"Even fans of the anime may not like this game."

Full Metal Alchemist Dual Sympathy for the Nintendo DS is a game based on the popular anime Full Metal Alchemist. This game fallows the story of Ed through out the entire story of the anime. Like most license games it is completely mediocre and only fans of the anime will enjoy the game.

Graphics 7/10
The graphics for Full Metal Alchemist DS are fairly well done, but at the same time I wasn't astound. The sprites were well done and had great detail. Unfortunately there weren't very many types of enemies and their sprites got very repetitious. Every now and then an anime cut scene would take place and those looked just like they did on tv. The backgrounds and environments also looked great. But once again there were so few levels that we only got to see a few backgrounds.

Story 4/10
The story fallows the story of the Full Metal Alchemist anime exactly, and I loved the anime. So why did I score story so low? Because this game completely ignores most of the story. Most of the story is told through scrolling text in between levels. These would take around two minuets to read. However they put way to much story in these parts. Most of the greatest parts of the anime are told through these, including every thing about Nina, Scar, and Hughes (hint: they all have something in common). These scenes lost a lot of its power when they are just a few lines of text. A lot of parts that should have been playable were told through these, like both times Ed fights with Scar. No to mention some plot points were just overlooked all together, Kimbly wasn't even mentioned. Finally these story sessions would condense 20+ episodes into two minuets, and when the anime only has 52 episodes that's a lot of the story we don't get to play through.

Gameplay 4/10
The game play in this game is a side scrolling beat-em-up. It's a very standard go right and kill everyone affair. You are only given two combos so you don't get much variety in how you beat people. The touch screen is used to select your alchemy attacks. You can select books for different types of alchemy, like Roy's fire or Ed's canons, and use one attack from each. That's right ONE attack for each book you get, and there aren't a lot. You can charge the attack but it only has two levels (uncharged and charged).

The largest problem with the gameplay is that this game is short. It can be beaten in less than three hours on your first play through. As I mentioned before a lot of the story is told in text and the actual levels can be really far apart in the story. For instance the third level is close to the beginning of the anime then in fourth level it takes a 20 episode leap to the middle of the anime, and then it happens again when you go to the fifth level.

The boss battles were probably the only thing done right. Almost none of the bosses just required you to beat the crap out of them. A lot of them required you to use certain alchemy at certain times to get an opening to attack. Unfortunately though they skipped a lot of potential bosses. You never get to fight Scar, Lust, or Gluttony and the boss battle you get against Envy really isn't a boss battle at all.

The gameplay is so bad it hurts the story and graphics like I mentioned earlier.

Conclusion
If you're a fan of the anime or manga you will probably like this game. It does have a lot of unlockables that will keep you busy past the main game. But it isn't that hard and should only take you around six hours to unlock everything. If you have never scene the anime stay away from this game I guarantee you will not like it.

Final Score 5/10

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/15/06