Dragging on my “complete” Avatar playthrough series project thing, we pick up with the PSP version of the first game. You’ll recall that the first released game (except for the PC version), despite its generic title and boxart, features a unique story set in between Books 1 and 2, wherein the Gaang picks up Haru and scoots all over the four corners of the world to confront a new mechanical menace.
The PSP game was made by TOSE, as was the DS one. The two share much in common, most notably having identical maps for all areas; the PSP version has the edge though in that the clumsy screen-rotating shoulder buttons are cut, and it’s therefore much easier to navigate. It lacks the charming 2D sprites, but makes up for it with nice dialogue portraits, and the simple 3D models are sweet in their own way as long as the camera doesn’t zoom in too much.
There’s more though, much more. On the PSP the game is souped up mightily compared to the DS outing, with equipment, upgrades, and sidequests fleshing out the experience much more. A seamless game world, and most importantly regular save points that restore your health (or “honor points”) for free are essential features bafflingly missing from DS. In terms of features and presentation it falls in between the main console version and the DS edition, although the GBA’s purity and polish still give it superior appeal and playability.
The DS game can boast one or two things for itself: a fun variety of food items, a full party of four, and brief voiced cutscenes; I felt the absence of these on PSP, especially when certain characters are required, forcing the player to backtrack for swaps. But on balance it’s no contest. On PSP you get gameplay that’s at times challenging but fair, also a useful minimap! It’s a mediocre action RPG but as a fan of the series I loved experiencing this story once again, and the different elemental machines make for great villains with cool designs whose attributes also inform the gameplay.
Speaking of which, as is customary, let’s look at unique elements this game contributes to Avatar lore. Full portraits of all NPCs is a good way to show off the dress of the different cultures you encounter, as well as a good look at Lian’s design. The plot and script are nothing new over the other versions (making the same gaffes as the other versions of this game, such as mistaking Omashu for Ba Sing Se), but as before I appreciated seeing the occupied port town, the earthbender training camp, the village in the shadow of the Southern Air Temple, etc.
As always I also noted animals not seen elsewhere. These include the new mouse/squirrel-cat hybrid, and a blue-ish kind of chicken; as well as the blue armadillo(?) wolves and odd deer seen in other versions. There’s ordinary cats in the village adjacent to the Air Temple, but the show already had one of those. There’s a few spirits too, with the familiar horned bear in chapter 3, but also a new six-legged tortoise in chapter 5 and a blue tiger/wolf in chapter 6. These little tidbits are so exciting to me! Anyway thanks for indulging me.
PS. One final bafflingly stupid piece of trivia: a formatting error on the printing of the game’s UMD disc displays the spaces that should be there in the title as question marks, as you can see in this picture I took.
Time for another Avatar game. See previous reviews. This one also uses the new storyline, albeit abbreviated by removing the “Earthbender training camp” and “Southern Air Temple” chapters. Haru still shows up, in Omashu, but doesn’t join the party. As I expected of Halfbrick (having played their two DS entries) the gameplay is more puzzle-oriented with some RPG elements. Aang, Sokka, and Katara move as a group and you can cycle between them to use their abilities. They all learn new tricks as you go on, to overcome environmental obstacles and the occasional combat.
The spritework is lovely; clean and fluid, with plenty of colour variety. I dare say it’s the best looking of the bunch that I’ve played so far. There are fewer enemy types, both because of cut chapters and the chapters themselves are much shorter. I believe I’ve covered them all in these screenshots. I did notice Yu Yan archers, which do not appear in the other versions. Boss battles also play out differently, more strategic and hence more fun.
While the storyline is the same, it’s cut back significantly. They left in Bumi’s excellently lame joke and most of the important plot points, and there are still some civilians to converse with, but it’s pretty stripped back. It’s a concise way to tell the story and certainly a quicker game to play to experience that story, but missing two locations is unfortunate. However, it does uniquely have a large section set in the Omashu sewers.
I was surprised how similar it felt to the later DS games despite using more traditional controls. The puzzles are thoughtfully designed and can get challenging, especially the brutal chase sequences and final boss. There are also hidden health upgrades off the main path which aren’t too necessary outside said boss, but are a nice bonus to find.
Despite lacking voice acting, sidequests, and some locations, I might recommend this as the best way to play this story. It’s the most polished and fun game experience. I still think fans should seek out the console version though, for its more fleshed out story, and additional characters (and spirits!).
