Fullmetal Alchemist 2 - Curse of the Crimson Elixir

The clap of hands is the whole hook. Stand near a pile of rubble, a fence, a broken cart, and Edward Elric can turn it into something that hurts: a spike of stone, a cannon, a swinging beam. Most licensed anime action games of the era settled for a combo string and a super meter, but this one at least tried to build its fighting around the property's central idea, that matter is raw material and the alchemist is the one who decides what it becomes.

It only half works. Transmutable objects are marked and finite, so the battlefield reads as a puzzle with two or three answers rather than an open workshop, and once you learn which object types produce the reliable crowd-clearing effects you stop experimenting. The rest is a competent third-person brawler with Ed's automail arm blade, light and heavy attacks, and Alphonse trundling behind as a heavy hitter you can point at enemies. Al being a genuine asset rather than an escort liability is one of the quieter things the game gets right.

The story is original rather than an adaptation, running parallel to the anime with red water, a new antagonist and the usual military entanglements. It is told in stiff cutscenes with real voice work from the English dub cast, which was a notable get in 2005 and does a lot to hold the tone together when the level design does not. Environments lean on brown Amestris towns and mine shafts, and the camera in tight corridors is exactly as unhelpful as you would expect from a mid-generation budget action title.

What keeps it worth revisiting is the pacing. Chapters are short, encounters resolve quickly, boss fights ask you to read a pattern rather than grind, and there is a steady drip of alchemy upgrades and item synthesis to spend battle materials on. It never outstays its welcome the way longer anime tie-ins of the period did, and it is clearly made by people who had watched the show rather than a summary of it.

Judged as a game it is mid-tier, a step up from the first Fullmetal Alchemist in mechanical confidence and still short of the genre's better efforts. Judged as a licence adaptation it is one of the more honest attempts on the system: it took the fiction's defining rule and made you play it, imperfectly, instead of putting it in a cutscene and moving on.