Fullmetal Alchemist - Video Games

FMA has received a respectable number of video games over the years, and I've had the pleasure (or misfortune, in the case of Dream Carnival) of playing quite a few of them. Here I'll be giving a basic backgroudn on all of them, as well as my thoughts on the ones that I have played personally. In other words, there will be a combination of both factual information and personal opinions on this page (as is true for most of the site). I'll try to make it clear which is which as much as possible. I hope this page can help in cataloguing FMA's history, and as for my opinions... Well, they're opinions, and you're free to disagree. :) Hell, if someone out there is a big fan of Dream Carnival, hats off to you, you're braver than I am. Though ultimately I hope my reviews will help people realize how cool some of these games are!

Regarding my sources for things such as release dates and developers, I've pulled from a number of places, including MobyGames, Giant Bomb, official websites, and in some cases, the game's box. If you find any incorrect or missing info (and are able to correct it), please let me know! You can reach me through the shrine guestbook or my Tumblr. I'm also happy to answer any questions people might have about any of the games, to the best of my ability, so don't be afraid to get in touch if there's something you're wondering about.

! Help Wanted !

I'm currently in search of the following information:

• Which regions and languages each game was released in outside Japan (and, in the case of the card game, outside the U.S.)
• Whether or not the Wii and PSP games have multiplayer, and if so, what type- i.e. whether it's local multiplayer, online, requires link cable (??? does the PSP have a link cable? I never played on one), etc.
• Any not-yet-listed fanmade translation patches for any of the games
• Plot and gameplay summaries for the PSP games

List of Games

Tip: Hover over a row in the table to highlight it. Scroll horizontally to see all pages of the table. Click a game's title to jump to it.

How to Obtain + Play

I own all of the U.S. released games, and a few of the Japanese ones as well. For those of you wondering how I accomplished this: I've been collecting FMA merchandise since 2010, and back in the early-to-mid 2010s, it was a lot easier to find used games for cheap. The used games market is kind of a wreck these days, with scalpers and speculators raising prices ridiculously high, and physical game stores simultaneously getting more expensive and putting less games on the floor in favor of making half the store Funko Pops and ugly T-shirts and what have you. Back in the day, though, anime licensed property games (even for a popular series like FMA) were the sort of thing that were a dime a dozen. For example, I got Crimson Elixir- generally the most well-regarded of the FMA games- at a local Gamestop for $10 (it seems to go for around $30 or more online these days), and both the GBA games on Rakuten for about $5 each (excluding shipping from Japan). I'm very fortunate in that I somehow managed to more or less complete this collection before the 2020 used games market shitshow, so in terms of actually buying... Unfortunately, there's really not a lot of advice I can give. You kinda just gotta keep an eye out and get lucky, I guess. (By the way, if anyone ever comes across Castlevania: Curse of Darkness for under $30 PLEASE tell me!!!!) What I can tell you, though, is which games are accessible in terms of console compatibility, language, and background information.

First off, let's get the obvious question out of the way: Yes, there are roms available for all of these, I'm pretty sure. I'm not going to directly link to any of them, since the video game (ahem) preservation scene is a complicated one and sources and techniques tend to come and go like the wind. You can google it, or if Google fails to give you what you need, find someone with experience to help you.

Now then, as for playing the games on physical hardware. Excluding the mobile game, all the FMA games are for 6th and 7th generation Nintendo and Sony consoles- Nothing for Xbox or Windows, and nothing newer than 2010, so bad news for those of you who weren't PS2 girlies like me. If you have 7th and 8th gen consoles, you may still be able to play the older games, depending on the system:

• PS2: Playable on full-size PS3s. The PS3 slim does NOT have backwards compatibility, unfortunately. I think there might also be some other models that aren't backwards compatible? I never had a PS3 myself (very tragic for a Katamari fan), so I'm not entirely sure.
• GBA: Playable on the original DS and the DS Lite.
• DS: Playable on all 3DS models, including the 2DS. Hooray!!
• Wii: Playable on the Wii U.
• Unfortunately, the PS Vita apparently can't play PSP games off physical discs, only the PSN store. I also never had a PSP or Vita, so I'm not sure what the availability is there. Good luck?

