Avatar: The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance

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Avatar: The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance
When an adaptation ends up cramming 3 seasons into one game, you end up with this.
Genre(s): Action-adventure/platformer
Platform(s): Microsoft Windows
Nintendo Switch
PlayStation 4
PlayStation 5
Xbox One
Xbox Series X/S
Release Date: September 22, 2023
Developer(s): Bamtang Studios
Publisher(s): GameMill Entertainment
Country: Peru
Series: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Predecessor: The Legend of Korra (2014)

Avatar: The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance is an action-adventure game developed by Bamtang Studios (of Nickelodeon Kart Racers and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Mega Battle fame) and published by GameMill Entertainment, based on the main Avatar: The Last Airbender series. It is the first Nickelodeon game after Big Time Rush: Dance Party to not be a crossover.

Why It Can't Save the World

  1. While it does have a solid opening premise via introducing the White Lotus members, Pakku, Bumi, and Iroh at a game of Pai Sho, it is launched because some OC character, Director Zongying, who was introduced in this game and will most likely be considered a non-canon character, requests to the White Lotus Members about their accounts regarding the Avatar's adventures seeing how the Ember Island Players' version of The Boy in the Iceberg contained many inaccuracies. While its unique for an episode adaptation game to have an in-universe explanation, the way how it adapts with this in-universe explanation only causes issues within the game's fractured and disjointed story.
  2. The game tries to cram all three seasons of the original series into one game, and ends up rushing them altogether with 6 chapters for each book. While this practice actually worked for movie-based games like the LEGO Star Wars games, which this game seems to be inspired by, this concept doesn't really translate well for linear story-focused TV shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender because Book 1: Water is 18 episodes plus a double-length episode in the end which totals around 440 minutes (roughly 7 hours excluding credits/intros). Because of this, a lot of major important plot points are left out, changed, or just told in text. This leaves the story unsatisfying for Avatar fans and confusing for non-fans.
    • A lot of important scenes, including Imprisoned from Book 1, the Waterbending Scroll from Book 1, and the majority of Book 3: Fire, especially the first half, were also ignored. These factors combined cause the game's plot to become massively disjointed at best. AirspeedPrime in his review did a breakdown of which episodes were ignored, only shown in cutscenes/text, or actually were featured in-game.
    • One of the most biggest scenes of the finale, Sozin's Comet, where the White Lotus liberates Ba Sing Se, is just a glorified arena-style battle with Iroh and Bumi. With how Bumi is the last playable character, this is the only moment where he's actually playable in the story excluding the Free Mode.
    • Katara does not have her Book 3 hairstyle and costume in this game at all.
  3. It relies on the outdated fixed camera system which was common back in 3D PS1 and early PS2 era games which was later seen in early 2010s 3D co-op platformers like Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, Disney Universe, and SpongeBob HeroPants to name a few examples. While this design philosophy is still used in many 3D platformers like Sackboy: A Big Adventure, this philosophy however doesn't work on melee-focused action games like this one as it causes melee attacks from most enemies to be difficult to dodge at times especially how easy it is to get knocked out during combat.
  4. The Nintendo Switch port, which was given out a day early from some retailers, suffers from a poor framerate, hovering at around 20 to 30 frames per second. Additionally, objects such as rocks will often times disappear and reappear once you move from a certain distance from them on-screen.
  5. The graphics are low-quality and feel like a late Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 game, combined with the weak visual effects.
  6. The PC version has no rebindable controls, so you're stuck with things like pressing the Backspace key to close the menu and enter to open it, rather than just using the ESC key.
  7. The game alternates between genres and modes way too often. Aside from the combat, there are the following sequences;
    • There's also running sections that look like something off Subway Surfers. The first is through penguin surfing, and another is riding Appa through the Fire Nation fleet.
    • One boss battle, Hei Bai, is just a slider puzzle where you must deliver crates to the goal before attacking him. Prior to the battle, it looks like that there's nothing between the Gaang and the Hei Bai, but after initating the battle via a warning, you are immediately put into a slider puzzle despite nothing in the game implying a slider puzzle would be put into use. This is where the game's continuity becomes messed up.
    • The game is padded out by slider puzzles that do nothing but tank the pacing of the game.
  8. Terrible production value. When rocks are removed via Earthbending, they just explode into a few tiny rocks. Additionally, whenever dialogue lines are either voiced or partially voiced as not every dialogue line has voicelines and some lines that do have voices don't properly say the entire line, the characters' mouths don't move at all.
  9. Bad voice acting (except Hei Bai), unlike the previous Avatar: The Last Airbender games, as all the major original voice actors from the show didn't return to reprise their roles in this game, not even Zach Tyler Eisen, Mae Whitman or Jack DeSena, Zuko and Azula are the worst offenders and they sound nothing like they did in the show, not even Dante Basco or Grey DeLisle either.
    • Among the voice actors excluding Dee Bradley Baker, James Sie is the only one returning from the original series, though with the role of Ozai most likely because GameMill/Bamtang was unable to get Mark Hamil to voice act Ozai, with his original role as the Cabbage Merchant recast as Ricco Fajardo for unknown reasons. What makes this recast very unusual was that James Sie reprised his role as the Cabbage Merchant in the Netflix adaptation.
  10. Game breaking bug: Free Play Mode after completing the game (where you can replay the chapters with any character) does not let you play through previous sections which are required for certain achievements/trophies, therefore requiring you to start the whole game over to get the achievement. In Chapter 10: Lake Laogai, in Free Mode (this game's Free Play), you only spawn at the end of the chapter with no way to back track to get to a hidden chest required for a certain achievement. You also cannot replay the chapters normally in the Story Mode. In fact, the LEGO games, which this game is clearly paying homage to, actually got this right back in the original Star Wars games.
    • Another game-breaking bug is Katara's bending. While directly controlling her, you cannot perform her ability that would allow her to trap enemies with her ice attack because of how the input is unresponsive. However, if she is on the field controlled by AI, the AI seems to have no problem performing the ice attack. This makes Katara the most useless character to main during combat.
  11. Artificial difficulty: During combat sequences, the other two AI-controlled party members do not take any damage. This makes many battles like the mecha tank miniboss incredibly frustrating especially with how difficult it is to dodge enemy attacks due to most characters having a weak attack range. On top of that, whenever the character you're controlling dies, its game over, even if the other two characters are still alive. Therefore, it makes switching over to another character required to survive certain battles necessary.
  12. Sokka ends up being the most broken playable character because he has an ability that trivializes many fights via rendering him immune to knockdowns. Given how easy it is to get knocked down which is why dodging attacks is incredibly unreliable especially against 3 to 5 enemies at once with ranged attacks, this is why Sokka will be the only good playable character at times when he's available.
    • Certain battles are often made trivial when you get to take control of characters that have ranged attacks, as the melee attacks often have very weak range which makes landing hits against enemies difficult.
  13. The lock-on system is unreliable and won't always lock on to every target. In one target practice mission where you have to use ranged attacks against practice dummies, the button for locking onto targets won't always lock-on despite being near it.
  14. Many, many visual bugs, including where NPCs do air actions like digging with no shovel in their hands or walking in place. There's also scenes where you can airbend the Fire Nation banners on the walls and they'll end up clipping backwards through the walls. These factors, alongside the game-breaking bugs; sum up one of this game's biggest problems; despite the game getting delayed due to its larger scope, the game was rushed to meet a deadline imposed by GameMill, causing the devs to ignore their quality assurance teams and release the game as broken as is. It's possible that some of these issues may be on Bamtang's side, given that unlike other devs GameMill tapped that year, IguanaBee and Flux Games, Bamtang has exclusively worked with GameMill after Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Mega Battle.
  15. The 2-player co-op mode is glitchy as best, as should a player head off screen, the camera will refocus on them while the other player will teleport to them. This leads to many game-breaking issues including where the other player can spawn over a pitfall.
  16. One of the Spirit Trials where you have to defend a villager while playing as the Blue Spirit. However, when you first play through the challenge, you are expected to kill all of the enemies. However, that is not the actual way to complete it as the villager will end up taking unavoidable damage, you're supposed to tank the archers' arrows while waiting for the time to run out.
  17. The UI of this game is unoriginal as it borrows design elements from Genshin Impact, particularly as seen in the item cards in the shop, the inventory, and from level completion rewards.

