Category: Full Metal Alchemist – Brotherhood

Well, that fatherly reunion surely turned out different from the first season. The Hohenheim there was like a burnt out businessman in need of retirement (but then again, who can blame him with the things he went through), but this visit was much shorter and businesslike. He just came to warn Piyoko to leave the country, and Ed happened to be there at the same time. You can see here that he regrets seeing what his son turned into, but at the same time you can see that he’s too busy with a lot of different things to be able to properly take care of his son. And I think that that’s the biggest difference between the two Full Metal Alchemists: the first series was much more focused on the past, and how past events have influenced people, and how they’re still obsessed over them. It returned in just about every major character. The major villain there was just clinging too much to the past, rather than striving for world conquest. I guess that that’s why all of the characters were toned down in terms of strength: they weren’t of the type of a cast that simply goes forward and forward. Brotherhood however is of this type, though. Even though the characters sometimes take detours, you can see that everyone is trying to move forward. Whether it is for Ed to find Al’s body back, the Humonculi to carry out whatever evil plan they are carrying out, Roy Mustang’s quest to catch the Humonculi. It’s much more straightforward. Anyway, this episode was one for the character-development, with the biggest shock being that the “creature” that Ed and Al transformed back then wasn’t actually their own mother. It was just the body of a random guy. Who knows if the guy was actually alive at one point and the two brothers took his body from somewhere. Judging on how Al’s body was taken away, I’d say that it was, and there’s some sort of grown up Al walking around somewhere in the world. If that’s true, then what about Ed’s limbs? And Izumi’s baby? (that probably was the most emotional scene this episode: when she found out that she didn’t actually kill her own child). Now, we all know why Hohenheim was involved with human transmutation in the first season, but Brotherhood still has a lot of questions lying around, the biggest being why the leader of the Humonculi looks like him. Is Hohenheim some sort of clone of this guy perhaps? Anyway, when commenting, please refrain from mentioning events that happen after this point in the manga, because the spoilers have gotten a bit out of control recently and I’ve received a couple of complaints about them. It’s fine if one person gives off a subtle hint of what’s going to happen next. It becomes annoying when the twenty people next to this person get the same idea. Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>

Oh my god… this was seriously the best episode I have ever seen from Full Metal Alchemist. No question possible. I knew that we could expect fight scenes in this episode, but that it would be this intense, and that it would push the plot into that kind of direction… And to think that nearly the entire episode lacked any sort of presence from Ed, who is supposed to be the main character here. It was this episode in which the Homunculi made their move on Roy Mustang and the others, in an attempt to spread the knowledge of them from flowing out, but they failed miserably there. Gluttony first fails when Roy finally shows himself as the leader of the investigation behind them, and Lust even gets as far as killed! But to think that the homunculi in this series are created with Philosopher’s Stones! Now there’s something that I never saw coming, especially considering how the first series had them all going desperate to find them. And to think that they all have the power to regenerate. Those Homunculi sure are on a much different level than they were in the first season, in which they were about evenly matched with Ed, of all people! And damn. That fight against lust was absolutely beautifully animated. It because an incredibly intense fight due to the amazing animation direction that made just about every frame a visual feast, especially when she was about to die. Seriously, Bones is on fire this season. I now understand why Full Metal Alchemist is considered as such a great series: both the good guys as the bad guys pull absolutely no punches and are in no single way incompetent or naive, unlike nearly every other anime you see nowadays. That really makes seeing these behemoths going up against each other a scene to behold. And yeah, Barry gets the award for most pathetic death I’ve seen in quite a while. There’s really something ironic about getting killed by your own body like that. And it’s a bloody shame that he’s gone now. As for the others, they’re probably still alive since we never saw their deaths, though I imagine them to be badly wounded. Al’s role in all of this was also pretty small, but he too made a lot of impact in this episode when he returned to Winry in the end. Speaking of which… Hohenheim finally made his entrance! I can’t wait to see what his role is in this series. Especially considering how his older clone is the leader of the Humonculi. Rating: *** (Awesome)]]>