There is, however, one other factor that must be taken into account, and that's every anime game enthusiast's least favorite acquaintance, regionlocking. Regionlocking is a thing where game companies do a xenophobia install on their consoles because something something what if a different guy owns the rights to a game in a different country or something like that, I dunno, it sucks man. But basically what this means is that games get released for specific regions, and some systems will only play games that match the region they're from. This doesn't necessarily correlate to language; a PAL region game may have English language settings for players in the U.K., but wouldn't be playable on a regionlocked American console, for example. By the way, the concept of regionlocking was apparently first introduced to the games industry with the NES, so you can check this off your "Nintendo absolutely hates its players" bingo.

Of the systems that the FMA games are on, the PS2 and Wii are both regionlocked. Now, the Wii is pretty easy to unlock using the homebrew channel, which is run off of an SD card. (Whether or not this is possible for the Wii U, I'm not sure.) As for the PS2... When I first started collecting there wasn't really any way to unlock it that wasn't complicated and at risk of destroying the system, but according to the internet, a way of getting around it via a USB stick was developed a few years ago. So cool!!! :) Again, if you're interested in trying these, I'll let you look it up on your own.

As for the mobile game, it's currently Japan-exclusive (and, if I'm being real, I would not hold my breath for it to get an English release, unfortunately), so it's not listed in app stores for other regions. However, it can easily be downloaded onto a non-Japanese iPhone by creating a Japanese Apple store account, which you can find instructions for online. As for Android... I don't have one myself, but from what I understand it's a lot more complicated to bypass region locking in the Google Play store. :( If you can get past it or happen to live in Japan, however, it should also be possible to download the game onto an emulator like Bluestacks or something.

Finally, let's discuss language and story. Unfortunately, most of the FMA games are pretty dialogue heavy, so I don't recommend playing most of the the Japan-exclusive games if you don't speak Japanese. (Fun fact: Back before my Wii broke, I'd test my Japanese skills every year by playing Prince of the Dawn and seeing how far I could get before I gave up, lol.) The exception is the two GBA games, Stray Rondo and Sonata of Memories, which both have fanmade English patches. If you're really determined, most people could also probably manage the mobile game without Japanese knowledge; I wouldn't recommend this unless you typically enjoy strategy games, though, since it is still heavy on the dialogue, so you won't really get much out of it other than the gameplay and some cool graphics.

In terms of story, you don't really need much pre-existing knowledge for most of them; Most of them start somewhere around the first arc of the manga, and then branch off into their own self-contained stories. This applies even to the PS2 games, despite them having ordered entries in a series. To my knowledge, the only game that's a direct sequel to a previous game is Daughter of the Dusk, the second Wii game; As for the first, it more directly involves the manga's plot, kicking off seemingly sometime just before the Briggs arc.
Dual Sympathy, meanwhile, is a pretty direct story-lite adaptation of the 2003 anime- You know, your typical "here's the level for these episodes, here's a 5 minute clip from them" type game adaptation. It is admittedly a very fun game, so I still recommend it even if you haven't watched 03, but bear in mind that you likely won't understand the plot all that much. The card game and Dream Carnival have little to no plot to speak of. The PSP games are the only ones I really haven't played at all, so I'm not quite sure about the plot for those two; What little information I can find online seems to imply that the first one has a semi-original plot, while the second more directly follows the mangahood plot, but I have no idea when exactly they branch off from the main story.

