loses of her bending immediately in this game too it means that the characters that should be the strongest your tanks are the easiest to pick off and Kora is the weakest character for most of the game now let's revisit problem B here because as Kora when you level up you have to think ahead which you're not going to know any better to do this and you have to pick bending moves that you can't yet use even if it doesn't seem like it makes sense at the time because once you unlock each element you don't actually get a move that comes with it free of charge so if you don't grab one of each El Elemental move right away the first chance you get you might never get another of that element with future level UPS oh and the only fire bender besides Kora it's the slowest person on your squad which is just great when a plurality of enemies are weak to fire if it sounds like there are a lot of backbreaking things yeah it starts out okay but very quickly the game throws an overwhelming amount of enemies at you which turns into a decision of grind out every single fight and waste 20 extra minutes on basic combat that just doesn't feel fun or go to the exit and risk being underpowered don't let the rankings at the end of levels fool you either by the way you cannot replay past levels once you finish them unless you start a brand new file Color Me surprised when I beat the game and found that out when the game more or less says earlier to come back later to be able to do this particular level better the level layouts are just uninspired with no positional attack bonuses like you might expect from a tile-based strategy game there are some bending element pads that show up that give you a temporary buff to one particular stat but they're not super helpful then there's Kora being limited the entire game which means that there's little by way of replayability despite the game throwing those rankings and bonus objectives in there and here's the real kicker the spirit world section of the game is maybe the worst thing that I can recall seeing in this style of tactics game ever see Kora doesn't remember how to Spirit Bend to help free these tortured Spirits so for the entire second half of the game any Spirit enemies you defeat will respond within three turns this gimmick first appears in a level where you're tasked with defeating seven enemies with your six characters in that three- turn span when the game lays the enemies out in such a way that the guys that are super effective against any one of your characters are the first ones that each character will reach so the fire bender has to take three turns to get across this very small map by which point the fire Spirits have already killed your Earth Benders all while Ang's two kids are struggling to fight a couple other enemies since you have to be super effective against an enemy or else you'll only deal 10 damage after spending one to three turns taking down their Shields first all the while Kora is just kind of there okay oh oh and the kicker by the way these enemies are only level three like 10 levels lower than you despite one-shotting most of your party so they only give you a couple experience points upon defeat it's a mercy that this game despite all this is only 6 hours long in total any further and I just I I would have probably stopped because it is not really fun as a fire emblem game and it's just it wouldn't be worth the time it already wasn't worth the time I spent but now I'm one of the four people ever to have actually talked about this game online so you're welcome after these two 2014 cor games we had nearly a decade Gap without any Avatar media outside of official graphic novels to bring us up to about the present day but first one small detour because we do have something unofficial to hit on first see there are others like me out there in the world suffering through some of these games and wondering how we've somehow not gotten more than one or two decent avatar games this entire time a fellow YouTube Creator named El gaming went One Step Beyond just wondering that and saying I'll make a video about that one day in like 2016 as shortly after the PlayStation 4 game dreams entered its Early Access in April 2019 he endeavored to create his own avatar game with Blackjack and hookers starting with little to no game design knowledge which by the way shows just how insane dreams is credit to medium molecule as well here Ela has spent the better part of four years creating a fan game now called Four Seasons and I'm not kidding when I say even the early demos are better than most of the official avatar games we've talked about today sadly although he and a small group of volunteers have seemingly put together the bones for a very solid game only two basic demos are available with most of their work still inaccessible to the regular player one of those demos at the time of recording is only a few months old and has a fully explorable island with some hidden treasure chest with of course cabbages the ability to air Glide just a little toy box of sorts to show you the mechanics if you if you go back to the older version of the demo you have access to the first few areas of the last air bender story starting in qara and Sak's Village visiting Ang's old Air Temple and a partially explorable Kyoshi Island only the first of these three has proper quests but the scope of each is