I never really got the whole Fullmetal Alchemist phenomenon. I know some otakus who swear by it, but otakus aren’t real people, so who cares what they think.

I never really got the whole Fullmetal Alchemist phenomenon. I know some otakus who swear by it, but otakus aren’t real people, so who cares what they think. From the few episodes that I watched, FMA just seemed like your typical run of the mill anime series. Plus Alphonse creeps me out with his looks/voice combination. I mean, a big suit of armor should not sound like a 5 year old boy. Wouldn’t the whole transformation process also change how your voice sounds? Also, why does this bother me? Anyone?

At any rate, I recently took a vacation and one of my main stops was my parents place. I knew that there would be some downtime, so I wanted to pick up a game that wouldn’t require a lot of time (curse you Pokemon!) and something that I could just leisurely knock out. After doing a little research, I decided to pick up Dual Sympathy, and I wasn’t disappointed.

From wikipedia:

The video game spans through the entire 51 episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist, and is a side-scrolling brawler in the vein of classic titles like Final Fight or Battletoads. Players control Edward Elric, and his brother Al will often fight alongside him. The touch screen feature of the Nintendo DS is used to draw transmutation circles for alchemy, as well as to trigger special moves, some of which are necessary to progress through the game. For example, the player may have to create stone walls to cross a bed of spikes, create weights to trap enemies inside hatches, or summon cannons to break down walls. Most boss battles also require use of alchemy in order to complete them.

Dual Sympathy also features many bonuses such as a second gameplay mode called Character Mode, which allows the player to replay the story with other characters; and also play a variety of minigames, (which are listed below); and an alarm clock mode using voices from the series.

I guess since I know what happens in FMA I don’t have to watch the anime, which is a good thing because I don’t know if I could handle 51 episodes of anything. Well, except maybe the Barely Legal series, and even then I’d probably just skip right to the money shots.

Like wikipedia says, Dual Sympathy is a side scroller, and if you didn’t know, I’m a huge fan of the genre. Dual Sympathy is no Double Dragon, but I found the setup to really work well on the DS. Also, the difficulty level is really low… probably because this game was meant for 10 year old kids or whatever, but I found it disappointing that I didn’t die once the entire game. It’s like the Final Fantasy of side scrollers. Part of the fun of side scrolling beat’em ups are the high difficulty levels.

The alchemy powers were a cool touch. It’s a shame that there weren’t more opportunities to use them except when you’re trying to walk over a spike pit or shoot a wall. By the way, does Edward ever turn lead into gold in Fullmetal Alchemy? Just curious because I think that’s the only thing I really know about alchemy besides the fact that some creationists are pushing for it to be taught in schools now.

I was originally weary of Dual Sypahty because video games based on anime licenses are usually utter shit. Overall, I liked Dual Sympathy. It was easy and fun to play despite its shortcomings.

Score: 6.5

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