Yeah we talked about Gintama a few times already on this thread, it’s a very nonsensical comedy that won’t click with everyone.
Hmm, alright lets talk Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
The remake of Fullmetal Alchemist, which was very popular and original, Brotherhood however stayed on track with the manga. The show is one of the few anime referred to as a masterpiece, and that gets an immense amount of praise with the Western anime community (no idea how popular it is in Japan).
I watched the original, then the remake sometime last year, and really there are things I like and dislike about both series. But there were still a lot of things that I felt didn’t live up to the hype in FMAB.
To start off, the pacing for the first part of FMAB was terribly rushed, they cut so much out of it including important scenes and it got to the point where they started relying on plot convenience to save time.
For example:
When they found Dr. Marcoh in Fullmetal Brotherhood, he was literally walking past the train they happened to be on, Dr. Marcoh then refused to talk to them, and for no reason at all decided he can trust Ed and gave him the location to the notes on the philosophers stone.
While in the original they did it much better, Ed and Al were searching for rumours of philosophers stones and because Dr. Marcoh used his stone for healing, they eventually heard about him and tracked him down. Following that they saved Dr. Marcoh from the army/scar, and he goes into detail about what happened in the war and decides to tell Ed where his notes on the philosophers stone are.
FMAB unlike FMA was more plot driven than character driven, which isn’t a bad thing, but it focused a lot less on Ed and Al, that’s also something I feel the original FMA did better, as it went a lot more in depth to their relationship. The amount of characters in FMAB I found I didn’t really care about most of them, a lot of them were kind of just…there. they didn’t have an impact on the story at all. Some characters like May seemed to be there for a singular purpose, hers being Als forced love interest (she fell in love with him on sight. there was no real connection there).
The story itself seemed like a bit of a mess to me nearing the end. I don’t even know what was going on with that random zombie attack (the transmuted body army that started killing people). And the climax of FMAB seemed somewhat anticlimactic to me. After father makes plan thousands(?) of years in the making a success, he got to the point where he held the power of god and could even easily make a miniature sun in the palm of his hand, only for his plan to instantly be foiled as he loses all of his power. Yeah they apparently planned months in advance to the day, a preparation we didn’t get to see, or really get to make sense of… still didn’t sit right with me. But the actual ending of FMAB perhaps felt more complete, with a short after-story that left it on more of a happy note than the original series did, it was a nice way to end it.
I may be picking at it, but don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot more they did right that I’m just not mentioning, and I still very much enjoyed the series (in fact I rarely dislike one), one of the great ones, but still not perfect
Here’s a question about something I never really got in the series:
One of the more interesting characters in the series was the dwarf in the flask (aka. father), but what was the dwarf in the flask actually? We know he came from Hohenheim apparently, and he conveniently had the knowledge of immortality, but that’s it. The question on what he actually was, or how he came to be was left unanswered, kind of wish they went into more detail about him. Can we assume he somehow came from out the gate. as he looked like the beings from in there? Thoughts?