This episode made me think of the use of weaponry in the FMA universe. There were a lot of gunfights in this episode, in which the people working under Roy Mustang were assaulted by some of the homunculi and their chimera, in which they used various guns to defend themselves. That’s pretty nice and interesting, but that does bring up the age old question: why doesn’t Ed use one? One of the major biggest flaws of Full Metal Alchemist, both the series I’ve seen so far, is of course how they try to get away with Ed’s strangely amazing fighting abilities, even though he’s only sixteen years old. And okay, it’s something that a lot of anime suffer from, so that’s easy to overlook. But I still wonder why he’s still stuck with his sword hands in a day and age in which guns seem to be common. Anyway, about the actual episode, it was as fun as usual; especially Barry shined, and I’m starting to understand why he’s such an interesting character, and how much the first season raped his personality. It was very interesting to see him finding his old body back (talk about different from the Barry from the first season), and this indeed shows that the Homunculi are somehow related to the fifth laboratory, and their current mission indeed seems to stop people from finding out about them. That still doesn’t explain their main purpose though, but I suspect that Lior holds some hints to that. I’m also glad to see Ross still alive. It had it coming of course, but it was quite unnerving to not see a single hint of her alive in the previous episode (yeah, I’m gullible; so what?). It’s also interesting that she’s going to get her own side-plot right now, as she travels to Xing in order to avoid any chances of revealing herself to the public. I’m interested to see what she can add to the story there. Also, for some reason Ross hid near a camp of Ishbal people who happened to know Winry’s parents, and were helped a great deal by them. It then turns out that they were murdered, not by the order of the Fuhrer to wipe out the Ishbals, but rather by an Ishbal himself: Scar. Or someone who looks like Scar anyway. He sortof reminded me of a Humonculus in that flashback. Rating: * (Good)]]>

So yeah, for the past few weeks I’ve read a lot of comments about people who are disappointed with some of the cuts that this version of the anime made. They’re thankfully not annoying to read (unlike a certain other show), but they are rather one sided. From what I gathered from all of the comments I read by the manga readers, the manga seems to be the most perfect thing ever, and the Brotherhood adaptation is a flawed adaptation.

From my perspective (as I haven’t read anything from the manga), Brotherhood is doing a pretty terrific job so far. The thing I especially like about it is how it toys around with your emotions, and this episode was an especially good example of this: Ross escapes from prison after being framed for the murder on Hughes. Roy then comes and kills her off, of all things! The episode ended without any clear hint about what happened to her, whether it was a clever decoy from Roy or whether he really turned into such a bastard that he’d actually kill her for Hughes. That scene in which he sits in his office… I didn’t know whether I should laugh, mourn Ross, feel sorry for Roy’s co-workers or get angry at Roy for what he did, and there were a lot more scenes with similar effects, in which so many different emotions rush through at the same time. Did the manga have the same effect?

So yeah, I pretty much loved this episode. Barry indeed was awesome in the way he bust Ross out of prison. The whole escape scene in fact was awesome, in the way that Lin tagged along, and when they ran into Ed and Al, so many things happened at the same time. The scene later, with Ross’s death only made things better, when this series kept reminding Ed how helpless he is in protecting the lives of others. This was also the first time that I saw Armstrong seriously angry… and that made a lot of impact as well.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

A very powerful episode. I’m glad to see that the creators aren’t rushing things, and if they are then I sure as heck am not noticing anything yet. This episode was mostly about Ed, Al and Winry arriving back in Central City and finding out that Hughes died. It was well built up and made for a number of very gripping scenes, not just when the two of them found out about the death, but also when they apologized to Hughes wife for getting her involved, and the aftermath in which all three of them had their own ways of distracting themselves.