beyond impressive for a fan project there are fully explorable Interiors with massive caves or the crashed fire nationship the game has its own triggers that lead to bonus mini games like penguin sledding or that lead to Zuko's ship approaching the water tribe Village just like in the show The Penguin sledding is also better than the 2023 official avatar games version 2 we'll get there in a sec and these areas are explorable both during the day and at night as is the sample Overworld where you can fly around with Opa and see the entire planet's map all the way down to things like the lights of moving trains in bossing say below you it's really impressive again there's not much to these demos besides a sometimes excessively large world and I would fully anticipate knowing dreams as limitations that there would never be much by way of enemies but in the same breath I never knew that in dreams you could chain together different projects directly to bypass those size limits so maybe the sky would have been the limit problem is dreams just ended its support earlier this year which further limited those size caps and also meant the plans to allow developers to Port their dreams games off platform onto PC among other features well Four Season lifespan is now more limited than it already was and it's a shame because there was so much work that's clearly gone in beyond what we've been able to play here on this side of the screen dozens of whole areas that the dude has live streamed himself creating bit by bit that hopefully will one day get to see the light of day before Sony inevitably sunsets the dream servers entirely in like 5 to 10 years even in the face of the inevitable Sunset of Dreams Ela gaming still posting online pretty much every day with progress updates at the time of recording which means that this fan game that's nearing its fifth anniversary that cannot possibly make a dollar due to you know licensing has outlived the next game we're going to talk about I had to change this entire part of my script because a week after I recorded gameplay of the mobile gacha RPG Avatar Generations the Publishers at get this Crystal Dynamics OS announced that the game was shutting down on December 2nd 2023 this game launched at the end of January after a country specific Beta release in Canada Sweden and South Africa starting in August 2022 around August of this year and this was a piece of info that I had missed in my initial research pass most of the development studio for Generations was laid off which explains why the game stopped getting any real updates after that point but let's go back a bit what is Avatar Generations the promise of this game was to tell the entire story of multiple avatars including Ang and heavy air quotes eventually Kora along with others like like Kyoshi whose stories haven't been fully explored yet all wrapped up in a frequently updated gacha RPG package that even the game's five fans would admit were overpriced even by gotcha standards I'm not going to pretend that I cared enough to dive into the Nuance of the combat because as far as the story stuff goes it's pretty easy to Brute Force the encounters and outside of the story there really didn't seem to be much to do since the game is now dead all you need to know is that it's your bog standard turn-based RPG gameplay with a couple wrinkles that were thrown in there were daily challenges and endless amount of items to assault your senses that each often act as their own upgrade currency multiple actual currencies because this wouldn't be a live service game without multiple currencies and plls plls plls plls plls after playing about I don't know an hour or so I had in my notes that this game would be dead in about 6 months if you told me that exactly 6 days after I wrote that they'd be announcing it shutdown well actually I would 100% believe you I'm going to hope one of you out there is weird enough to verbally ask why is that because I'm going to answer it well in part because it hadn't gotten any content updates in at least 5 months see Ang's story immediately throws some filler your way which is incredible so I went to check kora's story only to find out that Kora had never been introduced but that Koshi was kyoshi's story lasts maybe 40 minutes before it just stops waiting for an update that will now never come her story was frankly kind of insulting before that anyway it turns out that it's apparently Canon from a 2019 book that kyoshi's friend Yun was a assumed to be the Avatar not her and while I'm assuming the book handles that idea a bit more tactfully with more than I don't know 20 minutes of content in the book I'm I'm going to hope it'd be a really weird book if it didn't have more than 20 minutes of content the game presents Kyoshi here as a servant to Yun with everybody else in the town essentially talking down to her it kind of rubbed me the wrong way especially since after fighting some Pirates getting insulted by yun's Rude trainer and doing some other filler errands the story just pauses with the game not even telling you that there's no way to progress until the next update so all we got with kyoshi's campaign was a taste test a sampler that involved this mythically strong character that lives to be over 200 years old getting verbally slapped around and acting meekly what a joke this was mind you one of the first pieces of