exA-Arcadia Releases AVATAR LEGENDS: The Fighting Game To Arcades

New arcade releases have been a bit uneven this year, but we’re happy to report that the drought is ending a little bit with today’s news that AVATAR LEGENDS: The Fighting Game is now available to purchase for the exA-Arcadia system. Let’s check out the details.

AVATAR LEGENDS Unveiled

This title is a little bit of an exclusive for exA, as it is launching for their platform just before home consoles and PCs. Based upon Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender anime, you get to play 1v1 battles as characters from the series. This includes Aang, Korra, Zuko, Katara and more, with a total of twelve characters available to start; five more will be added with the Year One DLC, which will integrated into the exA version down the road.

Per the game page, here’s a basic description of what this offers:

Choose from 12 of your favorite Benders hailing from both series: AVATAR THE LAST AIRBENDER and THE LEGEND OF KORRA! Each character can select from 3 support characters that influence playstyles and unlock new strategic, special moves in every match. Master the flow, a movement-driven combat system that emphasizes positioning, momentum, and player expression. Use it to evade and parry attacks or go on the offensive and rush down your opponent.

While this game has gone through a bit of a roller coaster ride on the console side of things (at one point being canceled, before being re-announced), the arcade version was announced back on March 18th, and it has seen testing in Japan. A near-complete build showed up at EVO 2026 in Vegas as well, where it saw long lines of interested players.

The game is a four-button fighter, with attacks changing depending upon whether you are standing, in the air, or crouching; it’s a light/medium/heavy setup, with the 4th button serving as “flow”. Naturally, each character has a moveset to learn, with multiple attacks available that are unique to their character.

AVATAR LEGENDS on exA

This is the first exA-Arcadia release since last December, when they launched Asuka 120% Burning Feat EXALLENT a couple of days before Christmas. This is the longest period of time between exA releases that we’ve seen since they launched at the end of 2019, but we are expecting other titles like G.I. Joe: The Wrath of Cobra and Invincible VS to join the fray here in the next month or two as well. Part of the delays have been the skyrocketing cost of certain electronic components…turns out relying on AI for everything from essays to advice to laughs has real world monetary consequences. Guess I should’ve gotten into the memory/component production business as they aren’t complaining.

Anyways, here’s AVATAR as seen in an exA ARC-32 cabinet, but if you have some other cabinet it’ll work fine there:

Content-wise, the exA version offers a more focused experience the Story, Arcade & Training modes, along with exA’s low input lag (i.e., it plays faster/is more responsive than the console versions, which also are not launching until a little later this month), and you can choose from all of the costumes. The game runs at 60FPS; most exAs operate at 1080p, although a few out there (like two of mine) have 4K monitors. It shares the character and stage roster with the other versions, but to get the new characters once available, operators will have to send in their carts to get the updates.

As with other exA releases, AVATAR is available as a kit, where it comes with the game cartridge (hurray physical media), an A1 poster, mini-posters, moveset cards, and an ARC-32 marquee. Price-wise, it is around the same price as their other fighter games(around $1700 plus shipping), although as of this exact moment, the shop page for it will be going up tomorrow (the 12th). Japanese sellers have begun promoting it however.

exA has some big plans on marketing this, the biggest we’ll have seen for any of their releases, so stay tuned for more on that. Hopefully we’ll start to see more exA releases again; as mentioned, G.I. Joe & Invincible VS are supposed to be up next. There is quite a backlog of content that has been shown though, so I’m not sure on how they’ll go about releasing it (or if a few games might get dropped).

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On a different note, exA has moved their booth from the West hall to the main hall at IAAPA 2026 (happening this November). At the present time they are not in the Games & Arcade Pavilion as they have been before, but instead are in the Family Entertainment pavilion in the Northeastern section of the show. This might change and I really hope that is does, as so far this is the most bizarre show layout that I’ve ever seen IAAPA do. I totally understand that you have people paying for spaces at certain sizes, they all have requests, there’s seniority at play, and you only have so much space to deal with, but it still does a great disservice to everyone when you end up placing various unrelated companies with their booths next to each other.

For those who don’t want to read the whole rant (the tl:dr) is: shaking up the layout like it was a bingo ball selection is not the way to go about helping people discover stuff, or for exhibitors to find their buyers. Organize exhibitors sensibly and use events and prizes as ways to help buyers discover new companies.

For the longer portion, here are the problems as I’m seeing them, and hearing from a few exhibitors out there who haven’t been happy with how the show is shaping up this year. Note though at the end, I do offer ideas for solutions. I want to see this show be a success, as that’s a rising tide that lifts all boats. Where I’m concerned though, is that the current trajectory is more indicative of an uneven tide, and that’s already making for some frustration out there (since I’ve been attending IAAPA in 2009, this is the first time I’ve ever been cold contacted by companies who are venting about the layout).

Once, many years ago before I had opened my arcade, I sat in on a training with Costco as they were approaching the company I worked for at the time to use their services for tech support. In that training, the Costco rep described their business model, and how it would generate more revenue. They intentionally move things around all the time, and put unrelated products next to or near each other, to make the customer go on a “treasure hunt.” The thinking is that you might end up finding something you weren’t looking for, but you are interested in, and that becomes a sale. They had data to show that it worked, so if you’ve ever wondered why Costco’s product layout feels like it has ADHD at times, that’s why (granted, they don’t do this with everything, as you can’t move freezers every other week, but they do it with a lot).

