Avatar: The Last Airbender - Into the Inferno
on the Nintendo DS is much better than I expected it to be. By itself, that's not saying much. It's a licensed game, which often means that a developer has taken it on as a paycheck, given it the necessary time and no more. It generally means that the game is some common gameplay given a narrative and visual assets that refer to or even recreate the original property without regard to making the work stand by itself. I don't like many games with licensed properties, and the first couple of Avatar games, on Wii and DS, were no exception.

However, on the DS, "Into the Inferno" is a little gem of a puzzler. Each level is a series of rooms with puzzles that allow access to the next room. You control two of the characters from the show and frequently have to split them up to hit switches in time or in the right sequence, or with the right 'bending' power. The puzzles are decently clever and relatively varied. The story follows the third season of the show as closely as it can, and wouldn't make sense without having seen the story, but in the context of strong gameplay that has nothing whatsoever to do with the series anyway, I found myself only asking the narrative to get me from puzzle to puzzle.

There's decent challenge in it, and some unlockables that are interesting to try for-- in many cases, there will be multiple ways to solve a puzzle, and a particularly challenging solution will reward you with the currency for the unlockables. There are some action scenes, but they're really not the point. You can close it at any time, and most rooms are bite-sized, taking only a few minutes. It's great for the subway.

Also interesting is that they scaled down the whole game for the DS. Previous games did a poor job of translating the graphics or animation of the series to the strict technical limits of the DS. "Into the Inferno" gave up trying, and opted for a really cute "super-deformed" chibi style. The narrative then seems to have been reworked a bit to fit with the chibi style, so the whole thing fits together. It's a "cute little" take on the series, literally and stylistically.

What's remarkable about the game for me is that it looks, for the first time among the Avatar games for Nintendo, like the game designers stepped back, thought about what their platform could really do and made a good game that played well for that, and made it consistent with the series. It didn't have to be Avatar-themed, but the license did it's job here. I wouldn't have picked "Elemental Puzzle Pals" off the shelf; with the Avatar license on it, I did, and I was rewarded with a great little game.