Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood ran from April 9, 2009 to September 25, 2011, an anime adaptation of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga. Across sixty-four episodes, brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric chase an alchemical fix to get their bodies back. This show gets called one of the best starting animes, and one of the best animes period, and that reputation holds up.
Ed and Al are teenage boys in the militarized nation of Amestris, where alchemy lets people reshape their surroundings. As kids, they learned the practice and, after their mother’s death, tried the forbidden act of human transmutation to bring her back. It backfires. Ed loses a leg, Al loses his entire body. In desperation, Ed sacrifices his right arm to bind Al’s soul to a suit of armor, keeping him from dying outright. That trauma scars both boys, an act meant as love turned into their worst mistake, and they spend years chasing a way to reverse it. Ed gets prosthetics from childhood friend Winry and enlists as a State Alchemist. Along the way they get pulled into a countrywide conspiracy that threatens their friends, their family, and eventually the whole world.
There was an earlier 2003 anime run, but the manga was unfinished when that one was made, so it diverged into its own separate story. Brotherhood follows the manga faithfully, and it is the only version I have seen.
This show is genuinely awesome. Dark fantasy adventure with compelling characters and storytelling from the opening minutes. The Elric brothers’ core problem is deceptively simple, and I do not mean that as a knock: two kids tried to bring their mom back and now have to live with the fallout. What the show builds on top of that simple premise, and how tightly it ties back into the larger plot, is genuinely masterful. One exchange stuck with me specifically. Alphonse, bound to that armor, has no body: no temperature, no need to eat, no need to sleep. He admits he needs his real body back because he cannot handle the nights, stuck fully conscious in solitude while everyone else sleeps. He is fourteen when he says this, and he lost his body at ten, meaning he has effectively spent half his life alone in the dark. Moments like that hit you in the gut and land because the cast earns your investment first. The heroes are flawed people chasing redemption or trying to help the world around them, set against villains who treat human life as raw material to grow stronger from. The Elric brothers, as kids, bring naive hope into rooms full of scarred military adults forced into atrocities against a neighboring country, and that mismatch creates a genuinely moving dynamic: broken people helping the Elrics face harsh reality while the Elrics’ hope quietly pushes them to be better themselves.
The show is dark, and death is a real possibility, which makes fights and life-threatening encounters land with actual weight. Across sixty-four episodes it digs into loss, grief, forgiveness, redemption, and faith in a genuinely satisfying way. The animation is clean and refined, holding up sixteen years later. Fights are flashy, the powers are cool. The soundtrack stands out especially: orchestral pieces that reinforce exactly what each scene is going for. “Trisha’s Lullaby” is an emotionally charged, sad track reused throughout the series across many episodes, and it never loses its weight despite that repetition. It fits this steampunk-adjacent fantasy world beautifully.
My real complaints are minor. Resolutions sometimes lean too convenient: characters get boxed into peril, and too often someone shows up right on cue to bail them out. Most of those scenes still work, but especially in the later half, I wanted the characters already present to find their own way out rather than the fix being “now this person’s here, so we escape or fight.” The cast also gets a little too big, cutting between multiple groups when I was more invested in the original core than some of the newer threads. Certain later stretches drag a touch: Ed stuck in the pocket space, or the party split during the northern snowstorm. Not poorly paced, just a bit slower than I wanted in places. Most of my issues sit in the back half, which is not worse than the front half, just slightly less resonant for me personally.
Anime as a medium still splits people. It has grown a lot more accepted over time, and plenty of people still have zero interest. If you are on the fence, this is a solid entry point. The art occasionally shifts into a deliberately goofy, simplified style for comedic gags, which I know turns some people off. The story, characters, and world are strong enough to carry through those moments, and they are brief enough to work as tension relief rather than a distraction.
I have kept this vague on purpose, because this is a show meant to be experienced blind. I knew a couple of things going in and it did not ruin anything, but going in mostly cold is the ideal way to watch it, and I recommend the same for anyone else.
Nine out of 10. Watch it if you have not. Rewatch it if you have. Peak, as the kids say.
