YMMV / Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Burning Earth

• Badass Decay: Katara deals with a little decay in this game. She’s reduced to a damsel that needs Aang to save her during the boss battles despite her being a master Waterbender at this point. It feels like a downgrade of her character, especially since she could handle herself pretty well in the show.
• Breather Boss: Unlike other bosses, the Swamp Creature is ridiculously easy. It stands around trying to look intimidating, swings it’s arms either down or across the battlefield, and can send its vines up through the water. Even it using its vines to attack can be easy to dodge since the water will indicate where they will emerge.
• Complete Monster: Fire Lord Ozai is the tyrannical overlord of the Fire Nation. Ozai is an abuser who burned his own son's face and banished him for speaking out of turn. Through his reign, entire cities are invaded and subjugated by the Fire Nation; villages are poisoned to the point of lethal sickness by his weapons factories; and the kingdom of Ba Sing Se is almost decimated by a massive drill. In his ultimate move of malicious ambition, Ozai plans to use the power instilled upon the Fire Nation by Sozin's Comet to burn the entire population of the Earth Kingdom to ash. When confronted on his reasoning for this atrocity, Ozai simply notes that "the people did nothing to me, they're just in my way".
• Narm:
  • Katara and Sokka seeing visions of Kya and Yue. Since there’s not as much focus on them seeing hallucinations of their dead loved ones, it feels jarring and unnecessary, especially since the scenes last for a few seconds.
  • Aang realizing Ba Sing Se is in danger of having its wall breached by the drill. While his voice conveys the appropriate level of urgency, his facial expression is the same cheerful grin he has in all of the non-pre-rendered cutscenes, making it look like Aang isn't taking the situation seriously.
  • Aang confronting the salesman responsible for selling Appa. Unlike “The Desert”, which has Aang getting progressively angrier over time due to losing Appa, his delivery of “Where is my bison?!” here lacks any emotional impact and comes across as silly.
  • There’s also the final battle where Zuko is introduced as a co-boss. Katara getting angry and saying, “I thought you had changed!” feels really out of place since they never interacted with each other directly in the game. Like the entry above, it doesn’t have the same emotional impact of Katara feeling betrayed by Zuko since she thought he had changed in “The Crossroads of Destiny”.
• Periphery Demographic: The Xbox 360 version of the game became known in some circles for how easily one could earn all of the game's achievements, and many people took an interest in it for that alone.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Playing as Zuko and Iroh could have been interesting. Except you only play as them once throughout the game and it’s very short-lived.