The Bottom Line: OMGFMA! No, really, that’s sort of the bottom line. If you’re not a fan already, this game won’t make you a believer, but it doesn’t suck either. It’s a good game for someone who’s an FMA fan already and wants to hang out with the characters some more.
The Characters
You play as Edward Elric, Fullmetal Alchemist. With you, doing NPC things and joining in the combat, is Al. This is both cool and not cool. For someone with the stats-on-steroids Al has, he does bewilderingly little damage; he’s handy as a distraction, but not really much more. The cool thing is that when he gets knocked out you can alchemize him back together, making it so that you never have to use healing potions on him. Also of the cool is the fact that Al can equip kittens. No, seriously. Kittens. They do things like make him resistant to being stunned.
You have three other NPCs who join you from time to time: Roy Mustang, Riza Hawkeye, and Alex Louis Armstrong, who aside from Ed, Al, and my poor lost Maes are my favorite characters, so I did a lot of “OMGYAYE!” when one or the other of them showed up. They all do some fearsome damage to enemies. Also, I love Roy in this game. He is a cocky, snarky bastard to a truly jaw-dropping degree. There’s a part in the game where you get to play, depending on which one you take, with Roy, Riza, or Alex, and comes a time when Ed is all “I’m going to have to kill someone! Woes!” If you’re playing with Alex, he’s all comforting and consoling and stuff. Roy? Roy is like “…So? Suck it up, you little whiner. You were the one who wanted to join the military.”
I heart Roy. He is mean to Ed out of love, really.

N’awwwww!The PlotMonsters are menacing Amestris. Forth the Elric brothers, to find out what the hell’s going on.
You start out in Liore, facing off against Father Whatsisface with some cut scenes from the series, but the game diverges from both anime and manga within about five minutes. After the battle against the chimera in the church, you chase Father Whatsisface outside; there’s an annoying boss battle, and then the good Father gets abruptly sucked down into the ground by what looks like an oil slick with arms (well, I mean, it looks an awful lot like the stuff that lurks behind the Gate, actually, which threw me for a minute, but this doesn’t actually have anything to do with the Gate). There’s also a strange Mechawoman who looks sort of like a Harryhausen Medusa.
On the trail of the monsters, you find strange old men, alarmingly resurrected ancient civilizations thought to be destroyed in an apocalypse, and a Creepy Villainous Alchemist who’s, um, actually pretty hot.

Evil Is Hot. It also has bad taste in women.The GameplayEd can transmute all sorts of things out of elements in his environment, including but not limited to: bombs, swords, throwing knives, shuriken, strange little clockwork Ed dolls, huge bobbly things that suck up your enemies so you can hit them all at once, and boomerangs.
(ME: Mah luhv can’t catch a ba-boom-a-rang-rang-rang…
SHE WHO MUST NOT BE IDENTIFIED: OH MY GOD ARE YOU SINGING A SONG ABOUT BOOMERANGS?
ME: Um… yes?
SWMNBI: NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.)
Sadly, a lot of these things are fairly useless. The swords are no better than the one you can transmute out of the ground, the hammers are amusing but don’t do much damage, and the bombs have all the range and half the attack dice of a jelly jar dropped on your foot.
Similarly, the stuff Ed learns to transmute out of said ground aren’t all created equal. The hammer is insanely slow, and in a game where most of the enemies are faster than you that’s enough to knock it out of contention as a viable weapon right there. The lance is also fairly slow. Most of the time you’ll probably go with the sword; it packs more damage than Ed’s automail arm but is just as speedy.

Whosoever pulls the sword out of this stone is rightwise king of all Amestris, and also gets to fuck Roy Mustang.The inventory system is one of those incredibly annoying ones where you keep collecting stuff that you can neither drop nor sell, and – this is the really inexcusable thing – both Ed and Al have only two equipment slots. Yes, two. Which means, basically, that you get decent armor and, like, a +1 Ring of Getting Your Ass Kicked Slightly Less, and that’s it. Or, if you’re Al, the ring and a kitten. (Also, Ed apparently has an ear pierced. Who knew? Anyway, he gets earrings from time to time.)

Two items, y’all. Two. And also, for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom, half the items you get for Al are quite obviously cursed.Ed’s slow. That’s a problem. Ed’s slow and a lot of his weapons are slow, and there are going to be way too many times when you’re going to take damage because you couldn’t abort out of a combo in time to get out of something’s way. He and Al have this kickass rage attack they do in tandem, which is extremely useful because it can do damage even to the enemies that Ed’s too short to accurately reach by himself.There are quite a few different types of enemies, from huge lumbering headless things that shoot pink lasers out from between their shoulders to annoying, bomb-throwing little things that have huge heads, look like they’re wearing glasses, and generally look like someone tried to make a golem of Bloom County’s Oliver Wendell Jones out of used 3-In-One oil.
Speaking of enemies. As some of you know, my gold standard for video game annoyingness is Beyond the Beyond. As long as something isn’t as annoying as BtB, it’s one point ahead of the game in my book. Conversely, if I find myself going “Well, okay, I wouldn’t actually rather be playing that one part in Beyond the Beyond where you have to go through the caverns and you keep randomly falling through the floor, but damn, it’s a close call at this point,” that is usually a bad sign. The caves outside Rizembul seriously made me wonder if I was going to fall through the floor and reemerge as an eight-bit bobblehead with a chibi dragon. Hell, it’s not like both games don’t have Winry. Anyway, the problem here was that the enemies regenerate, completely, as soon as you leave a cave section. Fuck that. If I clear out a section it damn well better stay cleared, at least for a while.
One last thing about the gameplay: this is one of those games where you do an awful lot of watching cut scenes and whatnot. Which is occasionally pretty cool when they’re fully animated, but you’ll get tired of the Basil Exposition thing pretty quickly. Not that I’m not always glad to see Roy, but I would like to actually control the character for the bulk of the game, you know? I spent way too much time in this game feeling like I was watching a badly animated FMA fanvid with the occasional bonus interactive game thrown in.
The Bosses
The bosses in this game are weird.
Now, I know nothing about how video games are made, technically speaking. Games like this, though, make me suspect that different levels are made by different teams, and they don’t always have good communication. For instance, except for the final boss, the hardest boss in the game, bar none, is at the halfway point. That’s the only battle I didn’t get through on the first round – or the second, or the third, etc., because this particular boss will seriously fuck your shit up and can take huge amounts of damage. The rest of the bosses are… well, they’re not easy exactly, but the fights are more annoying than challenging. For instance, there’s one boss who is way faster than you – enough that you basically have no chance in hell of catching her – and she spends 90% of her time running around whatever room you’re fighting in.
Did I mention that, unless there’s stuff around you can transmute them out of, Ed has no projectile weapons, and the ones you can transmute are useless as often as not?
So, yeah. Fast boss who runs around most of the time plus slow Ed with no ranged weaponry adds up to a long, long, long, tiresome boss battle. She takes a lot of damage when you do hit her, fortunately, you just… can’t hit her, most of the time. Al will probably do a better job than you do, but not by much, and he doesn’t do much damage, as I said before. Most of the bosses are like this – not difficult, just tiresome. Plus for whatever reason the camera angles in the boss battles are never, ever where you need them to be; you’ll spend way more time than you should adjusting them.

There can be only one!The Rating:I’m giving FMA: Curse of the Crimson Elixir three out of five alembics for failure to suck, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it if you’re not an FMA fan already. Finishing the game doesn’t unlock anything major, but the replay value is decent as long as you’re obsessive about your games like I am.
Sadly, there does not seem to be a Roy In The Shower cheat code. Next time, next time.