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The last episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender aired 15 years ago, in 2008. So, if you’re a fan of the animated series, you might have been surprised when a video game following the events of the show was announced earlier this year. Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance was released on September 22, 2023. Early gameplay for the title looked rough, and now that it’s released, the game has proved to be just that. It is an action adventure where you control one of nine characters, solve puzzles, and use bending to defeat the Fire Nation. For a 15-year-old franchise, Avatar needs to do better.
Is Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance a Bad Game?
It’s not like Quest for Balance is the first Avatar game. The Last Airbender had a total of three game tie-ins, while two games were released for the sequel series The Legend of Korra. Most, if not all, of the titles were released to mixed reviews and were regarded as poorly made tie-in games. Quest for Balance was developed by Bamtang Games, the same developers behind the Nickelodeon Kart Racers games. Unfortunately, the title has many problems, including simple puzzle design, obtuse controls, and bad voice acting, all framed by the device that this is a retelling of The Last Airbender.
Quest for Balance is reminiscent of one of the weaker LEGO games, as you follow a formula that consists of a puzzle, a fetch quest, some button-mashing combat, and a boss battle. And you can’t forget the trial rooms or the sections where Aang jumps on an animal to play a short runner, akin to the Polar levels in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back. The odd thing about the title is that it seems like it was built for a younger audience. It doesn’t seem to be for people who grew up with the series as they would be too old for it, and worse, it even seems too simple for children in the Avatar demographic today. It honestly feels like it was designed for toddlers.
So, Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance is a bad game, or at least not a good one. People might be able to wait for a sale to try it out for themselves, that is if it doesn’t end up like The Legend of Korra by Platinum Games, which was delisted from all platforms after the license expired. While a hardcore fan of the franchise might get a kick out of the new game, it does beg the question, why isn’t the Avatar franchise in better shape?
Could Nickelodeon Improve the Avatar: The Last Airbender Franchise?
Even though Avatar has been dormant in the animated realm for quite a while, the franchise has been expanding in the form of novels and comic books, covering stories that the shows did not. There was also a mobile game that was released this year called Avatar Generations. That isn’t all, because there are some promising things coming that you can look forward to. There’s the upcoming live-action Netflix series set to adapt The Last Airbender, as well as the upcoming animated movie that will follow the characters we love, set after the original series but before The Legend of Korra. There is also an upcoming animated series set after the events of The Legend of Korra, following the next Avatar after her. So, with all that coming, surely the franchise will be in a better place in a few years, right? Not necessarily.
We don’t know if Netflix will capture the magic of the original series or whether the streaming service will be home to the second coming of the live-action film. We also don’t know anything about the animated material other than the vague release dates and their premises.
All Avatar fans can do is hope that the franchise’s upcoming releases are, at the very least, decent. Netflix’s One Piece was a solid adaptation, so hopefully, the Avatar series will pull through. Quest for Balance was barely promoted, so maybe it was intentionally buried. This might be too optimistic, but perhaps the prospects for both Avatar games and shows will continue their track record, with games always receiving poor-to-mixed reactions and the shows telling powerful stories for both mature and younger audiences.
