Avatar

When I first sat down in front of the screen with this old Mega Drive RPG, I was in for a surprise — not because the game was great, but because it exists at all. Avatar on Genesis is one of those titles that got lost in history because nobody really knew it existed back in the nineties.

It's a fantasy RPG where you wander around the game world, recruit a party of characters, and command them in battle. Graphically it's solid — on Mega Drive it looks decent enough — the sprites aren't anything special, but the map doesn't really stick in your memory mainly because you're getting lost in it anyway. Story? Standard stuff — you save the world, collect heroes, defeat the big bad guy. Nothing to write home about, but that's not really the point either.

Gameplay itself sits in that zone where you're bored half the time waiting for your turn. Battles drag on, spell-casting is painfully slow, and overall you get the feeling the game's trying to be ambitious but it lacks that dirty punch. Controls work fine, but in combat you often just stand there waiting for something to happen. The menus aren't bad, just tedious — exactly what you'd expect from an RPG from an era when everyone thought more text and clicking meant better.

Avatar stayed a footnote in history, and not without reason. It wasn't worse than plenty of other stuff being sold in the nineties, but it wasn't anything special either. These days I look at it more out of nostalgia for an era when games like this existed on consoles, not because it has anything crucial to say to the modern player.

It's worth a playthrough in an emulator if you're into nineties turn-based RPGs — purely for the period feel. But you're not missing out if you skip it. There were a few games on Genesis with ten times better ideas that ended up just as forgotten.