Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy finished (spoilers below)

The last section of Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy is strange. It's sort of like a boss rush but with a few screens of enemies and a puzzle scattered throughout it. Also, what I mentioned as a worry in my last entry on the game wasn't too far off the mark. The game's final boss was easier than those who came immediately before. Sort of.

After reaching the very last stretch of the game Ed faces off against Dante. However, this fight is easier than you might expect since it hearkens back to the game's very first fight. Yes, just as in the battle against Cornello, you just need to guide Ed through the obstacles and enemies that Dante conjures up. The difference being that two of the things she conjures (a series of falling rocks and a wave of fire) are very difficult to avoid unless you keep to the middle of the arena. These obstacles provide some frustrating moments, but otherwise Ed just has to outlast Dante. There's no context-sensitive alchemy, no impregnable defense, nothing. Just outlasting her.

Thematically, this is great. Cornello and Dante both wield a form of the Philosopher's Stone so it makes sense that these fights share a process. However, the game's final fight (if you can even call it that) is an experiment that fails.

Instead of running the game's story while the game's gameplay is on hold, the final fight against Envy involves a steady stream of dialogue that takes the place of Ed's alchemy on the Touch Screen. Envy's only attack is a simple jab, but because the dialogue is on the lower Touch Screen and the fight is on the upper screen it's difficult to follow both simultaneously.

If the game had done more that required you to pay active attention to both screens simultaneously (since the dialogue scrolls by quickly), I don't think this final fight/character building would be a problem. But as it is, it's too clunky to be effective (especially when Ed's down to a sliver of health and you're in no mood to test to see if you're invulnerable for the sake of the scene). Watching for context-sensitive alchemy works, however, because it's something that you can flick your gaze from screen to screen to do. The areas in which such alchemy is activated are fairly obvious after all.

All of that said, the game's final cutscenes reminded me of watching the series. In fact, even though these cutscenes involve nothing but a series of images, they were quite engaging. As the credits rolled, I definitely felt satisfied.

So then I peeked into the game's "Character Mode." Apparently you can play through the story mode's levels as a number of characters from the show. Though there are no cutscenes (aside from the opening) in this game mode. No doubt finishing it with all the available characters unlocks another.

But the game's content doesn't end there. Keeping true to this game's implicit m.o. of frequently using the Touch Pad, there're a bunch of mini games that are entirely Touch Pad based. They're fun little distractions, too.

So, having seen a fair chunk of Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy think that it's more than a beat 'em up usually is because of the Touch Screen. Though it is, by no means, a classic of the genre. Fights can be reduced to speed button pressing if you corner most enemies, and more often than not enemy attacks are easily avoided unless they're alchemical in nature. My playthrough was in "Normal Mode," though.

Overall, Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy is definitely a game to check out for fans of the series and for fans of the DS' Touch Screen. Beat 'em up lovers should look elsewhere.

When stories and difficulty curves alike are linear

I'd played Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy before, but I'd never gotten quite this far.

Since the game's keeping pace with the show, the best way to put my current position is thusly: I'm right in the middle of episode 36. (Spoilers: so at this point in the game, Ed and Al's dad has returned only to leave again, Al's armour is currently the Philosopher's Stone, and Ed has vowed to destroy the homunculi).

Needless to say, there've been a lot of cutscenes in the last 40 minutes of the game. That's definitely one drawback to making a game with so much story into a beat 'em up. Text becomes the only way to really convey it. Also, because beat 'em ups are a very linear genre, the storytelling becomes the same. And viewers of the show will know that Fullmetal Alchemist is a series that follows more than the adventures of Ed and Al Elric.

Nonetheless, the parts of the story driven by their father will likely get put into the next part of the game. I'm also guessing that that will be the final section.

Both because the game's story is only a few episodes away from finishing off the anime series and because the difficulty has increased substantially. Not so much in the sections where you're beating up troops of enemies, but more so when it comes to bosses.

