Looking at the faithful art style of this Legend of Korra game, which comes from reputable developer Platinum, the optimist in me had high hopes that it would make good use of the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe and its awesome elemental-infused martial-arts superpowers. It turns out to be much closer to what my inner cynic expected: a poorly made tie-in that can’t even stand up as a competent third-person action game, much less something I could recommend to a fan of the show. What a disappointment.

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As you’d expect from a rote video game adaptation, the "story" has Avatar Korra immediately robbed of her water, earth, fire, and air-bending powers and forces her to reactivate them one at a time. And as you’d expect, combat against generic, mostly palette-swapped enemies is painfully simplistic (though it is challenging) and takes place in a series of bland, featureless arenas. It’s especially bad in the first few hours of its approximately five-hour campaign.Every move Korra has is executed with a combination of just the X and Y buttons, with the triggers dedicated to countering on the left and dodging on the right – so it’s inherently button-mashy. To be fair, it does get better over time. Once I’d gotten the hang of its annoyingly short counter timing windows and leveled up my bending skills I was able to pull off some attack strings that resembled the beatdowns Korra delivers to her adversaries in the show. Freezing them in ice, blowing them away in a whirlwind, blasting them with fireballs, and crushing them with boulders is impressively animated, so long as the enemies don’t glitch out. It just never felt that good, even with the elaborate quick-time event finishing moves, and it took until I began my second playthrough of a game I didn’t really want to finish the first time to unlock enough moves for it to become remotely rewarding.Enemy variety isn’t terrible, but their baffling lack of resistances or vulnerabilities to any specific element means you almost never have to vary your attacks. I used water for distant or flying foes, earth for bashing them up close, air for crowd control, and fire for when I wanted to lose. What’s more, there’s no incentive to mix things up to create multiple-element combos. That seems like a waste, given that you’re the Avatar.Perhaps the most offensive part about The Legend of Korra: The Game is that, as a fan of the show, I could barely detect a hint of the wit and charm that makes its characters endearing. That’s partially because there essentially is no writing - just short, repetitive bursts of uncharacteristic and unimaginative smack-talk - and partially because Korra is effectively the only character who appears at all. A completely unanimated and badly voice-impersonated Jinora floats around giving advice on how to unlock your powers; Sidekicks Mako and Bolin show up for literally 15 seconds in an early cutscene before being knocked off screen and out of the game; Iroh has two lines of dialogue that repeat every time you visit the item store; Tenzin, Asami, Lin, Meelo, Ikki, Bumi, and the rest are complete no-shows. In fact, even the cutscenes are poor – they look to be animated at about 10 frames per second and feel slightly off-model. It’s embarrassing.A close second on the terribleness scale is Iroh’s item store. This is a fairly tough game on normal difficulty, and I was routinely beaten up by earth, fire, and water-bending enemies until I got some decent moves. That’d be fine, except for that when you die, all of the health potions and buffs you’ve used (and the points you used to acquire them) stay gone. That means they must be repurchased and re-equipped every single time, or you can’t heal at all. It’s a genuinely stupid system. You can even end up in a situation where one of the obnoxiously durable and repetitious bosses kills you enough that you run out of money and have to fight with no healing ability whatsoever, or go back to an earlier stage and grind for currency.