The Avatar universe has not fared well in adaptations. Outside of the original shows and the comics, most other properties that have stemmed from the series have been mediocre at best, and abysmal at worst (I’m looking at you M. Night Shyamalan). With the ever increasing stock of other decent licensed games within the last couple of years and the involvement of Platinum Studios, I hoped the Legend of Korra game would end that trend and finally give us a title worthy of its universe. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case. What Platinum has delivered can only be described as a lazy, mediocre, cash in.
The Legend of Korra takes place between the second and third season of the show. The game opens with a quick pro-bending match in which Korra’s companions Mako and Bolin are immediately knocked out. You then take on the opposing team on your own in what serves as a tutorial for a game mode that you will not play again in the main game. On her way home from the match, Korra is attacked by chi-blockers under the direction of a mysterious old man. He hits her with needles that block her bending and kidnaps her. Korra is able to free herself and escape, and is now on a quest to get her bending back and find out who the old man is and what he wants. That is pretty much the extent of the story. The game features animated cutscenes, but they feel awkwardly animated, and don’t seem to be optimized for an HDTV. They are stretchy and pixely, which was particularly jarring for me after playing Persona 4 Arena Ultimax and Professor Layton VS Phoenix Wright which both had amazing animated cutscenes.
The presentation in general is lazy. The music is good, but that’s because it’s almost all ripped directly from the show. The environments are strangely devoid of detail, and they really feel like the same models with different textures in each level. A lot of environmental elements repeat themselves on several occasions, which is shocking because the game only has 8 stages. The character models look good, but you’ll quickly notice repetition there with frequent palette swaps. It reminded me of the old NES and SNES TMNT games in that sense, here is the green melee chi-blocker, red electric one, and blue… rope… guy. Korra’s model looks great too, but her animations bothered me immediately. She doesn’t seem to move like a teenage girl, rather her animations are more akin to Raiden in Metal Gear Rising.
One of my favorite parts of the Avatar franchise is the rich, creative world, and the great, fleshed out characters. After all, just a good main character and a simplistic goal are not enough to craft a narrative. I wish someone had told Platinum that, because as it stands they couldn’t even be bothered to add some shameless fan service. The show’s supporting cast is all but absent. Jinora appears occasionally as kind of quest giver, and Bolin and Mako appear for a few seconds in the beginning and the end, but the rest of the game is Korra and a handful of color changing enemies broken up by occasional sections where you climb on top of Naga and guide her through obstacle courses.
If this game has a saving grace, its the combat. The bending feels great, every element has a unique feel and feels like there are situations in which it should be used. Earth bending has strong short range attacks, water bending is long range to close in, fire bending is fast and for close ranges, and air bending is used for crowd control. The game allows you to switch between elements on the fly, chaining together to create combos and generally wreak havoc. It is probably the best part of the game, and it makes you feel like you are really controlling the avatar. It is maddening then, that the game locks your powers at the beginning, forcing you to regain all of them once more. To encourage you to switch things up, the styles level up the more you use them, and with that you will get bonuses such as more energy, health upgrades, and more bending moves. The combat does have some challenge to it as well. Expect to have to master its dodge and parry mechanics in order to make any decent progress. The game does feature an upgrade system based on spirit energy that allows you to buy more bending moves, and talismans to upgrade Korra that make it very fun to go to older levels with an upgraded Korra to play through them again.
This deep combat and upgrade system feels wasted on a game that can be completed in about 4 hours. You will not be able to max out everything or collect all the talismans and moves during a single playthrough of the game. You won’t really have a reason to anyway, because the game’s other mode, pro-bending, does not allow you to carry anything over from the main game. The strength of Korra’s water bending is correlated to the strength in the game, but after going back and boosting it by a few levels I didn’t really notice a difference. The fact that the pro-bending matches do not allow you to get close to your enemies and that you can only use water bending makes them a lot less fun than the main game. That said, it is good to have them if only to add some content to a very short title.
The Legend of Korra is an interesting licensed game in that the core gameplay mechanics of it are actually not half bad. The game simply fails in just about everything else. It makes me wonder who this game is really for, because if you are a fan of the Legend of Korra this is just going to disappoint. Even more curious is the fact that there has been so much advertising for this game. Clearly it is to take advantage of the ongoing final season of the series, because this is the kind of thing that I would expect a publisher to quietly release and hope it is quickly forgotten. At $15 at the time of launch, I suppose that the asking price for the amount of game you get is still high, but my guess is that this will go on sale soon enough. It is on Steam after all. I would recommend picking it up once it is discounted if you are interested in the combat system. It can be genuinely fun to play through the levels with all the powers. If you are looking to spend some time in the avatar universe with some of your favorite characters and locales, skip this one.
