He and his younger brother, Alfonse, were experimenting with forces they didn't fully understand when Alfonse died. Only Edward's skills and personal sacrifice preserved Alfonse's soul in the body of a huge suit of armor. Now they're on a journey to find the Philosopher's Stone, which should help them heal themselves.

Your options for dispatching enemies during your quest begin simply. You can attack with a small sword by pressing the square button, and pressing it repeatedly results in a combo. You'll also have a few transmutation spells right away. One erects a stone wall to protect you from enemies and the other shoots rocks up into an enemy's face, causing damage. Before long, you'll also be able to change certain objects into weapons.

When you see an object sitting in the middle of the floor, chances are you'll be able to use your powers to make it into a weapon. You can make melee weapons, like lances, but you can also make machine gun turrets, flamethrowers and cannons. The latter weapons don't move, obviously, and have very limited ammo.

Your other asset is your armored brother. Command options consist of guard, call, and tackle, and using these is one of your early clues that the game isn't well thought out. If you tell Alfonse to tackle, for example, he's supposed to charge into the enemy and do damage. But because he just stops and charges blindly on command, he'll usually just run into a wall or other piece of scenery. Most of the time, you're better off just using the call command to keep him close by and then work around him as he does his own thing. That way he serves as a nice damage magnet while you take out bad guys.

Unfortunately, the bad guys don’t require much effort or attention no matter how useless you find your brother. They don't do much more than swarm directly toward you, and they don't even do that well. If you erect a small stone wall, for example, they'll just stand on the other side of it attacking in vain instead of walking around it. Those with missile weapons aren't much more dangerous. Most of those weapons are painfully easy to dodge, so maneuvering your way into melee range is a simple matter. So no matter how many interesting magical options you have at your disposal, or how much strategy is possible, none of it is necessary.

Along the way, you'll spend as much time watching animations and dialogue as you will playing. And because it's based on anime, the dialogue is long and stilted. There are plot turns and a lot of animation to move the story along. So if you're a fan of the series or animation in general, that's a plus.

After you've watched a fair amount of story go by and taken down a certain number of mindless, toothless foes, you'll get points to assign to attributes and improve your character. But with a game this easy, there's no urgency or interest in the process. It would probably be a lot more interesting to just let the points stack up until you come to a point of challenge.

In almost every way, the game is less like an adventure and more like a predetermined set of events in which you play a small part. Almost the entire game consists of entering an area, watching some enemies file in, taking them out, repeating several times, then watching another scene of story over which you have absolutely no control. The player is so far removed from affecting anything that the only way Fullmetal Alchemist qualifies as a role-playing game is in the concept of character progression.

And the idea of the alchemist is that he can transform things he finds lying around – a handy skill. But in the game, it's very obvious which things can be transmuted because they're usually sitting in the middle of the floor waiting for you to click on them. Everything else is obviously scenery. There's no sense that you're trying something new or using your powers with any creativity. The whole experience is simply unnatural. Of course the experience is staged – it's a video game. But Full Metal Alchemist makes the suspension of disbelief very difficult.

The graphics don't help. The scenery, as mentioned earlier, is either bland background or obviously a prop. The bad guys move around like bugs, with no interest in or acknowledgement of each other. The fact that they seem to run together into one blob at times is irrelevant since you can just attack in their general direction and still do ok. On top of it all, Alfonse, the seven foot tall suit of armor, is animated so that he runs like a girl.

Fans of the series and anime in general may enjoy Fullmetal Alchemist. But even they must grow weary of the mind-numbing, rambling dialogue. Add to that the simple fact that one would have to go pretty far out of their way to make the game challenging in any way, and the whole package is destined for the fullmetal scrap heap.