Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game: Everything we know about the 1v1 fighter

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game brings the worlds of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra into a straight-up 1v1 fighter. Announced during the franchise’s 20th-anniversary panel at New York Comic Con 2025, it landed like a love letter to longtime fans. 

The early footage leans on hand-drawn animation and recognisable bending styles; it’s rough in places, but the overall look tracks closely with the shows and has people hungry for deeper gameplay details. 

We’ll break down everything we know so far about Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game (working title) and what aspiring benders can expect from this upcoming FGC.

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is a head-to-head FGC set in Nickelodeon’s Avatar universe from creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. This isn’t an RPG or open world: think classic 1v1 fights built without combo strings that reach into three digits.

No, Avatar Legends isn’t a tag-fighter. Unlike most upcoming games in the genre, it “channels the energy of classic fighting games while breaking new ground in movement, style, and combat expression”.

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game uses hand-drawn 2D art that faithfully resembles the show’s art design. The announcement footage sells it well, with faithful character designs and bending styles on full display. The trailer gave a glimpse of how supers would smoothly transition into an in-game cinematic before unleashing the attack.

From the description on the official Steam page and press releases, the game emphasises elemental mastery and is designed for both newcomers and veterans to the genre. The developers teased a unique “Flow System” with movement-centric gameplay. 

While it hasn’t been fully detailed yet, the pre-alpha footage suggests that chaining bending moves and combos are free-flowing and dynamic. Other features include a single-player campaign with an original narrative, combo trials, and gallery mode. 

Notably, the game will also include support characters to assist in battle. These secondary assist characters “influence your fighting style and grant special moves”, but whether it’s similar to Mortal Kombat’s Kameo system is still up in the air.

Assuming that the support characters are the companions seen in the background, the trailer confirms four of them. There’s the iconic Flying Bison Appa, Korra’s Polar Bear Dog Naga, bounty hunter June, and one of Azula’s allies, Mai.

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game has a tentative date of Summer 2026 for release. Without further announcements, this information gives a time frame of June to August next year. It may be just sheer chance, but the summer solstice was also a significant day for Aang’s last battle. 

This title will also be available on the PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, PS4, and PC (Steam). On PC, you can already wishlist on Steam while waiting for further announcements. The announcement of a PS4 version is somewhat unexpected, considering the next-gen Switch target; nevertheless, it is made for more people to know about the game.

Avatar fans are eating well for the next two years with the upcoming The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender movie coming out next October, and the new series Avatar: Seven Heavens in 2027.

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is now in development at Gameplay Group International (GGI), a new studio built to revive cancelled games. Led by industry veterans Victor Lugo and Philip Mayes, GGI acquires and reimagines commercially unrealised games by finishing titles that otherwise wouldn’t ship.

The Avatar fighting game had a bumpy path before it was finally revealed. An untitled Avatar fighter previously in development at Maximum Entertainment was cancelled in late 2024 before it was acquired by GGI. The team working on the game has veteran devs who have previously worked on other fighting games like Killer Instinct, Them’s Fighting Herds, and Skullgirls.

This matters because the Steam page of the game has one of the key features listed as “best in Class Net Code and Cross Play”. This is most likely referring to Maximum Entertainment’s in-house Abare Engine, which claims to be the world’s most advanced 2D engine and the world’s first game engine built from the ground up for rollback. 

The Abare Engine’s RealMatch rollback was used in Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age. While the game itself only peaked at less than 100 players on Steam, at the very least, it was tangible proof of the impressive visuals and fast netcode.

The team has already confirmed 12 characters that can be played at the launch. The Steam page states that more characters will be released via a Seasonal model, commonly seen in most fighting games.

For now, seven fighters have been present in the trailers: Aang, Katara, Sokka, Zuko, Azula, Toph, and Korra. Fans are quickly searching for the wise Uncle Iroh, but there are too many good characters to draw from. From the first series, Suki, Firelord Ozai, Ty Lee, Jet, King Bumi, Hama, or even the Cabbage Merchant as a wildcard, have the potential to become fighters.

Of the 12 characters, six are from the first series; this means that Korra´s friends and enemies are absent from the party. For sure, someone from her own team should join the fight: Mako, Bolin, Asami, or Tenzin. The Beifong sisters, Lin and Suyin, could also add a metalbending specialist to the game.

Korra’s series is known for its amazing cast of villains. Red Lotus leader Zaheer is another fan-favourite that would fit right into the game; anti-bender Amon could serve as a counter-based character. Additionally, the eccentric Varrick and or the spiritual Jinora would fit as assist characters.

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is shaping up to be an exciting crossover between the Avatar world and the fighting game genre. At its simplest form, it’s an officially licensed fighter that brings the cast of both series with faithful animations, and that’s already a good enough excuse for fans to check out the game.

GGI will have no problem catching public interest with a game featuring this level of cultural heft, and everything shown and revealed so far is looking good. If GGI can translate that promise into polished play, it can earn its place in the FGC, rather than just a good Avatar game.