Now while that may work out great for what they do, it’s a bad practice to apply to a trade show with hundreds of companies and two giant buildings to walk through. One criticism I have had of IAAPA in the past is that they’ve done this before to a lesser degree. To be fair to them, often there are unavoidable factors that make getting things 100% organized together an impossibility. But this year, it looks and sounds like they’re leaning into the Costco model. Perhaps it’s to see if the effect works with buyers who just attend the show for a day, but if so, I just don’t see how that’s going to help everyone out (exhibitors & buyers). One issue at present is that almost every company is in a different spot from where they normally are found. Then there is so much mixing going on that the pavilion designations are almost pointless.

Here’s an example from the map as shown today, 7/11/2026. The Games & Arcade Pavilion is generally where you would expect to find companies who produce arcade games. From this snippet, a majority of the companies you find in this area offer products or services tailored towards rides you’d find at a theme park. Almost everyone has been moved far away from where they normally reside, and it makes little sense as to why. There’s some clustering going on at least – LAI Games, Zooom, Wahlap, Adrenaline, JET, and UNIS are all close to each other (and in the area where we usually would find arcade games), but then they’ve got a bunch of water park stuff mixed in and no “pavilion” moniker to help one find them.

True, if you’ve never been to the show before, then knowing where companies like Bandai Namco or Sega Amusements usually are at won’t matter. But how much of the attendees does that really apply to? I fail to see what the logic is in this layout, and it doesn’t get better when you go looking around the map. Fortunately this is not a final-final map, but that is also why I’m bringing this up now, as it’ll be November before we know it and there is a certain point where you can’t make any more changes.

IAAPA already is an overwhelming show. It will be even bigger this year thanks to the addition of the West building, where someone like myself who does intentionally explore, ends up missing several companies who I am actively looking for. This gets pretty frustrating, and if the map ends up being similar to what it is currently showing, that’s not going to get better.

Another thing about this strategy, assuming they’re trying for the Costco idea, is that it just wastes time for a majority of buyers. Sure, you will have a few who may have the budget and space to add on a new attraction, but for most of us, just because you stumble across a booth about waterslide engineering or laser tag or a spherical theater while trying to find an arcade game maker, doesn’t send you a bunch of bitcoins to your crypto wallet so that you can now throw a water slide into your arcade, or that you can magically make the space to throw in some other new attraction. There are better ways that we can help people discover other companies.

Now to be fair, I don’t envy whomever is in charge of figuring all of this out. I do understand that there are a lot of factors at play, and that they also are trying to find ways to get people to find smaller companies or others who might usually get overlooked. They also have the West building, where a bunch of companies will be located. From what I hear, “no one” wants to be over there, since attendance will likely be low thanks to it being out of the way. The problem is, IAAPA can’t make the existing Orange Country convention Center larger, and they have more companies than ever who are interested in attending. So much of this present layout is due to that expansion. I’m sure that exhibitors in the West building will be offering all sorts of giveaways to attract people to head over there, which can help, and they should be coming up with creative things to make it all worth the while.

But also as mentioned, the “hodgepodge” layout has been a problem before this. Just due to the size of the show, I’ve always missed one or two companies that I had even talked about in my IAAPA preview. Every time a small company is thrust into an area that has nothing to do with their product, they are missed by most of their potential buyers. Last year was the worst, where I missed three or four booths; I didn’t even find Unico USA until I had 10 minutes before I had to leave the show to catch my flight, and I had been trying to find them throughout the week. I missed them on a previous year and had a tough time finding them in 2023 too, as they just kept getting put into bizarre locations. Another was at IAAPA 2024 and there were some indie guys in a small booth in an area that wasn’t close to other arcades. It was a real pain to find them, even knowing the booth number, as the numbers went out of order for the aisles they were at. Finding them was like stumbling onto a speakeasy or something, but I had to waste a lot of time doing that “treasure hunt.” That meant that people who had no clue they were there, never found them.

Last year IAAPA tried two things to get people into other parts of the show – doing the opening ceremonies on the North side, and holding a scavenger hunt that they called The Game Of Life. The latter was one of the best ways to get people exploring the show, but I didn’t hear people saying that they cared for the former much (it made the show feel slow at the start, since usually most go and visit the Games & Arcade area). That still also doesn’t resolve the problem of how exhibitors are organized.

So is there a solution? I think so. Keeping everyone organized by the pavilion that fits with their principal product or service would allow everyone to easily find what they are looking for off the bat, meet the people they need to meet, then they can go and explore around for other things at their leisure. If the pavilion area has to be expanded to fit everyone, then fine. It’s never made sense as to why they limit pavilions to certain, arbitrary lines anyways (I can’t imagine that there’s a legal reason for it). Use special events like awards and open bars to draw people into specific pavilions, on top of scavenger hunts for prizes. Maybe even do a random lotto showcase, picking one exhibitor from each pavilion through the hour of each day and showcasing them in the IAAPA app and on their social media.

Granted, it also is on the exhibitors to help people find where they are at too – just posting your booth # isn’t the best way to do that(especially if this layout holds). Still, that job will be easier for helping discovery if we had all niches of the industry clustered together instead of spread out. It will greatly reduce the confusion, stress, and wasted time, replacing those with certainty and efficiency so that our time & money is put to the best use.

Anyways, rant off for now. Agree or disagree? And would you like to see AVATAR LEGENDS: The Fighting Game on a exA-Arcadia cabinet near you, if you have one?

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