Avatar: The Last Airbender – Quest for Balance Review
If you, like me, are a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the promise of playing through its fantastic story yourself is an enticing concept that, shockingly, has yet to be truly delivered on in the 18 years since the animated show premiered on Nickelodeon. Avatar: The Last Airbender – Quest for Balance set out to change that: finally you and a co-op partner will be able to relive iconic Avatar moments, like that time Aang had to save a village from an angry monster by solving a sliding block puzzle, or that other time he had to enter the Spirit World to… solve a sliding block puzzle. Quest for Balance is easily the worst adaptation of the series since M. Night Shyamalan’s abysmal live-action movie. It picks baffling moments from the story to highlight, fills them with awful combat and bottom-of-the-barrel quests, and tops itself off with a healthy coating of jank that leaves fans still waiting for a decent Avatar game to emerge from the ice.
Quest for Balance splits Avatar’s three-season tale into 18 chapters, each loosely retelling an episode or portion of the cartoon. The word “loosely” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, too, as the events of each chapter frequently focus on the most mundane parts of Aang’s incredibly rich adventure while breezing over many of the exciting bits in text transitions between scenes or 2D animatics that separate levels. For example, the first level has Katara and Aang exploring the rather ugly wreckage of a Fire Nation ship where nothing of note happens until a text box at the end of the stage explains that they set off a trap, saw the Fire Nation attacking Katara’s home, and had to rush back… by doing an incredibly bland Temple Run knockoff where you collect coins while sliding on an otter penguin.
It’s not a problem for an adaptation to make changes to its source material in order to better fit its new medium, but the scattershot way it’s been done here leaves the story completely unintelligible for newcomers and totally unsatisfactory for longtime fans. Huge sections of the show are reduced to half-hearted “and then this happened” exposition sessions while Quest for Balance asks you to complete exciting missions like delivering fruit tarts or punching faceless bandits for a meager reward instead. Some moments are even told incorrectly or out of order, and they are frequently warped into strangely anticlimactic versions of themselves. Almost identical fights against Prince Zuko are the boss encounters for three of the first four chapters, while the fight against the fierce panda spirit Hei Bai is literally a sliding block puzzle. Yes, another one.
Reusing the same mediocre activities is one of Quest for Balance’s favorite tricks, with multiple Temple Run-style sections (none of them fun), lots of recycled enemies and fights, and such a large number of decent-but-thematically-irrelevant block puzzles that it almost feels like this started as a completely different game that was then retrofit with an Avatar theme. A downright ludicrous amount of its puzzles are based around the idea that nobody, including the literal Avatar, can jump while holding a torch. To its credit, there is a respectable amount to do overall; it took me about nine hours to complete all 18 chapters, you’re allowed to revisit them with all your characters and upgrades for 100% completion after the fact, and there are even 19 bonus trials to complete. The trouble is that piling on more low-quality content doesn’t improve a game that wasn’t fun to begin with.
Squandering the flashy bending powers that scream for an excellent fighting system, combat is a clunky, button-mashing mess. It’s only ever incredibly easy to spam through waves of bandits and evil benders, or frustrating as the sheer quantity of them and their wildly inaccurate hitboxes causes you to get locked into constant knockdown animations. Perhaps the best example of how laughably inaccurate Quest for Balance has made itself is that Sokka is by far the most powerful fighter the whole way through, able to spam similarly strong attacks faster than any bender, and with an ability in his skill tree that eventually makes him totally immune to knockdowns. I did have to occasionally be thoughtful with my dodge (while not using Sokka), focus on enemies that put shields on others, or use special abilities that provided some crowd-controlling stuns, but the fights are such a one-note jumble the entire time that any subtlety gets waterbended away.
The skill trees for each of the nine playable characters are actually a small bright spot, if a very dim one, letting you use Pai Sho pieces collected from quests to improve stats and abilities – sometimes with boring statistical bumps, but other times in more noticeable ways (like that Sokka ability). It’s actually a nicely tuned progression system, making me consider which character to spend that limited resource on as I went… or it would have if any of it mattered even slightly in the actual combat, where swinging wildly and occasionally using a healing item was all that mattered.
(The first playthrough also has a few trap characters – it lets you dump points into skill trees of people like Suki or the Blue Spirit, who show up briefly only to basically not be relevant again until the end of the campaign.)
The way in which Quest for Balance is also fundamentally janky cannot be overstated. It’s not the most buggy game I’ve played in recent years, but to say its edges are rough would be to overstate how much they’ve been sharpened into edges at all. The controls are an unsatisfying mess, and it’s not uncommon to get stuck on geometry or for its rigid camera to completely cut off parts of the action. It’s also broken in some hilarious ways: most notably, healing items sell for more than they cost at shops, letting you get infinite money any time you want and rendering nearly all of Quest for Balance’s breakable objects and hidden treasure chests pointless in the process. It’s one of those “How did this make it out of testing?” kind of flubs.
What’s particularly disappointing is how easy it is to see the bones of what this game could have been underneath all that grime. It probably wouldn’t ever have been great, but not all of its ideas are ill-conceived. While the 3D animations are pretty much terrible throughout, the 2D animatic cutscenes are actually pretty cute. The whole thing is framed as a few members of the White Lotus recounting the Avatar’s tales, chiming in to provide all those hastily glossed-over details as they do – and while many of the voices seem to be soundalikes, the handful of moments where conversations are voiced really aren’t bad.
If that’d been paired with a game where the side activities were actually entertaining instead of pointless fetch quests, where switching between your teammates provided interesting bending playstyles instead of different flavors of the same button mashing, and where this legendary story was retold in a way that respected the source material rather than using it to shoehorn in overused and only loosely related minigames, Quest for Balance might’ve actually fulfilled its promise. It’s not unthinkable that with a bit more time (probably a lot more) the fun could have been found here, but what we got instead feels like the bare minimum required to look like it might be alright and get it out the door so that Quest for Balance could live as yet another trap on store shelves, laying in wait for well-meaning parents who don’t know any better.
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