ll_Exile_ll

I just got the platinum trophy, so at this point I'm completely done with the game. Here are my final thoughts:

The first playthrough might as well be the tutorial. You don't unlock all the elements until far more than halfway into the game and you're unlikely to even have them all fully leveled with all the combos unlocked by the end. Even when you do finally unlock all the elements I found myself deterred from using them all in conjunction with each other because they level up by using them, so I was compelled to focus on only one element until it's maxed and then move on to the next. New game plus on the hardest difficulty with every element maxed, all combos unlocked, and talismans coming into play almost feels like a different game.

Playing with the full breadth of combat system from the very beginning really allows you to make the most of it. Combined with the rearranged encounters on extreme difficulty (which are better than normal but still not great given Platinum's track record), I found myself enjoying my second playthrough much more than the first. The combat system isn't the most complex the genre has to offer, but it's still pretty good with plenty of opportunities to do some cool shit and enough depth to make learning and mastering its intricacies fairly rewarding. The combat is without a doubt the best thing about the game. I still have my problems with the way the game chose to represent the limitless potential of bending as nothing more than character action combat, but the issue of translating bending as it's portrayed on the show to video game inputs is one that goes far beyond the scope of this game and can't really be held against it.

The level and encounter design, on the other hand, betrays the quality of the combat and shows the game's undoubtedly limited budget at every turn. The game really has a shockingly small number of enemy types and they don't really make you change up your tactics. It was a hell of a lot of fun to get to a point where I had mastered the combat enough to chain together 100+ hit combos using all four elements, but the specific enemies getting smacking around don't really do much to change the way in which you accomplish that. The levels themselves are pretty bland and incredibly linear, with only ridiculously obvious hidden paths (typically housing collectibles) breaking up your straight shot through each stage.

While I like character action games and enjoyed this game well enough from that perspective, as a huge fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra I was thoroughly disappointed with the narrative aspects of the game. The characters of the show are criminally underused and the story itself barely has a plot. Despite technically taking place between season 2 and 3, this feels like some non-canon bullshit since it has no impact on anything going forward and was never referenced again. The idea of Korra losing her bending at the begining makes sense from a gameplay progression standpoint, but after it was such a huge deal when she lost and regained her powers in season 1 it feels idiotic to be like "counter this tank a bunch to get earth bending back."

It also just feels like too much of what makes the shows great was compromised to make it work as a game. The shows are never about the Avatar kicking ass nonstop and saving the day solo, they're about the whole group working together and overcoming adversity with violence as a last resort. The core ideas of internal struggle and the burden of responsibility that the shows tend to explore in such interesting and brilliant ways are completely absent from any of the narrative in this game. It simply boils down to "Bad guy it doing bad things, carve a path of destruction from Republic City to the Spirit World and kick his ass," and that misses what makes this franchise so special.

So yeah, I liked the game well enough I guess. It took me like 15 hours to get the platinum trophy and I can't say it was a bad time. I'll probably never play it again, but I don't regret the purchase at all. The core combat was enjoyable enough to get me through the game's other shortcomings, and even if it doesn't hold up as the sort of "lost episode" at the same quality as the show I was hoping it would be, the few nods and winks to ATLA and TLOK were enough to get a few smiles out of me.

As a final note, the RNG collectibles are bullshit. It took me ages of farming chests to get them all after getting like 12 of one of them while still missing out on others. I have to deal with this shit enough in Destiny, there's no need for that type of mechanic in a game like this.

Well, in Destiny's case it's more that the few things it does well are fantastic but almost all the design decisions are bad to a head scratching degree.

Different people are looking for different things out of games, so there is no definitive answer as to whether or not story matters. For some people it does, for others it doesn't. For some games it does, others not so much.

There is no right or wrong answer to this question, it simply depends on what the game is aiming to offer and/or what any given individual is looking for out of a game. You may not be interested in games like Gone Home or The Last of Us and that's totally fine, other people are interested in those types of experiences and that's totally fine too.

He is wrong, you can fight those by attacking and dodging.

I wish I could be only cautiously optimistic, but at this point it's my most anticipated game for the rest of the year. I may be setting myself up for disappointment, but everything I've seen of it has looked fantastic, so perhaps it can live up to my expectations.

I don't think those issues are common. I've played the game more than any human should since launch and I've had zero connections issues whatsoever.

I have no real opinion on this video, but I can I just say that I hate the trend seemingly every site jumped on of having a "clever" two or three word phrase at the front of their review that is almost always a terrible pun or play on words. That shit is the worst.

I think the game has pretty good Platinum style character action combat, but as I've maintained since the game was first announced, this type of game is far too limiting for how bending is portrayed on the shows.

Granted, how any developer would go about making gameplay mechanic that truly capture all the potential of bending is beyond me, it's the same problem that has held back amazing telekinesis gameplay mechanics as well. When a power is literally "think it and it happens," translating that to video game inputs is pretty much impossible.

Perhaps if VR brings along with it new and interesting input methods we might one day see an amazing implementation of bending or telekinesis, but with the way we interact with video games right now I just don't see how any game could even come close to capturing the true potential of bending.

The most fanservicey it gets are really the collectibles and the trophy names. Other than that I wouldn't really say there's too much of it.

I don't think it's quite as bad some of the reviews say, but it's certainly no masterpiece. At the very least, the combat has some decent depth and is generally pretty satisfying. I'm a little over halfway through and I can at least at say I've enjoyed it, even if it's full of problems.