As part of a rewatch of Avatar: The Last Airbender, I’m playing video game associated with the show. Of course I had to wait until Book 1 was finished to start this one, and finish the game before Book 2. Yes, most versions of the first tie-in game bar the PC version share a unique plot. It’s a nice little sidestory, with some inconsistencies to be sure, but greatly enhances the value of the game for fans. Note that the PS2, GCN, and Xbox versions are mostly identical, and this Wii version is a port of that version with some motion controls added.
I would tell you to go back to my review of the DS one for a rundown of the new plot, but I’m always embarrassed by my old writing so I’ll tell you again now. The setup makes you think it’s a Mechanist situation where a gifted engineer is making machines for the Fire Nation against her will. You find out though that Lian, aka The Maker, has a grander plan to replace benders with analogous constructs and end the war by having a better army of robots. You also discover benders from every nation are in on the conspiracy. Tracking Lian takes Team Avatar (plus Haru, so that you can play as an Eathbender too) from the North Pole to several Earth Kingdom villages, Omashu, a hidden island with a lost history, and the Southern Air Temple before you confront Lian in her fortress in what has become a desolate wasteland due to her machinations.
Some parts feel familiar, taking cues from the show, but mostly it’s fresh and exciting to see new places and talk to people, even if they don’t have much interesting to say. Lian is a great character, and evocative of themes that are brought up later in Korra. Zuko has a scant few scenes: he captures Katara but is detained himself as a traitor, then has a few brief cameos. Really he could have been cut entirely without losing much; this game is about the new independent mechanised threat, and the Fire Nation just gets in your way in a few levels.
Zuko’s reintroduction in the first chapter seems to ignore his state at the end of Book 1, but at least the game then goes on to acknowledge his banished status. Lian’s plan to destroy the Avatar statues in the Southern Air Temple was, as far as I can recall, treated seriously in the DS game. The console version gives Aang a line to say that this wouldn’t actually do anything, but they should protect them anyway—salvaging that moment for me in terms of the order I played them. But Omashu is still regarded as the Earth Kingdom capital, remaining as a niggle for me. Nitpicks aside, the plot is fine for a video game, although chapter transitions can be a little narratively clunky.
Anyway let’s talk about the game. Each chapter has a pseudo-open world structure, with a hub town. You get quests, visit shops, then venture out along narrow paths to other hotspots, fighting groups of enemies in real time. There’s usually backtracking involved and fights are generally very easy once you have the full party, as long as you take the time to do sidequests and get the best set items. Yes, there is also phat loot. Combat gets more challenging and interesting on the few occasions the party is forcibly split. Unfortunately once you leave a chapter there is no returning. Doubly unfortunately, I think there might be a bug because after doing everything (so I thought) in Chapter 6 it was stuck on 98%, so I never unlocked the character gallery. Boo. According to the guide I occasionally used, it’s good to watch out for quest order, because due to bad design certain things become cut off even within a chapter. I never encountered this though.
I did however have problems with the game crashing, but that may just be due to a damaged disc. Either way, my play experience was occasionally fraught but despite this I had a better time than with the gruelling DS version. The sprite art there is more appealing than the wonky 3D models here, but I did like the lush environments here better. It’s also more quick and fun to play, and much more fully-featured. It does frequently make you stop to play a drawing minigame with the Wiimote to pull off environmental bending moves though.
Two more quick highlights of this game. The incidental dialogue heard just by standing around villagers adds both humour and world-building, which I appreciated. And as with all Avatar adapted material, I’m on the lookout for new animals, as the series is known for its fun hybrid animals. In fact this one was pretty lackluster for new hybrids but it does have some rarely-seen vanilla animals, with wolves and feral cats as enemies. A different kind of wolf with some perhaps armadillo traits is a common enemy, and the final chapter has a “deer” with some alpaca and rhino traits. Item names also reference minksnakes and whales. There’s also several spirits in the story: a forest guardian in the form of a horned bear who transforms into a man, a normal-looking badger mole who guards the lost history of the people of the hidden island, and a large owl connected with a sacred place next to the Air Temple. I liked seeing these spirits more than the animal offerings, although the game did also bring back many animals from the show as enemies, not to mention the variety of intriguing elemental machines.
Well I’ve gone on long enough. For now I’d say this is the best way to experience the new story that Flint Dille created for this project, but we’ll see how the GBA and PSP stack up later on. Keep an eye on the home page for my Avatar reviews if you’re interested.
