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zetalial · 5 years

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A look at the old FMA Fangame Bluebird’s illusion

Hey there. One of the more interesting things to come out of the FMA fandom is this fanmade visual novel called Bluebird’s illusion. It was made in October 2004. I’ve recently tried it out so why don’t I share?

It’s based on the FMA manga but was clearly heavily influenced by the anime as well with it’s cute artstyle and much of the music. The manga was of course far from finished at this point and perhaps what drew plenty of attention to this little fanproject was its speculations. (And the impressive art.)

So, the story takes place in a seemingly happy future where Ed has restored his brother’s body and now lives with Al in a lovely house in Central. He still works for the military and has just started a new job as the Fuhrer’s secretary. Mustang is also around, of course.

However all is not well... (Long post by the way).

(I’m going to be spoiling this games plot pretty liberally just for the warning.)

It is called Bluebird’s illusion because the brother’s seeming happiness is just an illusion that cannot last. It is revealed that in order to restore Al’s body, Edward made some sort of deal with the Homunculi. However, his current body isn’t good enough to hold his soul and it’s starting to disappear. Plus the homunculi are still watching in the background.

The game at first is pretty lighthearted with lots of jokes about Ed’s height, about Roy’s avoidance of paperwork, Breda’s fear of dogs etc. and the beginning is honestly pretty boring to play, in my opinion. Yet, it gets darker and in fact this game has no happy endings.

There are three main endings to this game plus one joke ending.

The most infamous ending is definitely the Pride!Ed ending.

Ed gets taken into the basement beneath Central HQ where the Homunculi’s Father awaits to use Ed to fulfill his vision of creating a new, perfect world. This happens in every ending actually.

The Homunculi’s Father is Hohenheim, by the way. (As I said, it’s following the manga but at the time it was created it was not yet clear that Father and Hohenheim were different people.) He speaks to Ed with a strange amount of fondness, calling him his most beloved son. (Which is quite something when its in front of the other Homunculi. I found this a really interesting dynamic)

Ed of course tries to resist, even with Hohenheim-Father promising to create a new permanent body for Al. He is held captive in the basement for five days before someone comes to rescue him. In that time he gets pretty abused by Envy but manages to disrupt the Homunculi’s plans some.

In this ending, Roy and Al come to save Ed but things go rather badly.

Both Roy and Al are defeated and dying (from facing Bradley(AKA Wrath) and Envy) so Ed, in his desperation and heedless of his own wounds, attempts a transmutation to bring them both back. All his efforts bring the basement crushing down and almost no one survives.

Seeing how Ed is not fully dead and the great power he possesses, Hohenheim-Father decides to bring him to life as the Homunculus Pride (A name he has never given to anyone before as he felt he had never had any children worthy to bear the title until now.)

Ed’s pretty much dead inside however. Pride is a cold, heartless creature who can’t seem to remember who he was. His new life seems to feature following Envy around (the only other Homunculus left.)

For all the love around Pride!Ed, the game only has this one screenshot, featuring an admittedly really cool design. (I love how he’s got two arms again but only one has a long sleeve). If you search for fanart there’s loads of Pride!Ed with this design. (It’s also rather impressive how this game predicted a Homunculus could be made out of a human as this was before Greedling existed and the method seems pretty similar.)

So, that was the real downer ending, (Roy dead, Al dead and Ed having lost himself). The other two endings hit closer to bittersweet.

If you go down the Al path in the game, by going home early each day and spending time with Al, you can unlock the Veg!Ed ending.

So, you do things like agreeing to help Al with housework and agree to go out with him on your day off and you deal with the serial killer plotline. (Yeah, that’s a thing, it’s a little weird.)

Anyway, this time when Al and Roy come to rescue Ed from the basement, Al is particularly self-sacrificing. Actually this end kind of reminds me of the end of the anime. I’m sure you can see why.

Envy stabs Al through the chest and so a distraught Ed decides to sacrifice himself to save his brother. He trades his soul for a new body for Al.

Al lives this time, (As does Mustang) and his body is restored permanently. However Ed has given up his soul. He isn’t quite dead - he’s physically alive but unresponsive. Al takes him back to Risembool and continues to talk to and take care of Ed in his vegetative state, hoping his brother will some day respond to him.

But there’s no sign of any recovery.

...

Right, the next ending is known as the Roy end. This is the ending you get if you follow Roy’s storyline.

His storyline also deals with him remembering Hughes, who’s been dead for quite a while. You’ll notice in the picture above that one of the books has one of Hughes’ knives inside.

In this storyline you are invited to go out with Roy on your day off rather than going alone or with Al. It includes getting in a fight with him at one point.

(They go into a pub and initially Roy orders two alcoholic drinks. Then he corrects himself and orders Ed something non-alcoholic. His first order had been for Hughes.)

Sadly, this ending is bittersweet as well. Al and Roy go into the basement to save Ed but this time Ed can’t save his brother. Alphonse disappears permanently. Ed’s still messed with the homunculi’s plans as he does every time and Roy and Ed manage to get out alive though Ed’s crying.

