My Love-Hate Relationship with FMAB

I have a love-hate relationship with Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood.

First of all, I’d like to say that my main mistake was going in expecting it to blow me away and be the best anime of all time, which it wasn’t. If I found it of my own accord and watched it without knowing that fact I would have enjoyed it more, but it led to me watching it with a more cynical perspective and enjoying it less. However, I have gotten over this now and can now formulate a proper opinion.

It’s good! It’s not a 10/10 or even a 9/10 for me, but it’s a solid 8/10 and I can’t see myself putting it any lower than that. The episodes where significant things happened were very good and I felt that some episodes, mainly in the second part and towards the end, lived up to all the hype and were some great anime. Episode 4 and 60 were my favourites mainly since they were shocking and dark and episode 60 reminded me of a slightly worse version of End of Evangelion, but I had my jaw dropped for the last few minutes.

Now comes the problems. First, I think that while the episodes with a lot going on or episodes that have strong emotional moments were great, lots of the other episodes fell into the “yeah it’s ok” category of 7/10, without that much interesting stuff happening, just moving the plot forwards. The main time I felt like this was during the 10 episodes that take place at Briggs. I didn’t like Sloth as a villain, I didn’t like the new characters that much, and I didn’t feel like anything big was really happening.

My next big problem was the characters. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start saying why Ed, Al, Mustang or Hawkeye aren’t good characters, in fact I think they’re very well-written and I liked them a lot. I mean the insignificant side characters that didn’t have enough time to become interesting or developed, like the two sets of chimeras they pick up along the way who I couldn’t tell apart from each other, some of the Briggs soldiers, and even Kimblee. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them, it’s just the anime didn’t make me want to like them because they were mainly insignificant and just added to the pile of names I needed to remember, so by the later stages I felt like groaning every time another new character appeared. I also didn’t find The Father that great as a villain after episode 60. He just became a dude that they had to kill who was pure evil rather than being interesting, and I found the final battle a bit underwhelming

My other problem with it that I can think of is that some fights were drawn out over several episodes and they just got tiring and I didn’t find them all that great. Examples include Armstrongs vs Sloth and the main group vs Pride.

I’d like to end on a good note though, the main emotional moments were executed very well, like episode 4, 10, the moment with the 3rd of October, and the ending. This anime was more positive than negative, even if there were parts I didn’t like (and I didn’t go into the comedy aspects because I didn’t find it that bad and everyone talks about this already). I’ve decided to try out the original FMA 2003 to see what direction they went in after they overtook the manga and just to chill with the characters again, even if Greed (my favourite) won’t be there this time around since he was introduced later on.