Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy (DS) Review
Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy follows Edward and Alphonse Elric on their journey to find the Philosophers Stone, and covers the entire anime series. In cut-scenes there are a lot of stills from the anime, and a lot of the script is used too. However, although a small amount of dialogue is spoken by voice actors from the series, the vast majority of the storyline is told using dialogue boxes and huge blocks of scrolling text. FMA DS also condenses the storyline to such a degree that hours of episodes are summed up in a sentence or two, and vitally important parts of the plot are skipped altogether. Because of this, lots of complicated parts of the story are left unexplained, which would be very confusing to someone who hasnt watched the entire series.
The game is a straightforward, quite repetitive beat em up. You have only one attack button, and a few alchemy attacks at your disposal, which you gain in the form of spellbooks that you can switch to and from via the touch screen. You start with just Ed and Als spellbooks, but as you meet other characters like Colonel Mustang and Major Armstrong, their alchemical skills are made available to you as well. Gameplay is nearly always a case of killing everyone in the room, advancing, killing everyone in the next room, drawing a transmutation circle to open a trapdoor, and fighting a boss. Its repetitive and short; youll have it finished in less than 3 hours.
Although being able to use everyone elses alchemical skills isnt true to the series, the choice of attacks adds variety, and without them the game would be even more repetitive than it already is. I was annoyed by the lack of attention to detail, though. For example; Edward can perform alchemy without a transmutation circle, but Al cannot. However, in Dual Sympathy he can perform it as easily as his brother. They also got the colour of Als alchemy wrong. It may seem like Im nitpicking, but the mistakes go as far as Edward transmuting either of his arms into blades, when its only his right arm thats prosthetic. Normal gamers wont notice the inaccuracies and probably wont care, but to fans of the series its very disappointing.
The DSs features are used fairly well, but Destineer could have gone further with it. In fact, they could have gone a lot further with the whole game; its repetitive, straightforward and short, squeezing 51 episodes down into about nine levels and less than 30 minutes of dialog. Unlockable features include a Media Library, so that you can read all the annoying dialogue again, Minigames, which are actually quite fun but get boring fast (multiplayer would have helped), and Character Mode, which lets you play as characters such as Scar, Mustang and Izumi. There is also a Hard Mode, but the second play through will be a lot more boring and repetitive than the first, so you probably wont bother.
Ive said a lot of bad things about this game, but Im going to finish by saying that Im glad I got it. I love Fullmetal Alchemist, Im a huge fan, and although it falls short on so many levels it can still be fun for the odd ten minutes. Unfortunately if you havent watched the whole series, getting this games version of the storyline first would ruin it for you. In short, Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy is not worth buying unless youre a big fan of the series and dont mind a lot of disappointment along with some very short-lived fun.
