Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Burning Earth

Last year about this time, Ymiris & I were out shopping for our daughters christmas presents.  She was getting a Wii, so we were going through different games to get her.   The new concept Wii-motes were a scary idea, so we were leary of giving her games that would be too difficult to use or understand.  Ely & I were very much into Avatar: The Last Airbender on Nickelodeon, and figured it may be a good start.  After reading a few bad reviews a week or 2 before Christmas, we hastily took it back and traded it in for Elebits (horrible game, but a good how-do-you-do-this starter).

Now they have a new Avatar game out.   A year and a few bugs later, and I figured they’d have the whole thing down, right?

No.   And because that is such a small word for the magnitude that they’re forcing on you.. I must repeat heartily:  NO.

First, let’s go over the plusses… because otherwise, you’re going to think I hated this game.  You really have to grasp how much I really, REALLY wanted to like it.  I love the cartoon, and really believe it is under appreciated.  The first player plays consistently as Aang, with your 2nd player switching between Katara and Sokka depending on the storyline.  This keeps both players engaged, as you can’t both be Aang (the main character), but still moves along the story.

The story is the entire second season of Avatar: The Last Airbender; traveling to the earth kingdom and such.  This means that your child, or anyone that follows the storyline, is going to feel like they’re watching reruns on NickToons for the most part, with a few “hey, I wonder if they cut this out of the cartoon” parts thrown in for fun.  Of course, they also take out a lot of the story line, so I don’t know if someone that has never watched the cartoon would get as much of a kick out of the stranger things (like pentapox) as the avid watcher.

Now we delve into the negatives.  I tried this game on the Wii, so I can’t speak for the 360 or PS versions, but on the Wii, the special “combo moves” seemed to go off all on their own.  I would be walking down a hall, and suddenly Aang would go into some “bender” mode, where he sat on his air ball, waiting to throw out air at nonexistant people.  Aang did this so often, I started jiggling around the Wiimote, TRYING to make him do it when there were a lot of people, with little success.   When fighting large groups, we had to button mash and shake our hands up and down to try to get it to do all the cool things it did other times for no reason.  Luckily, the battles are easy and button mashing worked just fine to defeat them, but it seemed a sad waste of the Wii’s capabilities.  The bending capabilities to solve puzzles was a nice twist, but again the controls were clunky and there was no ability to move the camera, so multiple times you would jump and move without being able to see your character at all.  This eventually became more than just inconvenient.. down to frustrating and almost infuriating.

The final straw came when we  were told to stand on a runed circle, and two little images came up on how you should move your Wiimote on that circle.  What those pictures really meant is anyones guess… we thought it meant hold your Wiimote up, then put it sideways.  It also didn’t list WHO had to do that, so we both tried repeatedly.  My daughter got her character (Katara) to do SOMETHING on it, but it didn’t cause the puzzle to be solved, and after 20 minutes of both of us standing on that circle and doing everything we could think of, we finally threw up our hands and went to play The Scruffs.

In short, Avatar is still too buggy to play on the Wii.  If you have played this on another system and got it to work properly, we’d love to know what you thought of it.  Otherwise, I’m writing Avatar off as an unplayable game, and sticking with watching it on Nick.

As a final note, because my coworker (who we’ll call PointWhore) pointed this out to me first thing Monday morning, if you play Avatar on the 360, you can get all 1000 points by firing repeatedly at the wall in the very first board.   So for all those of you that connect with PW, that seems as good a reason as any to rent this game.  Just don’t rent it planning on playing past the first 5 minutes.