23. avatar legends: the fighting game
it's kind of hard to take seriously anybody who bemoans the state of fighting games, the throwslop, the assistslop, the stanceslop, but can't fork over 30 bucks to play avatar.
the game feels good in a way i'd forgotten fighting games can feel. it's novel supercombo/dustloop crossbreed broke my brain at first. it wasn't until the end of my 2nd day with the game that i googled if you can airblock - you can't, by the way, but the speed of the game and its inclusion of gatlings made me certain you could even after i ate anti-air after anti-air for those first few hours. the flow system offers a thoughtful approach to defense, where basically every character has access to a sort of autoblock, and, more interestingly to me, a roll that can get you out of corners at the cost of half of your flow meter and a temporary pause on meter regen. it's a system i grow to love more and more as i ponder its application. avatar has the skullgirls combo-breaker to prevent infinites, but teching out of the corner at the cost of a valuable resource feels like it accomplishes effortlessly what wallbreaks have tried and failed to across now multiple games.
i can't think of the last time i dropped a combo in another game. fighting games feel overly sticky these days. generous input buffers, combos that seem to home in on opponents, and an overabundance of immediate feel-good buttons have over time eroded the feeling offered by older games of daring to tame an unruly system. avatar, by contrast, is completely uncompromising. i've got my toph bnb down, but it's hardly optimal and i still drop it from time to time, especially its extension, which i drop often enough to call it often. its exciting to feel like i'm contending with systems indifferent to my success, grinding out my execution until i can bend the game to my will, instead of mindlessly pressing the buttons while the game feeds me what i want, designed not for warriors but for #bums who want all execution checks sanded down until every fighting game looks like yomi hustle.
and yet, who care? my heart isn't in it to hate on other fighting games, babyfied as they are, when avatar is right here, being everything i want it to be. its characters are unique, not in the loud and immediately compelling way that marvel tokon's characters are unique, but in subtle ways truer to the fighting game classics. you got your mix, your zoning, your setplay, and your rushdown, all exemplified beautifully in the game's small roster. and there are of course still twists on the formula. i've never much been one for superarmor, even less for command grabs, but here i am playing the game's resident big body, toph, only for the novelty of it being toph, who notably, is really more of a small body. the assists, a bit like the isms in street fighter alpha, add even more variety to the characters. toph can be a long-range setup character with the badgermole style, or a belligerent gorilla with the boulder style. sokka can turn his boomerang into a cap shield-style combo tool with the yue style, or with the piandao style he can power up his sword every time he connects a hit with it. close enough, welcome back, junpei! most noteworthy is azula, who is essentially 2 entirely different characters altogether depending on which style you choose.
my only real issue with the game is in its presentation. the sprites are all beautiful, hand-drawn animation that works perfectly in game, but as far as being an "avatar" fighting game...did one of zuko's line on round loss really have to be a reference to the infamous "that's rough buddy" line? the game feels made less with reverence for the source material and more with reverence for the source materials most famous memes and quotable moments. sometimes it works great, like sokka's "water triiiibe" win quote, but other times, not so much, like aang's win animation referencing that one scene from the 1st season where he impresses those little water tribe kids and makes that stupid goddamn face. maybe in a game with thousands of interactions a few of these would be charming, but in a fighting game, where every character only has a handful of quotes, it feels like the true character of these characters isn't being represented. it grew on me, eventually, that toph can proclaim "i am melon lord!" upon a round win, because it's fun to put someone into my bnb and shout that i, like her, am melon lord, but it doesn't really feel like i'm playing as toph so much as it feels like i'm playing as some parody of her. because, really, "i am melon lord" isn't something toph says, it's something she said, one time, ever, in a very particular context.
but my issues with the game as a representation of the cartoon i love so much aren't enough, not nearly, to get in the way of how relieved i am that there's a fighting game that just lets me move and have fun and grind out ranked without feeling like i'm lying to myself about its quality. the name sucks and they really gotta nerf azula, but other than that, there's no reason for a fighting game fan to not pick up this game.