It's my new top #1 anime. I thought it was better than Rurouni Kenshin and Death Note, and the anime has to be extremely awesome to top those two series in my mind. I was originally planning on doing maybe just one review per week and the last one was released yesterday, but I don't really care. Haha.
Also let me say, it was freaking PAINFUL trying to fit 64 episodes into 6 pictures that represent the series. I didn't do too well, so my apologies. Also not to self: Next time when you're deleting episodes and you've still not taken any screenshots, DON'T freaking leave behind the few ending ones and the ones from the beginning! Maybe it's just that it's really, really hard to take non-spoiling interesting screenshots out of it. I don't know.
I also apologize for how small the pictures turned out, I was only thinking about the same width I've used for all the pictures so far which is 520 px, and they became so small. Sorry for that.
鋼の錬金術師: Fullmetal Alchemist
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Episodes: 64
Also known as: Fullmetal Alchemist (2009)
Aired during: April 2009 – July 2010
* This is a completely spoiler-free review. *
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. You've probably heard of Fullmetal Alchemist before, it was a manga and it got made into an anime at 2003, which for the most part, had nothing to do with the manga. It was an OK anime, just not a masterpiece. Then, years later, at 2009 came FMA: Brotherhood. Following almost exactly the plot of the manga, it's undeniably one of the best animes ever made.
I own most of the manga, 19 out of 27 books, Finnish translations however. I haven't read all of them, but after finishing Brotherhood I read some of the manga randomly, and from what I saw, the plot followed it exactly and even some of the lines were the same from word-to-word. There are some differences however, there is a list of them available here, PLEASE note that the list contains HEAVY spoilers, and if you read the whole list you WILL be spoiled unless you've seen/read the whole thing.
Now, onto the actual thing.
'Four years ago two young brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric committed a taboo in alchemy, human transmutation, in hopes of bringing their dead mother back. As a result Ed lost his left foot and Al his whole body. Desperately trying to keep his brother from disappearing completely Edward sacrificed his right arm in order to affix Alphonse's body into an empty suit of armor.
Edward gets his limbs replaced by automail and recruited to the military as a state alchemist, bearing the name Fullmetal Alchemist. Together with Alphonse they now set out to search for the legendary philosopher's stone in order to get their bodies back.'
The basic story may sound simple, and that's not really where the points come from. Where they do come from is that you can never in a million years figure out what is going to happen next, the series throws new plot twists in front of you continuously and makes you keep your jaw open. The plot overall is undeniably the best one I have ever seen in any manga or anime, topping even Death Note which I thought was pure awesomeness. The execution is perfect, the story flows on at a good pace and there's never a moment you'd feel bored because of watching it. The plot is a masterpiece by itself, it's just simply put amazing.
If I wanted to talk about it more, I'd have to tell stuff that spoils, and I was thinking of keeping this review spoiler-free. Maybe I'll do another one which has spoilers, just to show my respect for this series.
Also one more thing, the series contains quite a lot of... Humor, basically what it is here is reusing the same jokes over and over again, but it's not that bad. It disappears almost completely as the series progress, just emphasizing more on how serious the plot gets.
So... It was made in 2009. It's hard for me to compare it with something, since I've barely seen any anime made in 2009, apart from maybe Umineko. The animation is basic. The artstyle is pretty simple, but it works out well. I wouldn't say FMA Brotherhood was made to be especially artistically beautiful, it has way more emphasis on the plot. You cannot say a lot about the animation to be honest. Shortly said, it's good and pleasant to the eye, but I wouldn't call it amazing.
Opening and ending
From an series 64 episodes long you would expect maybe three openings, maybe even two only. Instead we get five, yeah, five. Are they any good? Well, some of them are. The first one, Again by Yui, is my favorite out of all them, it's great. The second one is horrible, I only listened it once. Makes me think of something out of Naruto. Third one is good, but not great. Fourth one is, once again, horrible, however not as bad as the second one. Fifth one is good, and it suits the scenes well where it plays during the anime (apart from opening). So yeah, it's a combination of good and bad songs.