Fullmetal Alchemist and the Broken Angel (鋼の錬金術師 翔べない天使 Hagane no Renkinjutsushi: Tobenai Tenshi)

Plot Summary † My Rating & Review † Image Gallery † Walkthroughs, Soundtracks, and Other Links † Trivia & Tips

• Release Date: 12/25/2003
• Developer: Racjin
• Publisher: Square Enix
• Genre: Action RPG
• Platform: PlayStation 2
• Number of Players: 1
• English version available? Yes (U.S. + Canada)
• Have I played it? Yes

Spoiler-Free Plot TL;DR

After a train derailment leaves the Elrics temporarily stranded, they find themselves in New Hiessgart, a strange town said to be an autonomous community governed by alchemists. There, they meet Izumi’s old friend Professor Eiselstein, and his daughter Armony- Who, for mysterious reasons, is forbidden from studying alchemy despite it being her father’s trade. What’s really going on in New Hiessgart? Who is behind the chimera attacks that destroyed old Hiessgart? What secrets does Armony hold?

Full In-Depth Plot Summary

Coming soon!!

My Rating & Review

• Story: 3 out of 5
• Gameplay: 5 out of 5
• Graphics: 2 out of 5
• Music: 4 out of 5
• Overall: 4.5 out of 5

Story: Broken Angel has a pretty solid story that does a good job of drawing the player in, building layer upon layer of mystery; Much like the overall story of FMA itself, what starts out as seemingly only a little detour on the boys’ journey, a little “something sounds weird here, but we’ve got other things to worry about,” ends up developing into a long and dark rabbit hole. Searching for the end of this proverbial tunnel is as exciting as it is unsettling, and whenever I play, I inevitably find myself going “Oh man, just one more level, I gotta see where this is going” and playing for way longer than I would most games.

Broken Angel also occupies a really interesting place in FMA history in that it was some of the first media ever produced beyond the manga, releasing in December of 2003. This means that at the time Broken Angel was being developed, the 2003 anime didn’t yet exist (though there was communication between the development teams for the anime and the video game, as Bones did the 2D cutscenes), there were no light novels or movies, and the manga was still only on the Dublith arc. (Note how Izumi is referenced several times as a plot hook- She was a fairly new character at the time.) Certain things that are taken for granted, such as the origin of the homunculi, the full background of the Ishvalan War, and characters like Ling, May, or Olivier just didn’t exist at the time, so Broken Angel ends up being a very tidy early 1914 side adventure. It’s also got some outstandingly funny dialogue, I’ll be real, they did a great job with the sibling dynamic.

On the other hand, the unfortunate side effect of being such an early entry in the series is that a lot of elements seen in Broken Angel- the battle on the train, selfish and mildly incompetent military commanders, a mysterious alchemist girl who doesn’t know the truth about her own origin, Big Automail Guy- appear more and more frequently later on in the franchise’s history, causing some parts of Broken Angel’s story to retroactively feel cliché and generic through no fault of its own. We’ve seen Mystery Redhead Hair Girl like four times now, but back then Armony was the one and only, so show her some respect!

Where Broken Angel’s story does suffer, in my opinion, is two elements: the first being a habit of running certain jokes or story elements into the ground, and the second is its characters. I can’t quite explain what I mean without some spoilers, so please click the drop-down below at your own risk.

Gameplay: Being the first FMA video game, Broken Angel established the template for its two successors, as well as certain elements that reoccur in other FMA games- And boy, did Racjin hit it out of the park right away! Fans of Kingdom Hearts will feel right at home with this one. It’s a shining example of the action RPG genre (in my personal opinion); It’s got versatile and seamless 3D combat without requiring Devil May Cry-like reflexes or learning too many inputs, and it also has RPG elements like stats and item equipment, but without so many things to keep track of as to feel confusing or bogged down. Thus it makes for a great entry-level game that’s friendly to fans of both the RPG and character action adventure genres, without feeling too barebones or hand-holdy. I really think the gameplay was well executed.

It also plays well with the FMA universe. Transmuting different weapons out of different objects is super fun, and they did a great job showcasing Ed’s zany transmutation style. The elemental upgrades allow more versatility and flair, and I really wish they’d kept that mechanic for future games… It’s also fun to transmute special weapons for Al, and combined attacks with the two of them are great.

