Fullmetal Alchemist and the Broken Angel

Written by Chris Reiter  on February 22, 2005

Review: If I had alchemy powers of my own, I'd transmute Fullmetal Alchemist into Final Fantasy X!

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Deducing the difference between graphics that are outdated or simply lackluster and quality that's state-of-the art is kind of like shopping for clothes. There are so many styles to choose from; so many ways your outfit's going to either attract attention with its sleek and sexy look or make those same onlookers snicker at its pitiful design. Apparently, Racjin (the developer) isn't much of a fashionable dresser. Fullmetal Alchemist...it's got "tacky" written all over it. Level designs are each drab and clearly uneventful. They're boring. They're plain. They're built around in and on large and open town squares, alleyways, tunneling through a cavern, riding on a train, exploring the smelly undergrounds of a sewer system, and even breaking out of a massive prison complex. But here's the problem: these stages don't have much meat on them. What do you see besides a group of enemies roaming back and forth in strategically placed spaces of the level and the transformable objects? You'll see some bushes, fences, or barred walls of some kind blocking direct routes between you and certain other areas at times in the simplistic blueprint. Water with subpar quality flows in the sewer tunnels. Inside the prison's HQ, tidy offices and non-interactive glass windows line up the level that does nothing but makes you want to yawn at its merely basic structuring. On top of that, windows and doors are painted onto most of the outside buildings. There are some textures and effects like tiles in the stone floors and objects in flames, but none of it is appreciatively conceivable enough to believe that Fullmetal Alchemist is anything but a pair of archaic pants hidden in the bottom of the bargain bin.

What's been said about the lonely and low-grade levels of the game doesn't fare very differently about the uninspired character models of Fullmetal either. There are people and then there are things. Things like giant crab creatures and smaller, reptilian crawlies that produce electricity barriers around themselves, flip around, and whack Ed and Al in their attack. There are hooded purple clothed guys that conjure up waves of haystacks to strike. There are guys in black with knife weapons. There are guys with guns that shoot really big and really ugly looking bullets. There are even big guys in pink business suits whose arms flip open to launch rockets. Now, who the hell would wear a pink business suit? Some enemy models are upgraded in later parts of the game, to look a little different and act different too. But no matter what variety alterations are established, these models are all highly unattractive. Edward and Alphonse aren't that much better. While Ed actually sticks out with his bright red attire, Alphonse's drab gray body and faded pink loincloth kind of loses him in the moment. Sometimes it's easy to think that Alphonse is an enemy. But the thing that cheeses me off the most is the fact that Fullmetal's animations are ridiculously stiff. Watching an enemy jump into the air and appear as if he were being dragged along like an inanimate puppet on wires just to land is a very ineffective technique. At times when Al runs, he seems to bob along like he's a prissy girl in a dainty field of flowers. At least there's 30 minutes of anime cartoon fitted into the story to give the game some visual dignity. Unfortunately however, the cartoon is mediocre at best.

Like playing a cheesy arcade game, the voice work in Fullmetal is pretty sad. In-game, you'll hear just Ed and Al speak. The lines they say repeat often, because they've only got a few bits that sound as if they've been filtered through a machine. All the same unknowns from the anime series are used to voice the selected and respective roles for their characters, at least for the game's limited cut scenes (and average quality ones at that). Voiceless text dialogues and 2D anime imagery fills in for most of the game's plot. And except for maybe a couple of boss bottles, Ed and Al are the only ones doing the talking during the game. Lame as that is, Fullmetal only continues to disappoint with poor examples of audio effects. Yeah, you can hear when characters jump, slice, activate a vacuum sucking device, fire a bullet, blow a cannonball into a flock of attackers, amongst other things. It's just that the actual parameters of these noises are faulty. Though, nothing's as bad as listening to the campy, light music tones that plague this game's story moments. Of course, that's not the only type of music found within the quest -- there's some fast-driven arcadey rhythms and some darker ones too. Although, no great shakes come out of these commonplace synthetic beats.