media properly shown in the Avatar Studios era after Paramount brought back the series creators in 2021 to helm this multi- media Empire that would hopefully help prop up Paramount plus almost everything else was set for years down the road such as the postl Airbender angen crew as adults theatrical movie and an earthbending avatar show both in 2025 a 2026 Zuko film and two spin-off shows in 2026 and 2027 but this game the next game and the currently Untitled mobile strategy game that set to come out in 2024 these were the best we got outside of merch books merch comics and merch merch merch merch merch for the first two games in this new era to be worse than the prior era well it doesn't necessarily Bode poorly for the entire rest of Avatar I would say the rest of the Avatar Studio stuff rests more on whether Paramount plus even makes it to 2026 and stops losing money but it's not a good omen when in the same breath other Nickelodeon series are getting faithful revivals and solid sequels to those revivals that mobile strategy game by the way it's being phrased as if it's a city Builder so I'm guessing Clash of Clans don't get your hopes up that they won't strike out a third time back to Avatar generations for a sec the only good thing I can say about this game is that the music is actually really strong one of the few avatar games with more than minimum effort put into the soundtrack a good chunk of this video's background music is sampled from this game because you have no idea how Barren the game series is otherwise in terms of soundtrack and that includes the next game avatar The Last Airbender quest for balance published by the fittingly named game Mill in September 2023 quest for balance is the worst kind of licensed game a disclosure reminder from earlier game Mill sent me a review copy of the game about a day or two before before launch because I was hoping against hope that I could end this video on a positive note I I I I cannot you've possibly already heard some of the problems with this game from the overwhelmingly negative reviews on steam or other creators out there so let me go another route first and highlight that this game does not have a Metacritic score because only two press Outlets have covered it not even Gamespot who mind you is owned by the same company as Metacritic was tasked with reviewing this game open critic isn't any different this game doesn't have a proper score there either putting it in the and I quote negative one percentile of games nobody wanted to touch quest for balance and there's a reason this game isn't just bad it's boring dreadfully boring the kind of game that cannot appeal to either Avatar audience longtime older fans can accept that yes they're going to be playing children's games most of the time hi hello but not something this brain dead meanwhile kids with would already have to be huge fans of Avatar to get anything out of this because this story butchers The Last Airbender see quester balance is a frame story a post TLA retelling of the events of the show by iro and the other White Lotus members they're sharing the tale with a playwright who is looking to put together a masterpiece of a show to celebrate Zuko's coronation as the fire lord so what do they do with this frame story they take after The Last Airbender movie game skipping over entire key episodes in order to rush things along and ensure that pretty much none of the game that you get to play is a substantive part of the Avatar story even throughout each of this game's 18 chapters not just the beginning and end but during them the game will just throw a text box up in between sections to have one of the old men tell you the story that occurred in between points A and B and the worst part this is preferable to the alternative because only two voice actors return from the show and none of the rest of them give any sort of convincing performance whatsoever one of the returning voice actors is the prolific D Bradley Baker who mainly voiced a bunch of the animals such as Opa and Momo his spot in the credits very well may be archival Clips just reused for the game the other returning voice is James C voice of the Cabbage salesman except he doesn't Voice the Cabbage man in this game somebody else does instead he stands in for fire lord oai the OG cabbage salesman is the villain they they couldn't even get that right now of course a lot of the voice rolls would naturally be replaced over time especially since for example Ang's original voice actor is no longer a child so yeah he's not going to be able to do a young Ang voice anymore the issue here is that the voice acting is pretty awful across the board and the game's visual Fidelity is also like let's be generous and say PlayStation 3 level so any attempt at making actual cutcenes the few times they do just takes valuable resources away from things like making the game and lowbudget Peruvian developer bam Tang games needed all the help it could get on that front to begin with I promise you the last thing I would want in this game is to hear any more of the poor kid voicing Ang screeching in my ears thanks to poor Voice Direction last thing I'll say about the voices before I move on I've got a conspiracy theory that this game may have snuck in a Canadian media Grant to help subsidize some of its budget it first caught my eye when I saw that Zuko's replacement