Yesterday, it was announced that Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is due to launch this fall. While the reveal trailer featured a variety of iconic characters like SpongeBob SquarePants from… Well, SpongeBob SquarePants, Michaelangelo and Leonardo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Nigel Thornberry from The Wild Thornberrys, one particular Nickelodeon series was weirdly absent: Avatar.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is my favourite series of all time – I watched the whole 61-episode run three times during the pandemic and have an enormous tattoo based on The Tale of Iroh lining the inside of my right bicep. I’m admittedly a little less into The Legend of Korra, but it’s still probably in my top ten TV shows. This is a universe I’ve devoted hundreds of hours to, and I’ll be damned if Nick is bringing out a Smash-esque brawler that forgets about some of the best characters in animation history.
Related: Sorry, But James Cameron’s Avatar Is The Wrong Avatar To Make A Game About
So, like any normal human being, I set the new trailer to 0.25x and scoured it for clues. Where is Aang? Korra? Katara? Zuko? Iroh? Sokka? Toph? Asami? The Last Airbender has a rating of 9.3 on IMDb, while Korra earned itself a respectable 8.4. For the sake of comparison, SpongeBob has an 8.2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has a 7.8, and The Wild Thornberrys has a 6.7, all of which – as mentioned in the first paragraph – have characters representing them in the game. When you consider that Avatar: The Last Airbender is Nickelodeon’s highest-rated show of all time, and that Nick recently set up Avatar Studios as a means of specifically focusing on the future of that series, it would seem absolutely absurd for it to exclude it from its upcoming brawler.
Fortunately, my research was not in vain, for I have found multiple pieces of evidence pointing to Avatar’s involvement in Nickelodeon’s All-Star Brawl.
First of all, check out the trailer itself, which you can view above. If you skip to 0:35 and pause the screen, you’ll see Patrick Star dropkicking Nigel Thornberry, which understandably draws your eye away from the rest of the frame. Once I saw the white buildings adorned with green and yellow, my mind instantly went to Ba Sing Se – but it could have been somewhere else, right? As distinctive as Ba Sing Se is in Avatar, the portrayal here is 2D and nondescript outside of a vague coloration similarity.
That is until you notice the symbol for The Order of the White Lotus in the background. Check out the picture below and compare it to the scene in the trailer – looks like we’re headed for a scrap in the Impenetrable City, eh?
That’s just a stage, though. I mean, it would be weird to have Avatar stages and no Avatar characters, but it’s not necessarily impossible. Fortunately, the actual cover art for All-Star Brawl features at least two silhouettes that are unmistakably supposed to represent Avatar characters. I’ve circled Korra and Aang below, who can be distinguished by their braid and ear, respectively.
Korra’s braids are usually pretty thin, but if you watch an action sequence from the show you’ll see that her hair thickens in combat. Meanwhile, Aang’s bald head and distinctive ears separate his silhouette from those of pretty much every other Nickelodeon character ever created. As protagonists of some of Nick’s biggest shows, they’re natural shoo-ins for a game – especially a fighting game. Still, it’s refreshing to see some confirmation that we’ve got at least one Avatar stage and two Avatar characters. If they weren’t in All-Star Brawl, there’s no way in hell I’d have considered playing it. Now, though… Well, I might start playing Smash again so I can become an esports pro as a Korra main.
Hopefully there are more characters, stages, and tracks from Avatar included in the final game. As for now, though, I’m just happy that it seems Avatar is being included to at least some extent. This is my favourite series ever made, and, honestly, I’m relieved to finally see it being represented in a modern video game, even if Aang and Korra are getting into fistfights with the dinosaur from Rugrats.
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