I’ve started playing all the Avatar games. As I’ve said before, the first round released for Book 1 have an original story set after Book 1. The PC version is the one exception. It has 6 chapters based on episodes in the first season. The game itself is obviously cheaply made and not very good, but I want to talk more about its content because it’s not widely acknowledged. By documenting it more thoroughly I can perhaps save you from playing it but still bring it to light.
Apart from the show’s animated intro as an opening cutscene, you’re dumped straight into The Kyoshi Warriors, episode 1x04. The main gameplay is a simplistic Diablo-like clickathon; you’ve got 3D models, isometric view, painted backgrounds, and mouse-only controls. Each of the clicks has three skills which are unlocked through the plot: attacks on left, and on the right are the air scooter for mobility, an air shield, and a mist technique to hide from enemies. Other gameplay modes are inserted between small arenas of this type. In the first chapter we see the meditation minigame (click the distracting thoughts to keep Aang’s mind clear) and an Appa-based flying shoot-em-up.
We move on to 1x05, The King of Omashu. The game is fully voiced, with all the actors reprising their roles for the cutscenes, an abridged mix of slightly rejigged lines and new dialogue that gets the same points across as the show. The lunchbox key test has been replaced by fighting a bunch of hog monkeys, and the Flopsy test shows a new “chase” gameplay style which controls like the Appa stages but just avoiding obstacles. Then there’s a one-on-one battle with Bumi, which has the standard controls but feels different due to duelling single opponents with a range of skills. The difficulty is very forgiving; if you run out of health you instantly respawn and enemy are not reset. The other modes are bit less lenient but still easy.
The Scar of the World, as the manual calls it, is 1x7 The Winter Solstice part 1. After an Appa stage against a new kind of bird (”spine hawks”), you fight out-of-place canyon crawlers and later the also-new tiger bees/wasps. The new creatures are a great part of this game to me. The Avatar world has lots of interesting hybrid animals so seeing brand new ones for this game was really fun, such as the boar-coons in the Kyoshi stage. There’s a Heibai chase and another meditation here, but also a nice story moment that’s not in the show; meeting repentant Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom soldiers who regret their actions destroying the forest in the name of war and industry. The fight with Heibai requires the use of the dedicated Avatar State button on the interface, which is used only the once.
Part 2 of the Winter Solstice is the basis for chapter 4, The Crescent Isle. Just like the show there are scenes with Zuko and Iroh, mostly just repeating lines from the show. The Appa level that starts this chapter is not tacked-on like the others feel, as it recreates (poorly) the desperate flight through a Fire Navy bombardment. It was in this level I discovered the tactic of using the air scooter to skip right past all the bad guys to the next cutscene trigger instead of tediously fighting them; the game’s controls and hit detection are very unsatisfactory. Amusingly, the temple is stacked with Fire Sages, rather than there just being 5.
Chapter 5 is mainly based on 1x13, The Blue Spirit, although I was pleased to see it enriching its presentation with elements of 1x09 The Waterbending Scroll (pirates to fight, and the scroll teaches Aang a new move) and 1x15 Bato of the Water Tribe (Bato shows up for exposition). Sokka and Katara sometimes accompany you, throwing boomerangs and water whips, to help with fighting sections. But both they and the enemies often just wander around or lag behind, so it’s not very dynamic. The stealth section is very tedious but at least the new “croco beasts” in the swamp gave something to look at. The “scoot past all enemies” technique helped again to escape the Pohuai stronghold.
The final chapter adapts the last three episodes of Book 1. You fight some “frostbats” on Appa, then a duel with Pakku, infiltrating Zhao’s ship, a duel with the chain hammer guy, meditation in the spirit oasis (no Spirit World level unfortunately), and finally an epic beatdown as the ocean spirit (which in fact looks and plays pretty poorly, as does most of the game).
It’s too bad the game is not very fun, because it does have its commendable features. Being the only Book 1 adaptation (apart from the movie tie-in games) gives you the opportunity to play favourite moments from the show, and the few new plot elements and new creatures are worthwhile for fans. It also has some nicely drawn backgrounds, but just as many bland or muddy ones. It tries to vary the gameplay but each mode is pretty lousy. Finally, there is a section of the credits devoted to showcasing concept art for the project that could be of interest to fans. It’s baked into the credits movie so I’ve captured the video of it which you can watch here. So, now you don’t have to play this game. Unless you want to, of course.