voice was in a significant number of Canadian animated projects in recent years including the Ratchet and Clank movie at bra which I know for a fact took Canadian grant money a decent number of the cast is from Canada which is one of the smaller requirements for Canadian funding I I would have looked into this further but even saying these last two sentences means that I've looked into it more than anybody else in gaming press so I'll hang my hat on that because not a soul gives a damn so anyway this stupid fing game which was according to the developer intended to reach younger kids unfamiliar with the show's story and yet tells that story the worst out of any avatar game yet it is split into 18 chapters six per book after about a chapter or two this is a fully Cooperative game which is at least a not in its favor and somehow this is maybe the longest avatar game of them all clocking in at 9 hours they really wanted you to feel like you got your $50 out of this one the base upon which quest for balance is derived is the Lego Star Wars franchise so imagine this as a dog [ __ ] imitation of that each chapter tends to have a little Hub a number of side quests a couple areas that will require you to come back with a specific character or Bender to get the secrets take all of that and just imagine it done at the most surface level possible and poorly for example puzzles in this game are almost always block puzzles and if they're not or even sometimes when they are they require you to grab a torch and carry it from one side of a room to the other without it being doused by water even later when you're a Firebender and could just light the torch at the other side with your fire bending these exist I meant a couple literally when I mentioned secret areas by the way it's one or two per level at most usually one like with the Lego games there's a wide cast of characters to play as and by that I mean nine some of them like Suki the Kyoshi Warrior or the blue Spirit they show up once in book one and then disappear for either the entire rest of the game or almost the entire rest of the game so be careful not to spend your limited P show upgrade tokens on those character skill trees because you are just wasting that experience also all these characters play just about the same anyway it's all mindless button matching combos you don't really have to worry about dodging because enemy attacks don't do much and it's clear that the combat is tertiary in this one behind trying to figure out how many block puzzles you can get into a game before it reaches critical mass and making a game that's also a sleep medication the only unique aspect to each character tends to be their specialty moves qara has a healing move sakas is a damage buff war cry Etc I shouldn't even really have called it comboing either it's slow and heavy three hit punch combos you can't chain anything together the side quests I mentioned a moment ago are also bad what a what a shock they're mostly fetch quests often times they don't let you grab the items that clearly stand out in their environments as fetch Quest items until you first get the fetch quest which then forces you to backtrack and fetch the item sometimes the quests want you to do the tasks in question in a specific order like giving lunch snacks to different villagers and that lunch Quest is one of the few where they actually tell you which order to do them in most of the time it's just run around the level until you find the quest trigger go back and repeat even some of the main missions do this too it's it's great the rewards for all these side quests are just money and piie show tiles and neither are all that worth it when the upgrades are just combat tweaks and the money is really only worth using on the eight bending Scrolls that you can unlock for each element which also don't really matter all that much plus you can just keep reloading the game and destroy the Cabbage salesman's cart over and over again and get infinite money actually fun fact before this game was patched the economy was broken not even counting the Cabbage salesman you could buy the moon Peach health regen item for example for 50 coins and then sell it back for 100 coins yeah all right let me just run through the list of oddities really quickly here there is no drop shadow in this game despite the game frequently wanting to pretend that it's a platformer I found a dude sweeping the streets but his broom didn't load in 10 minutes after that I had to reload the game entirely because I physically couldn't destroy one of the two flaming carts that I needed to destroy to progress at first because it wanted me to destroy the other one first and didn't tell me that I couldn't destroy the second one until I destroy the first one when it doesn't there's no it doesn't tell you that and then after that simply because didn't register the other one as a destructible item anyway so I had to reload they skipped the entire first omashu episode in a text box which is probably a blessing since that level would run like absolute [ __ ] I know this because there's a season 2 omashu episode that's already in the game and that area runs like [ __ ] for some reason Ang and Saka have GTA San Andreas gangster NPC hand movements during cut scenes that just kind of threw me off and speaking of that the Ally AI in this game is horrendous sometimes they'll