The White-Knuckled Alchemist
And as such, this is a 2 on 2 fighting game that lets you play as a few key characters from the series, up to Ed and Ling's fight against Envy. The game looks pretty good, characters take after the manga's art-style pretty nicely, so they look very squared and chunky. Despite the game having up to four characters on screen at the same time, the frame-rate keeps up pretty nicely. The cherry on top? Clothes break and characters start looking damaged as the fight goes on! And, to make it even sweeter, you can unlock costumes for every character! Most are simple recolors, but you do get a fair amount of fun stuff, such as Roy with his coat hanging over his shoulder, or Ed's artic coat. The character roster is pretty comprehensive, considering up to where the game covers, so you get Ed, Al, Roy, Riza, Major Armstrong, Izum, Ran Fan, Mey Lin, Ling, Ling(Greed), Greed, Lust, Wrath, Envy, Gluttony and Scar.
Sadly, the game itself is a bit clunky. Battles feel pretty slow, and there's not much you can do with the tools you are given. You can mix weak and strong blows to create various 3-hit combos, you get two different alchemy/special attacks, a jump, you can block(Or dodge, but it's pretty useless, dashing is better 90% of the time). Oh! And you can't use the analog stick, movement is done through the digital pad exclusively. Special attacks are fairly slow to come out, but they are probably balanced that way for 2 on 2 fights. Unlike Gundam there's not much verticality in the fights, so for all intents and purposes, it's an Anime Arena Fighting Game(tm). There's also a Super Combination Attack that you can use once you fill an energy gauge, in which case the character that initiated it must go through 3 sequences of 4-button presses to initiate it. Getting hit, or getting an input wrong, will lower the overall possible damage it will dish out. Once you press every button, an unavoidable cutscene plays out, and the enemy gets to go through QTEs to lower the damage. You can also use these energy stocks to revive a fallen comrade instead.
But I simply can't stress how dull the game is when the game plays so slowly. It's not even a framerate issue! For instance, your special moves either have a long wind-up animation or a long recovery animation, so pulling them off feels like a chore. The three-hit combo system doesn't work very well, 'cause sometimes you or your opponent can simply start blocking out of hitstun, which is all sorts of wrong.
And then there's the story mode... it's a bore. In the case of Ed, it follows the plot up to the fight against Envy's real form, however, the story mode for the other characters is mostly made up. Izumi, for instance, ends up teaming up with the Elric brothers and takes down the homonculi. As you go through matches, some optional, some mandatory, you level up and unlock various costumes as well as stat points that you can spread on your Attack, Defense, Special Attack Power and Speed. Sounds neat, huh?
But it's not. Stat points seem to make no real difference, and fighting the CPU feels unfair to the point of annoyance. They can amass Super Stocks way faster than you, so you'll be eating a ton of unavoidable, unblockable Super Combination moves that will deal 70% or so damage to either you or your ally. Sure, you could try to quickly kill either of them, but they'll have a stock ready to revive each other, and pretty soon after they'll launch a super move. This means that you have to play defensively with your Super stocks, since you'll probably need them to either revive your ally or wait for your ally to revive you. It simply isn't fun, I'm still considering not unlocking every character 'cause I'm dead tired of this game. Oh, and your AI partner? Absolutely useless. He'll let enemies gang up on you, and when they are priming a Combination Attack they'll just let it happen.
Fullmetal Alchemist on the PSP isn't very good. Even putting aside how annoying the single player mode is, the game is just too slow to be any fun. Even though the game looks really good, it's only skin deep, just avoid it entirely.
2.5
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