Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game Year 1 Pass Confirms Bolin, Ty Lee, Lin Beifong, and Uncle Iroh

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game lands on July 23, 2026 and the Year 1 Pass roster just dropped publicly, giving fans their clearest look yet at the post-launch content plan. Developer Gameplay Group International and publisher PM Studios confirmed four DLC characters: Bolin, Ty Lee, Lin Beifong, and Uncle Iroh. A fifth slot remains open, to be decided by a fan vote tied to pre-orders. The console pre-order trailer went live on June 27 alongside the announcement, and pre-orders opened simultaneously on all platforms. For a game covering two beloved animated series packed with iconic side characters, the lineup signals that the developers actually watched the shows.

Who Made the Cut and Why It Works

Bolin is the earthbending and eventual lavabending star of The Legend of Korra, and he is a natural fit for a fighter. His moveset practically writes itself: earth volleys, a pro-wrestling-inspired grapple lifted from his canonical arena career, and a personality that makes him readable at a glance. He covers the goofy bruiser archetype without leaning on any other Korra character for overlap. Ty Lee is the chi-blocking acrobat from Avatar: The Last Airbender, and her toolkit is better suited for a fighting game than almost any other character in either series. She does not bend anything. She uses precise finger strikes to shut down an opponent's bending mid-fight, which in practice translates directly into a rushdown pressure style that will be a headache to face at high level.

Lin Beifong, Chief of Republic City Police and Su Yin Beifong's older sister, fills the heavyweight defensive slot. Metal cables, rock armor, and decades of hard experience give her a kit that favors deliberate spacing over flashy aggression. Her arc across Korra's four seasons carries the kind of weight that most DLC additions never bother with. Uncle Iroh closes out the four confirmed spots, and his inclusion alone will carry a lot of goodwill. The retired Fire Nation general who spent most of ATLA sipping tea and nudging Zuko toward a better life is also a legitimately terrifying firebender when the situation demands it. Previous Nickelodeon-licensed platform fighters kept teasing the Avatar IP and never followed through with a roster that felt considered. Iroh in a fight is something fans have been asking for across multiple game releases now.

The Fifth Slot Is a Fan Vote

The fifth Year 1 character is not confirmed yet. Pre-order buyers get a vote, and the winner is announced at a later date. This mechanic is smarter than it sounds. The game covers two separate animated series spanning nearly a decade of content, with a combined cast large enough that no launch roster could have satisfied everyone. Locking the fifth DLC slot behind community input does two things: it rewards early adopters with a sense of ownership over the product, and it keeps people talking about the game in the weeks before launch. Speculation is already running across forums and social media, with Azula, Sokka, and Kuvira appearing in early community polls as frontrunners. Whoever wins, all Year 1 Pass holders receive the character regardless of whether they voted, so this is not a paywall-for-a-preference situation.

What the Game Is Actually Doing

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is built around hand-drawn 2D animation that mirrors the aesthetic of the source material rather than trying to push the art style into 3D territory. The Steam page lists both single-player and multiplayer modes, which puts it ahead of the bare-minimum feature sets that plagued earlier Nickelodeon-branded fighters. Skydance Games co-publishes alongside PM Studios, which is not a combination that suggests a low-budget cash grab. The base roster pulls from both ATLA and Korra timelines, covering the broad strokes of each series before the Year 1 Pass picks up the more specific fan requests. The structure makes practical sense for an IP with this many beloved characters competing for slots.

Early footage available through the pre-order trailer shows combat that moves at a pace closer to traditional 2D fighters than the floaty air-time of platform-fighter contemporaries. That positioning matters. The Avatar IP has been associated almost exclusively with the platform-fighter genre through Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl and its sequel, and neither title fully landed. Moving away from that template is a deliberate choice that opens the game up to a different competitive audience. Anime fighters and cartoon-licensed 2D brawlers have had a reasonable run in recent years, and a game with hand-drawn animation pulling from two popular Nickelodeon properties has a legitimate shot at carving out a niche.

Community Reaction

The Year 1 Pass trailer circulated quickly after the announcement. Uncle Iroh drew the most immediate enthusiasm, which is predictable for a character with his fan standing but still significant as a measure of how invested people are in the roster choices. Ty Lee and Lin Beifong both have dedicated followings, and their inclusion signals that Gameplay Group went through the characters and made deliberate picks rather than defaulting to whoever appeared in the most episodes. Bolin's confirmation generated more discussion than most of the launch character reveals combined. The main critique circulating is that Azula's absence from the confirmed slots is already frustrating people, which is fair given that she is the most requested character not yet placed anywhere. The fan-vote fifth slot exists precisely for that conversation, though.

The Honest Assessment

Uncle Iroh in a fighting game is something that should have happened years ago, and it took a smaller licensed project to finally deliver it. The Year 1 Pass lineup is four deep with characters who each have a distinct mechanical identity on paper, which is more planning than most DLC slates show at announcement time. The fan-vote fifth slot is a real engagement mechanic, not a placeholder. The base roster still needs scrutiny before anyone calls this a success, and the pricing for the Year 1 Pass was not detailed in the reveal, which is an omission that will matter at checkout. But the trajectory here is better than anything the Avatar IP has produced in the fighting-game space so far. If Gameplay Group followed through with the animation quality on the actual game the same way they did on the source material aesthetic, this one could hold up.

Pre-Orders and What to Watch For

Pre-orders for Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game are live now on Steam. The game launches July 23, 2026 on PC. Console versions were referenced in the pre-order trailer title, suggesting a simultaneous or near-simultaneous release on PlayStation and Xbox platforms, though specifics were not broken out in the announcement. The Year 1 Pass includes Bolin, Ty Lee, Lin Beifong, Uncle Iroh, and the fan-voted fifth character. Voting is tied to pre-orders. The fifth character reveal will come via official channels at an unspecified later date. For anyone who grew up with ATLA or Korra and has been waiting for a fighter that takes the IP seriously, the next few weeks are worth paying attention to.