For the most part, up until the fight with Greed, you'd do fine if you watched for a context-sensitive technique to come up or discovered which of your basic techniques is most effective. But from the fight with the diamond-shielded Greed onward, bosses get tougher. At first because you need to wait for the context-sensitive alchemy to show up rather than simply move to where it is, and then later (in the fight with Wrath, for example) you need to survive long enough to get through the boss's defenses often enough to lower their health to 0.

I can't help but feel worried, though. With the final boss just around the corner will that be the roughest battle yet, or will it feel all the easier after the tough fights that precede it?

Fullmetal touch screens and recovery times

After another half hour of gameplay, another 15 or so episodes of Full Metal Alchemist have played out (so I'm up to about episode 33 of 51). Full Metal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy does a pretty good job of keeping pace though. Instead of highlighting every battle from the series, the major ones from the main plotline are emphasized and the game is otherwise filled out with little minigames.

In the section of the game I played through tonight (Warehouse 5, and Ed and Al meeting with their teacher Izumi) there were three such games. One is a memory minigame, another a rhythm-ish minigame, and the third a stealth minigame. All of these used the touch screen. As someone who doesn't play that many beat 'em ups, these breaks from mashing the attack buttons are very welcome.

Especially since Ed can beat up chimeras ranging from lizard-lions to dragon-gryphons in ten blows or less without so much as a scratch if you mash those buttons quickly enough.

That's not to say that the beat 'em up portions of this game are broken because Ed's overpowered. It's just that enemies have a very slow recovery time. If you manage to catch them in a combo (get within brawling range and mash those buttons!), then there's little chance they'll break free. Though the same thing goes for Ed.

Not in that enemies launch combos and those can catch Ed in a rain of pain. No.

But in that environmental hazards like retracting spikes are perfectly timed to match Ed's post-hit recovery time. So if you're hit by a such spike once, you'll likely be hit by it again just as Ed's getting up. And again before you manage to jump (or have the damage dealt throw you) out of harm's way.

Tonight's session also saw the first appearance of necessary alchemy in a battle. While fighting the living armour named Number 48, you need to transmute giant stones into statues. Number 48 then attacks these statues and while it's mid-blow you need to knock its head off so that you can fire off some of your offensive alchemy. Otherwise, when it's got a cool head about itself, Number 48 just blocks everything.

What I like most about this sort of necessary alchemy is that you aren't really told about it going into the battle. You either need to remember the fight from the series and watch for your cue to copy what Ed did in it, or just watch for when your currently available alchemical skills change. Forcing the player to keep an eye on both screens like that is something I enjoy because it brings an element of discovery into an otherwise dull and straightforward genre.

Starting into Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy

Until reading through some early in-game text I'd completely forgotten that Al and Ed are 10 and 11 respectively. So kids that aren't even pre-teens are running around laying the smack down on guys who're wielding curtain rods, knives, and guns. Just like in the hit anime series, y'know?

Because if there's one thing I remember while Fullmetal Alchemist completely mesmerized me when I first started watching it, it's how the brothers Elric battled hordes of enemies. 

To be fair, though, as little sense as the "beat 'em up" genre might make for the game adaptation of a series that complicates its share of fantasy/adventure anime tropes, the text between levels helps. Actually, its being in Al's voice explains the simplifications that help to keep the game's action-driven pace going, too. 

The dialogue on the other hand is merely all right. It's definitely a stark reminder that Ed's much older than his age, and that there's some truth to what a friend of mine (whose music blog you can find here) said on the matter of "subs v. dubs:" (to paraphrase) 'Dialogue always sounds cooler when you can't understand it aurally, since when it's in English it just sounds like the same trite stuff that's in every other show.'

Thus far, the game's relegated the series' alchemy to special attacks and touch screen events. Short of turning the game into an RTS a la Lost Magic, I think that Natsume took the middle road in terms of bringing alchemy into the game itself. For better and for worse, since it seems underused thus far.

Though there's still quite a bit of game left. The game covers the entire original series and I'm hardly through the first 10 episodes (after about 40 minutes of play time). So there's still another 41 or so episodes' worth of game content to go.