As for the Xing people, they didn’t really play a big role in this episode. May Chang didn’t appear at all, and Ling basically spent the episode missing and dehydrated, apparently. The rest of this episode pushed the Homunculus plot further. You can see Envy still spying around in different disguises and when he finds out which people are investigating the cause of Hughes’ death he sends a Lust in disguise to go after them, and she introduces herself as Jean Havoc’s new date. This could go horribly wrong for either of the parties: either Lust succeeds and continues the Homunculus’ killing spree, or she gets discovered and Ed and Al finally get themselves a valuable link to who the Homunculi are.

On top of that, I wonder why Lieutenant Ross had to be arrested, of all people. I didn’t quite pick up whether the Homunculi were behind that, or whether there’s another reason for her arrest, but it’s definitely an interesting plot twist. Especially after she basically went against Mustang who wanted to keep Hughes’ death a bit more secret.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

And so, we’ve finally moved on to the second part and the point at which the two FMA-series have turned completely different. At this point in the original series, the creators were busy to turn Lust and Scar into nice characters. Brotherhood instead makes the setting a whole lot bigger by introducing a Chinese-inspired country that lies next to Amestris, which is apparently what the country that Ed and Al live in is called. It also shocked me how small their country actually is, especially because there are several other huge countries that surround it, including a huge country called Drachma (as in… the Greek currency?).

Anyway, this episode introduces a bunch of new characters from ChinaXing: Scar ends up with a young girl who can heal people and her miniature panda, while Ed runs into one of the country’s many princes along with two of his bodyguards, who are searching for the Philosopher’s Stone as well. This episode was mostly filled with their introduction, and a fight scene between those bodyguards and Ed and Al (which happen to be an old guy and a teenaged girl by the way… not exactly the most logical choice for bodyguards for a prince, are they?). It was a pretty fun episode, but nothing special.

This episode also had a new OP and ED, though both of them aren’t really my tastes. I’m not really a fan of J-pop and J-rock, and these two songs didn’t make it any different. For me, they didn’t really set themselves apart from all of the other OPs and EDs out there.

Rating: (Enjoyable)
Introduction episode for the characters from Xing. Finally this show is 100% different from the original series!

And this is the point where Brotherhood becomes completely different from the original series. There were a few similarities here and there, like Greed’s henchmen getting mercilessly slaughtered and King Bradley having a son, but the differences by far outweighed the similarities here. To start with, it’s Bradley of all people who goes after Greed and brings him in. He’s definitely shown to be much more than the nice grandpa that the first series turned him into.

And ZOMG, instead of being Pride, he’s Wrath! The first series really scrambled around with the definition of homunculus, didn’t they? Sloth also turned out to be just about the complete opposite of the Sloth in the first series. And really, it does make much more sense this way. I always wondered why Ed and Al’s mother, of all possible people, would be called Sloth. That just leaves the question of where Pride went, seeing as the other homunculi never mentioned him (or her), while they did mention the absent Sloth. Also, why did their master this time look like a grown up version of Hohenheim? Did he suddenly age fifty years since he saw Ed and Al for the last time or something?

The thing that I’m most curious about right now is how different the homunculi actually are, especially when they start developing. Quite a few of them actually devolved in the original series: Lust became sympathetic, Gluttony became crazy, Pride became much less careful, Envy became obsessed with getting revenge on Hohenheim and Wrath… he just became more and more emo as the series went on, it seems (at least, if my memory isn’t mistaken, which it has been for quite a few times with this series…). I really wonder what kind of path the original manga went into in terms of their development.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Excellent fight and finally we get to the point where the two stories completely diverge

Wait, what? Was it just me, or did we see the evil officer from the mining arc right next to Scar in this episode? I mean, I’m trying to watch both series as different stories, but it’s really making this difficult when this show references events that only happened in the original series…

Thankfully, that was just about the only thing I didn’t like of this episode. I’m glad to see that Greed finally got his introduction, because his story is one that I really liked in the original series. He already starts off as a quirkish character, and so far I feel that Brotherhood did him justice. I was also surprised that his henchmen still are a bunch of Chimera. That means that someone other than Shou Tucker has been creating them.