get stuck on basic geography or they'll forget to jump up some stairs and you'll just have to to hope that sometime in the next 5 minutes they respawn next to you why you ask well good question remember in the first avatar game when I mention that it doesn't tell you which d-pad direction corresponds to which character that you need to switch to well this game is the amalgam of every avatar game sin so this does that too but worse somehow and if you pick the wrong character to swap to and it's somebody far away from you even though you've been waiting for them to respawn next to you and they just won't respawn next to you if you swap over to that character by accident quester balance will immediately respawn all of the Allies to back to where you now are so then you have to slowly jog back to where you just were to swap to the character you needed to activate a contextual switch now remember when I said to remember the endless Runner stuff from the cor game well those are here too and frequently penguin sleding in chapter 1 elephant koi riding in Chapter 2 these like every Temple Run kind of game are always locked to three lanes frequently with enemy attacks and obstacles flying in which sometimes have disjointed hit boxes here so that you can get hit even when you're following the trails of coins meant to tell you which way to safely go this sort of Runner mini game was already out of style in 2014 so to see them do it in 2023 is maybe the most confusing part of this entire game and this one has the added onew punch of a 4-year-old unofficial fan game demo having better penguin sledding than the official game all right back to my list here what's next outside of a handful of cutcenes anything in game is the lowest effort possible all the way down to a lack of lip flap animations just like in The Burning Earth boss fights are the most basic cookie cutter garbage imaginable like Zuko doing the same charge attack three times before standing still and being open to an attack and by the way you do this same boss fight twice in the first three to four chapters Ang in this version of the story Masters water bending by beating up some water benders yeah just to reiterate how the game chooses some of the least important story moments to highlight as actual facets of gameplay chapter five of the six chapters in book one starts with you collecting Frozen toads to cure qara and Saka before chapter 6 skips the entire rest of season one and goes to the ending they then skip most of season 2 as well and it's at this point that I realize the computer controlled allies do a fraction of the damage that you would do as that character if you were controlling them in that exact moment so that's just Stellar there's a whole item system in this game certain items are General boost and certain ones are specific to certain types of Benders except you never need a single godamn one of them the only time I used one was a speed boost during a very particularly time crunchy puzzle where I had to once again move a torch through some spinning water cannons with disjointed hit boxes that will knock you down and put out the fire even well outside of the water spray only to find out afterwards and the game just actually says this that this puzzle was entirely filler but mandatory woo I love it this puzzle is one of what feels like two or three such puzzles every chapter where the game turns basic plot points from the show into a deusex Machina of sorts remember that oneoff Guru that tries to help angs Chi late in the series no you probably don't well in quest rebalance every time anything is supposed to happen in the story we do a breath of the wild Shrine knockoff with each one being either a block puzzle or a move the stone wheel from point A to B puzzle remember that time the gang found the secret of Lake La guy by moving blocks first and then suddenly realizing the answer because some blue guy told him no me neither just look at this [ __ ] shaking static image here when this game was first leaked as a breath of the wild inspired avatar game and it gave us all hope for a brief moment this was not what we anticipated they meant it took me until like 5 hours in when one of the text box cut scenes talks about this Guru for me to realize that this wasn't just meant to be a generic monk to fully cop from Zelda because this guy is such a forgettable character when you see him as a goddamn blue jpeg oh and by the way they skip most of chapter 3 to they don't even try to explain what happens this time around though Ang goes from being shot by aula to totally fine in the heart of the Fire Nation cities Zuko just shows up at a point and suddenly angs a master fire bender no different than when Into The Inferno skip that whole story beat too so hey I guess taking after their Elders or something and then when you beat the game if you dare go back into free play mode and play with other characters the hidden collectibles in each chapter are just randomly sitting somewhere in plain sight those Collectibles are only collectible because they simply don't spawn outside of free play mode look not every puzzle in this game is awful some are creative the first minute or two before they start to overstay their welcome but that's the only real positive I have with this game for the first like 30 minutes or so I thought maybe this wasn't as bad as the tea leaves