Game #937: Avatar - The Last Airbender(Playstation 2)

  No, I still haven't seen the show.

 A few years ago, something bit me and I decided to play every single Avatar game in existence. And while I managed to get most of them(Still missing the PSP and Wii movie-adaptation game) I've been playing them very sparsely. Here we are with Avatar: The Last Airbender for PS2, a game that follows its own original story using the characters from the show.

 Among the first Avatar games, this one is probably one of the better ones. It's a very linear action game with RPG elements, not unlike LOTR: War in the North which I just finished a few days ago! You control a party of four: Aang, Katara, Sokka and.... Haru, you can swap characters at any time but the CPU will play as the other three, doing a subpar but tolerable job with them. They aren't much help, but hey, at least they won't get themselves killed and CPU Katara keeps the healing coming regularly. Experience points are shared between all four, so they all level up at the same time, each level up comes with a new move or an upgrade for an already learned move. You can outfit your characters with different equipment pieces, but there's a definite 'best set' for each character that you can unlock if you delve into the optional content. 

 Speaking of side content, if you're interested in that... make sure to do every optional thing before tackling the main story missions, because there are points of no return, and once a chapter is finished there's no going back, and you definitely don't want to miss out on ultimate equipment pieces. Or miss out on them, it's not like the game is hard, and once Aang learns his final offensive super move the game becomes a cakewalk. Just spam the move and watch enemies and bosses fall apart.

 The game looks a bit bland and it has a certain feeling of cheapness to it, but damn if the cell-shaded character models don't look really nice, they are super expressive too, during cutscenes characters' faces deform and go out-of-model frequently to highlight their emotions which I felt was pretty neat for a licensed PS2 game. On the other hand, the game soft-locked once on me, and that wasn't very nice.

  I'd say I had an overall positive experience with the game. It's not a deep game and it doesn't do anything special, but it's a fun time all the same.

 6.0