Now with recap, spiffy visual effects, and annotations!
Summary
Korra travels the abandoned districts of Republic City in search of answers. Along the way, she gets attacked by a mecha tank. She follows Jinora’s advice to root herself and counter its attacks to unlock her Earthbending. It works, and Korra proceeds further in, fighting off Triads and another mecha tank. She interrogates the tank’s pilot and learns that the person who hired him is some old guy from the Southern Water Tribe. That’s right – our enemy is ONCE AGAIN Water Tribe.
Thoughts
The difficulty continues to spike frustratingly, but I’m ultimately impressed by the fighting system and rotating through elements to suit the situation.
More frustration abounds when being forced to deal with invisible walls that prevent you from exploring the way you want instead of the way the game designers want you to. Ditto the fixed camera parts.
The pallet swap of the Triads boss was just embarrassingly bad. The entire boss fight was frustrating, what with losing lock-on often and having to keep track of way too many things at once. The waterbender is predictable, the earthbender is deadly but telegraphs easy, and the firebender is unpredictable.
I want to say that the battles are wonderfully designed, but once you level up in other elements enough, things once challenging have a way of scaling down drastically. Really, most of the real challenge comes in learning to sense when cheap attacks are coming. And speaking of cheap attacks, I REALLY hate the mooks. I can counter most of their attacks, but the green ones occasionally use a swift kick that has 0 telegraph time. If I anticipate a kick, I miss out on the opportunity to counter the punch. If I anticipate the punch, I allow a free kick in. It’s BS, and the best course of action ends up being element bending from a safe range and interrupting them rather than trying to counter.
Lastly, I just HAVE to mention how blatantly the designers avoided pretty much EVERY opportunity for character interaction. And to think, what we get saddled with is Not Jinora.