were already starting to indicate like maybe it was flawed but with some level of promise to it but shortly after that it became apparent that no this is actually just the worst elements of every prior avatar game wrapped into one like it was some kind of Avatar of the avatar games itself except instead of bringing peace it only brought misery I wish that was some slightly exaggerated point that I was forcing together just to make the avatar and elements allegory but no it legitimately hits on the worst beats of every other avatar game that I played before it and I don't even know how this random Studio from Peru managed that because you know they weren't playing the older games for research they were too busy cranking out DreamWorks All-Star cart racing at the very same time a game that game Mill also published only 6 weeks after this one I fully understand that Avatar may not be the kind of series that at the current moment and maybe just forever depending on how that Paramount plus experiment goes is going to justify more than a budget title I get that but at the very godamn least if we're getting games at all we should be getting games that I could say children by and large could enjoy there is no market for a game like quest for balance outside of praying on the uninformed hoping that they see it on a Shelf at some point during its life and buy it because they or a kid in their life likes Avatar it will not introduce new fans to the series because it can't even act as a substitute at the most basic level for the series at least the THQ games when they were struggling with this same issue they were coming out within a year or so of that show's season not 15 years after the finale aired kids deserve far better than a game like this fans of the series deserve far better as well and for the record far better would still only mean mediocre in this case hell Viacom hear me out here if you're going to let them throw out a crappy low-budget Lego game knockoff just suck it up like Disney did and pay Warner Brothers to make a proper Lego Avatar game series it would go great with another set of merch to sell like hot cakes while you pretend the series still isn't all that successful they already did a Lego Avatar set once before actually twice before so it's not a crazy leap to make and look I can't blame the development team for cranking out a soulless cash in because they're not the ones funding it I I can't blame game Mill because even if they are a soulless cash in Publisher fighting in a race to the bottom to offer the lowest cost tie-ins they're just the ones that are handling the cash in properties that they can get neither of these two handled Avatar Generations after the blame starts at the top and it goes solely in the same wishy-washy hands that have been responsible for this franchise consistently being given breadcrumbs its entire existence with the exception of maybe the next few years if the shows and movies actually pan out quality-wise I'm sure those shows and movies will pan out if they get that far there's no reason to doubt the showrunners that have treated the Avatar world and series that they created with respect but there's also no reason to have anything but cautious not not not even optimism realism knowing that the moment that its temporary purpose has been filled there's a good chance the series goes back in the bin until another rainy day I I wish I had a better way to close out than that because those of you that are longtime viewers and subscribers know that my goal at the end of the day is to use games and the stories behind them as a way to ultimately lift up instead this was this was not very much that sure at least I finally did it I made the damn video but go figure the game I went in knowing was already looking looking kind of shaky ends up being the worst of them all and it's the one that got me started on making the video anyway so uh funny how that worked out Knock on Wood the next proper avatar game is better at this point I'll give up hope on getting a truly great one and settle for another Platinum developed budget title or something like that just just just just give me something at this point it's a sunk cost thing look I don't have a good ending for this one I'm just going to go try and forget the last two months happened so uh uh subscribe here's more videos join the Discord as always until next time stay golden if you'd like to watch videos just like this early or even add free you can do so for as little as a dollar a month over at patreon.com theeg golden bolt you'll also get into the exclusive golden cult Discord server and get your name in these credits with fine folks like Rodney 220 the critic of Innocence Thomas kozma jump Rock and so many more thank you

Channel: The Golden Bolt

Views: 77,393

Keywords: the golden bolt, nickelodeon avatar, nickelodeon avatar games, avatar video games, avatar video game retrospective, avatar games retrospective, avatar the last airbender game, avatar the last airbender game retrospective, avatar retrospective, korra retrospective, korra game retrospective, korra video game retrospective, korra game 3ds, every avatar game, every atla game, every nick avatar game, every nickelodeon avatar game, nick avatar video games, atla video games

Id: lhgqlyb7jOc

Length: 98min 45sec (5925 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2023