My main criticisms of the gameplay are that certain areas can be difficult to navigate (namely anything involving platforming) and could really benefit from a dash ability. That, and Al’s A.I. is… I mean it’s not the worst ever, but he has a tendency to get in the way, and often struggles with pathfinding- He’ll typically try to take the most direct path possible to Ed when you call him, and if that path has a wall or ledge in the middle of it, then by god he is going to walk into that ledge like his life depends on it. On the other hand, because he auto-aims, it’s really easy to cheese a lot of enemies by just putting Al on a crossbow or something and letting him have at it while you run around doing nothing in particular. Is this a bad thing? If you just want to get through the game without dealing with combat, no. If you’re a game developer who wants your players to actually play the game instead of making Al do all their dirty work, yes.

Gameplay rating: 5 out of 5

Graphics: The talk sprites and 2D cutscenes look perfectly nice, and the character designs are ok, but the actual 3D models and textures… I will be fully honest with you, they’re not great. Even as a kid I thought Broken Angel looked scuffed as hell, lol. I think it’s mostly an issue of art direction rather than the PS2’s technical capabilities, because I never had this criticism of, say, Sonic Heroes, or even MediEvil way back on the PS1. Fortunately, by Crimson Elixir the graphics have greatly improved, but I’m really not sure why they went for kind of a grungy soft shaded look for Broken Angel.

The GUI is also, frankly, boring as hell. Like it’s not bad per se, it’s just… lackluster. Like they put the elements where they needed to be and then threw in a default font and as little decoration as possible. FMA has a really fun, cartoony fantasy industrial aesthetic, the East End London to Soul Eater’s Nevada, and I really wish they’d leaned into it more. The GBA games did a fantastic job with this, so it’s a shame the same can’t be said for Broken Angel and Crimson Elixir.

Graphics rating: 2 out of 5

Music: While the soundtrack isn’t quite Final Fantasy tier, it’s pretty solid. There’s a few standout tracks (PIZZA TIME GOES SO HARD), and nothing that I found actively unpleasant to listen to. And of course we can’t mention the Broken Angel soundtrack without talking about Flower of the Heart, the hilariously cheesy-cute insert song played over the Armony friendship montage. It’s genuinely a cute track. :)

Music rating: 4 out of 5

Overall: Like I said earlier, Broken Angel laid a really strong foundation for future FMA games. I’m sure this is due in part to the unique capabilities of Square Enix; Squeenix is already experienced in RPGs and action games, and since they’re also FMA’s publisher (via their manga imprint, Gangan Comics), they had the ability to work much more closely in tandem with the development of the manga and anime than is possible for developers that just get IPs farmed out to them. This is even directly acknowledged in an IGN interview with the developers.

Even if it’s not my favorite out of the FMA games, Broken Angel still holds up quite well, and it’s one of the video games I find myself replaying time and time again. I absolutely recommend it to any fan of the series, and anyone who enjoys a good story-heavy action game.

Overall rating: 4.5 out of 5

Image Gallery

Coming soon!

Walkthroughs, Soundtracks, and Other Links

• Manual (EN)
• Official strategy guide (EN)

Trivia & Tips

• Arakawa's cameo in this game comes in the form of a mechanized version of her self-portrait, carrying a glass of... milk..? She will wander around for a short time playing music and blowing poisonous bubbles from the glass, which inflict damage to enemies upon contact. After the automaton stops its merry little jaunt, it can be transmuted into an item.
• If Al dies, don't worry! Head towards him and hold the alchemy button; You'll see an "?" pop up as a transmutation icon near him. Activating this will revive him, causing him to exclaim "I thought I was dead!". (This does, regrettably, mean that it is a legitimate strategy to simply let Al die and save single potions exclusively for Ed...)
• Speaking of Al dying, it's normally not possible for the player to kill him, as most attacks and weapons don't do friendly fire. However, a handful do, namely the giant iron balls and the cannon. If you kill Al in this manner, and then revive him, instead of his default line of "I thought I was dead!", he'll chide you with an exasperated "Come on, Ed!"