The endings... Uh, I don't know. I never listened to any of them fully, ha-ha-ha, what a surprise, I know right? I was too hyped about watching the next episode. The few seconds of an ending theme play quite often at the end of the episode however, and I think those parts suit the episodes well. So, bleh.
Voice actors
It has two of my all-time favorite voice actors, Romi Park as Edward and Shinichiro Miki as Mustang. The original cast is big, with all the major characters having their own seiyuus. They suit their characters well, then again I seem to say that from just about any anime. But that's just how it goes for the most of them.
Alphonse's seiyuu is the same as Karin and Nemu from Bleach. Edward's seiyuu is, again from Bleach, the same as Hitsugaya and Nana Osaki from Nana and also Temari from Naruto. Miki (Mustang) I remember the best from Bleach also (what), as the voice of Kisuke, from Pokemon as the voice of Kojiro/James and also as the voice of Takumi from Initial D. If I talked about all of them this list would never end, so I'll just leave it to that.
Background music
It's... A combination. Once again. Most of the time it just feels like you're listening to the same tracks over and over, even though there is a total of 93 tracks (including openings and endings) or a total of just over 3 hours of music. Listening to the soundtracks, there are three of them, after watching the anime I feel like I have never heard majority of the songs. One of those series with not too memorable background music, but I'm not saying it's bad. Some of the tracks are kinda meh, but most of them are nice. The music it had suited the scenes well and was pleasurable for the ears, and those are the two main things you want from anime's BGM in any case.
Guess what, it's a combination! A really uneven combination however. The 'bad guys' are 98% people you won't like. Edward is a likeable main character, much like, let's say, for some reason D.Gray-man's Allen comes to mind. Or maybe Ichigo from Bleach. They got something in common. Alphonse isn't an unlikeable one either, but I can't really help but to think he's a bit on the annoying side.
Then there's Winry. She's an annoying bitch, bluntly said. Almost every single anime has to have an annoying woman character who has to have something to do with the main character, and here it's Winry. To name a few other ones, there's Sakura from the original Naruto (she's OK at Shippuuden), Misa from Death Note, Kagome from Inuyasha, Kaoru from Rurouni Kenshin, Orihime from Bleach... The list goes on. You can't really blame the creator from making a character like that, but the worst part is majority of watchers seem to LIKE Winry. I don't really know what the hell is wrong with you if you're one of them. Okay, rant over.
Then there's all the other characters. I really like only a few of them, Mustang, Olivier and Hohenheim. There is a big amount of characters you only see a few times. Counting from all the characters I loved and hated from this series, it was 4 loved and 14 hated. I even seemed to find some of the really minor characters, for example Shou Tucker, really unlikeable. I don't know. The characters aren't bad, that's not the thing here, what makes them hateable is their personalities and how they act. They're all well thought out and not any single one of them resembles each other.
How did I get 9.8 instead of 9.3? Because of the plot. You see all the + marks after the 10? Yeah. That's how good it is.
Overall, the 'new' Fullmetal Alchemist is a masterpiece and one of the top anime ever made to this day. I'm sure there will come along some series that will top it, but for now, it's the best one I've seen so far, out of currently 159 watched ones. Might not sound a lot maybe, but let me say, I'm picky with 5/5 star ratings, and only 10 other ones have reached it from TV series (excluding a few OVAs and movies). I will review all of them at some point.
What made this anime so great is still the plot. It's just so amazing, breathtaking. Only real complaint I have got about this series is that once you start watching it, you will have hard time stopping watching it... And still it took me about a month to finish it, and I even took a break lasting over a week (two of them actually) in the middle of series, after an episode that ended in a cliffhanger. Don't know what's up with that. Haha.
[I started and finished Futagohime in the middle of watching this!]
In any case, check it out. Seriously. Even if you're not into watching a lot of anime, check it out, and watch the whole thing. You won't regret it.
Over and out.
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