Ed is extremely broken by the loss of his brother. For the next two weeks Ed locks himself away in his house alone, willing himself to believe his brother isn’t truly gone. Then Roy, who is now the Fuhrer, comes to see Ed. He’s cold as ever, telling Ed that his brother’s gone and that he needs to move on and start living, that Al would want him to be happy.

Ed does start to move on, and continues his life by working under Roy in the military. (For RoyEd shippers this could lead into an angsty relationship between the two in this ending. It’d be a pretty good dynamic.)

So, how about the last ending - the joke ending? It’s called the Tea alchemist ending. In this game, one of Ed’s jobs has been to serve tea every day to the Fuhrer. Yeah.

To get the tea ending you have to go down the King Bradley route. Basically you need to serve tea to him first every day and work overtime every day. On your day off, Bradley should call you and asks you to come into work on your day off. If you agree then Ed gets a permanent position of serving the Fuhrer as the Tea Alchemist and he never gets taken down to the basement.

(The person patting Ed’s head in the above image is Fuhrer Bradley by the way.) Working overtime every day has Ed get closer to the Fuhrer.

Ed gets given some cookies made by the Fuhrer’s wife. Another time, Ed falls asleep and looks absolutely adorable on the couch. Another day, Selim calls Ed and they have a friendly chat. Selim says he wishes he could see his father more often. Then the next day, Selim has gone missing and Ed is able to tell them where to find him. King Bradley is very grateful, hence the fatherly pat on the head. Honestly, this might have been the most surprising storyline for me in the game. I didn’t expect anything like it at all (whereas I knew about the dark endings).

So that’s all the endings in this game. The only other thing to mention would be all the fanservice stuff. If you ship Royed, EdAl or Edvy, this game gives you fodder for all these ships. (Or if you don’t ship them then you can just ignore it pretty easily).

Of all the character designs in the game, Envy’s is probably my favourite to be honest.

I love how his spiky hair seems to be all wildly different lengths and, well, just everything about his design. He’s as cruel and smug as ever of course. (When I say there’s shipping fodder, there’s no tender moments just typical Envy tormenting Ed and whatever his companionship with Pride is supposed to be.)

Roy is probably the one with the most obvious shipbait. At one point he convinces Ed to wear a dress to disguise himself as a girl. If that sounds random and fanservicey, it certainly is.

(Yes Roy looks that smug for pretty much the entire game.) He and Ed are practically constantly arguing.

Ed meanwhile, looks incredibly cute throughout the game.

(His pajamas are adorable. It’s has little cartoon Alphonse heads on it)

All versions of human Alphonse tend to look pretty good, I find. And this game does not disappoint in this regarding. For an obvious bit of fanservice, this game gives a particularly random shot of Al in the shower. (Getting that particular event was also kind of annoying and random.)

Yeah, there’s no explanations for some things.

Oh, this isn’t necessarily fanservice or anything but I thought that Breda’s design looked surprisingly good, of all people.

It’s the casual open uniform look. Makes him feel big and strong.

Finally there’s also a few outtakes that become available if you complete the right parts in the game. Most of them weren’t much to talk about but I found the one between Wrath!Bradley and Father Hohenheim to be rather funny.

It’s a silly outtake so it starts with Hohenheim commenting that Wrath is a good and dutiful son to him. Then he notes that Bradley is a father too and asks how Selim is. Wrath replies that Selim is the cutest boy in the world. Hohenheim has to argue though and says that, no, his son Edward is the cutest in the world. This goes on for a bit. Then Mustang (who has been secretly hiding with Alphonse) appears in order to interject that he believes Edward is indeed cuter than Selim. This is a mistake.

Wrath kills Mustang in anger. And the conclusion is that you should never mess with a father’s pride.

Gosh, that line has some layers in it. Anime!Bradley actually is Pride ironically enough. And later in the manga it would be revealed that his son Selim is Pride. That hasn’t been revealed yet though and the only Pride in Bluebird’s illusion is in fact Pride!Ed.

Now, I’m sure Selim is absolutely adorable in this verse but can he really compete with Bluebird’s illusion Edward?

Heh, so this has become an incredibly long and detailed post that hopefully explains everything there is to know about that old fangame. It was an interesting thing to try out for sure. I’m not sure I’d actually recommend trying it out as it’s a bit slow and I’ve already explained pretty much all the interesting things about it.

If anyone has any further questions, I’d be happy to try and answer if I can though.

I personally love the headcanon that Hohenheim is in fact Father and I think I would have preferred it if the manga had actually gone that route. If only for the creepy fatherliness he might exhibit towards Edward. The odd love twisted with being evil and wanting to destroy the world would have been amazing in my opinion. Just the sample this game gave me was great.

#FMA #fma bluebird's illusion #bluebird's illusion #sorry for such a long post #ed is so cute in this #i knew the endings before playing #but the fatherly wrath completely blindsided me #the fighting in this game is the most tedious thing ever #fortunately you don't have to win too many #there's a few sideplots i didn't get into #all of mustang's crew have their own storylines #i like falman's the most #envy hurts ed a lot in this #the few images are pretty brutal #myposts

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