Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game Looks and Plays Like the Anime

Full text

Previewing a fighting game is tricky. It’s a notoriously dense genre and every game speaks its own language, has new things you need to learn, and rewires some part of your brain. Getting good at one fighter will help you be good at others, but true mastery requires the grind. So when I sat down with Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game for a brief 30-minute appointment, I was both excited to finally get my hands on it (I’ve missed the previous playable tests) and deeply aware of the passing of every minute of my half-hour demo.

Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way first: Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is absolutely gorgeous. It looks like the anime, as you’d hope and want it to, animations are stunning, and it feels smooth in the way that great fighting games should. But I couldn’t spend much time marveling. After I got a quick tutorial to get me up to speed, I started playing around. First a little training mode to get a quick feel for things, and then straight into matches.

My demo featured eight characters : Aang, Zuko, Katara, Toph, Sokka, Azula, Korra (my personal favorite) and Kyoshi, the latest addition. The nice thing about Avatar is it’s pretty easy to pick up and play. It’s a four-button fighter: you’ve got a light, medium, and heavy button, as well as special moves with variations based on which attack you press. But the main thing that sets Avatar apart is Flow. Pressing Flow will cause your character to blow any incoming attack (though really it’s often more of a dodge than a block or parry), but entering and holding Flow takes Chi and leaves you open to a souped-up throw. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an incredibly powerful “don’t you touch me” button, but it’s also a risk. In addition, you can use Flow to move around via Flow Techniques that can be canceled into attacks. Some are very basic, like my girl Korra charging you, and some, like Aang’s ability to glide in the air, are a little more complex. I won’t lie: I didn’t come to grips with the Flow system in my 30-minute demo. I was still experimenting. But I can see the vision, and if I were a betting man, I’d bet money that there’s going to be some absolutely filthy tech built around this.

If I were a betting man, I’d bet money that there’s going to be some absolutely filthy tech built around the Flow system.

The other thing Avatar has going for it is Chakra points, which you get from landing special techniques, follow-up attacks from Flow techniques, throws, holding Flow state, and opening somebody up with lows and overheads – so there really is an advantage to saying “block this overhead” if you’re feeling like someone just ain’t gonna react in time. There’s other character-specific stuff, too, but the long and short of it is Chakra opens up your EX attacks and gives you access to ultimate techniques that do massive amounts of damage and look gorgeous.

I didn’t have time to gain mastery of Avatar’s mechanics, but I picked up enough of it quickly. Chaining light medium heavy into a special move was a way to build simple combos, and soon enough, I was doing some more ridiculous stuff, and all of it felt good – even against the computer, who was pretty cheeky, especially when playing as Aang. Everyone I played with felt good, but I quickly gravitated to Korra because her strike throw game felt good and her specials cover a decent amount of space.

Selecting the right fight at character select is only half the battle, though. You also have to choose their support character, which can completely change how your character works. One of Korra’s juices her Flow state, while another makes sure her Avatar state lasts until the end of the round. But the other characters have some neat ones, too. Choosing Appa for Aang allows him to Flow cancel all of his basic techniques, and June makes Zuko’s divekicks an absolute menace.

Finally, I got to spend some time with Kyoshi. I was lucky because Rooflemonger, famed fighting game content creator and occasional IGN contributor, was there, and he gave me the 411. Kyoshi is the Avatar, and she’s absurdly powerful as a result. So much so, in fact, that her EX moves cost more Chakra points than other characters and also consume some Flow meter, though her Flow meter charges substantially more powerful as a result. Kyoshi is strong and her skillset reflects that. She just pays more for her special moves. Her support characters boost that ability, powering up her follow-ups, specific special moves, and offering a double jump. She can also run after she’s airborne, offering a frankly absurd amount of air control in a game where characters aren’t hurting for movement options. Playing against her is scary, but it’s also deeply satisfying to call out her moves with a properly time Flow or reversal to counter her.

The other thing Avatar has going for it is how fast all of this is (it’s not an exaggeration to say that characters are zooming around the screen basically all the time) and how good it feels to pull off even simple combos and how much depth there seems to be if you want it. Thirty minutes isn’t nearly enough time to tackle everything Avatar Legends has to offer, but it was enough to make me want to play more of it, and I loved eking out wins and playing around with all of these characters. It’s hard to say how Avatar Legends will turn out when all’s said and done, but I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t want to spend hours figuring things out in training mode. As far as a fighting game goes, you can’t ask for much more at this pre-release stage.

Will Borger is an IGN freelancer. You can find him on Bluesky @edgarallanbro.