Redeeming Qualities

  1. The models, while still are rendered bad due to the badly done graphics, they are still faithful to the designs from the show.
  2. The idea of having 2D cutscenes in the form of comics is a neat touch here and there.
  3. The box art is also pretty cool, completely great, and faithful, being the one of the handful greatly done things about the game, and it even resembles the animation of the original shows.
  4. At least Dee Bradley Baker did reprise his role as Hei Bai, and he still gives a great performance for Hei Bai.
  5. This is the first (and as of 2024, the only) Avatar: The Last Airbender game where you get to play Kyoshi warrior Suki, as well as the king of Omashu Bumi.

Trivia

  • According to early leaked storefront listings, the game was originally supposed to be released October 7, 2022, before Cobra Kai 2: Dojos Rising took its original release date. Smartoys Be, a French retailer site was found to have leaked the information about the game a year before its release. In fact, Avatar News, which reported on the game, correctly stated that the opening features Pakku, Bumi, and Iroh in a game of Pai Sho talking about old war stories.
  • It was rumored that the game was going to be an original indie IP, but got picked up and funded by GameMill to become an Avatar: The Last Airbender game [citation needed]

Reception

The game received mixed to negative reception from critics, and was panned by gamers and players on Steam. It has a "Mostly Negative" 29% rating on Steam out of 91 reviews, criticizing for its disjointed story,

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