There were also lots of differences this episode when compared to the original series. My memory is a bit too fuzzy to list all of the differences exactly, but it seems that Izumi is going to play a much bigger role here. It also seems to be the goal of Greed and his henchmen to become like Al: away from all those nasty side-effects that the human body has. Ed also threw a major tantrum when he finds this out, and this part turns out to be quite a bit deeper than what happened in the original series, which was just about the homunculi wanting to become human. Here, Greed and the others are longing for something they hardly know anything of, and something that Ed is desperate to get rid of. This time, it’s Greed who feels uncomfortable with the way he is, rather than Lust.

I also love how the comedy in this series just appears from out of nowhere, especially this episode did this really well. The creators really have managed to integrate it seamlessly with the rest of the series, rather than having clear-cut parts that are funny and other parts that are serious.
Rating: * (Good)
Solid episode; Greed was especially nice.

I’m noticing something pretty weird with this series. Scenes that were nearly the same as in the first season suddenly turn out to have much more impact when compared to when I watched them for the first time. I should be getting bored right now, for having to rewatch the same thing all over again, and yet I’m not…

So yeah, this episode tells the Izumi arc. It’s pretty similar to the original series one, with again some notable differences: Ed and Al never went back to the island they were dropped off at (I’m not really sure why they wanted to go back there so badly… probably nostalgia), and so they never met Wrath. We also learn that in Brotherhood, Ed hates his father even more than he did in the original series, and Hohenheim in his turn looked nothing like the caring yet stupid father who simply was too long away from home for some reason.

But the scene that hit me the most was where Izumi discovered that Ed and Al had tried to revive their mother, and the way she related their hardships to her own loss of her dead-born child. She didn’t bash them into the ground, like I remember her doing in the original series, but instead she immediately recognized that she should have told the two of them about how one should never attempt to revive the dead.

It’s interesting how the homunculi have played such a small role so far. At this point in the original series, we had Wrath wreaking havoc, there was Greed (who also didn’t show up yet), and they were much more involved with the storyline. Here, all they did was preventing people from getting too close to the philosopher’s stone. At the same time I’m also wondering whether Izumi’s teacher still is the same person, and whether she still also is the one behind the homunculi like she was in the first series (if you’ve read the manga, please don’t spoil, because I’d like to find that one out through watching the series ;)).

Rating: ** (Excellent)
Izumi’s proper introduction, and despite the lack of action a great addition to this series.

Well, so this episode shows the Rush Valley arc. It was mostly the same as in the original series, but there were some notable differences:
1) The comedy was better and funnier as usual
2) Winry stays in Rush Valley to learn more (Yay!)
3) A completely random birth scene.

I mean seriously, what was up with that birth scene? I’m not sure whether or not this was in the manga, but it felt like the creators were like “hmm, this boring, we need some more drama – How about a birth scene? Okay!” If it was in the manga, then this is one thing that the original series did better: if you’re going to show a birth scene, it’s indeed much more meaningful to show the birth of Hughes’ daughter, rather than the birth of the daughter of some urelated side-characters.

Anyway, this episode really showed that the creators have slowed down the pacing significantly. Most of this episode didn’t have that much to do with the plot, though thankfully it lacked the stupidity that made the fillers of the original series so obnoxious. This episode again had lots of comedy, and it was pretty much like the rest of the series: it usually is really funny and there were some hilarious moments, but Ed yells too much. His voice actor simply isn’t funny when he starts yelling. The scene I liked the most though was that scene from Paninya’s childhood. There was a strange kind of irony in the way how lightly the creators treated such a young child who lost her legs, being picked up by Dominic who would end up saving her life, and yet it felt somewhat natural.

The next episode should show the real introduction of Izumi, and I suspect that at that point the show is going to be different from the original series again, since I’m assuming that Wrath is going to be completely different from the original series.

Oh, and on a side-note: I’m glad that this show decided to recreate its own soundtrack, because it really sounds much better and less generic than the soundtrack of the original series (not that that was bad, of course, but it didn’t really stand out either).

Rating: * (Good)
Not the most eventful yet a very entertaining episode.