There’s extra anime being made now than at any point in the medium’s history. Every season brings a nonstop flood of new shows vying to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the canon heavyweights—from the mecha deconstruction of Neon Genesis Evangelion and the old-school cool Cowboy Bebop to the fashionable blockbuster that was Attack on Titan. However no present has confirmed to have arms lengthy sufficient to field with God—and that God, for me, is Fullmetal Alchemist.
Each time a brand new collection crops up, firing on all cylinders, I discover myself asking—nearly involuntarily—whether or not it’s higher than Hiromu Arakawa’s magnum opus. The reply is all the time no. Merely put, Fullmetal Alchemist didn’t simply increase the bar; it rewired my mind chemistry for what anime will be.
In the a long time since its finale, it’s develop into my customary‑bearer of greatness, the rubric in opposition to which each subsequent anime is measured. And to this present day, no anime has ever dominated fairly as arduous or as utterly because it did. The chasm between it and different exhibits solely grows extra obvious each time I revisit it.
Fullmetal Alchemist tells the story of Edward and Alphonse Elric—two brothers who, on October 3, 1911, paid the final worth for meddling with alchemy, the world’s closest factor to magic, in a determined try to carry their mom again from the useless. The brutal penalties of their naivety are the lack of Ed’s proper arm and leg and Alphone’s whole physique. Outfitted with automail prosthetics and a full swimsuit of armor, respectively, the brothers rove out seeking the Thinker’s stone—a long-coveted alchemical artifact rumored to have the energy to restore what they’ve misplaced.
Alongside the method, the Elrics achieve allies amongst state alchemists, conflict with the literal embodiments of the seven lethal sins, and confront ethical grey areas in opposition to the stark backdrop of a world ceaselessly warped by the horrific worth of energy.
Calling Fullmetal Alchemist the best anime of all time is about as chilly an debatable take as you may get. Its GOAT standing is so broadly accepted {that a} fast scroll by means of MyAnimeList all however solidifies it as a everlasting fixture in the pantheon of the most beloved anime ever made. If not at the apex, it’s a minimum of in the prime 5 in the a long time since its premiere. It’s the type of collection that seasoned followers instinctively place on the shortlist of gateway suggestions in the identical breath as Loss of life Word as a result of it’s a well-rounded showcase of the whole lot the medium has to supply after which some.
A whole lot of FMA‘s status owes quite a bit to the excellent artistry of Studio Bones and Akira Senju’s divine orchestral score, certain, however the remainder of it comes from the story itself. FMA is unflinchingly political, morally tangled, and deeply human in ways in which most shonen might by no means dare to be. What’s extra, Arakawa’s absurdly resonant storytelling extends far past the Elric brothers, touching each nook of its ensemble, “good or unhealthy,” in ways in which blur the traces nearly instantly.
Guilt and absolution is likely to be the largest ideas in FMA‘s thematic phrase map. And rightly so, they reverberate by means of the whole ensemble. Each variations of FMA—however particularly its extra manga-accurate remake, Brotherhood—serve up that ethical complexity with out pretension and dense world-building with out drowning viewers in lore soup. You may see the bones (fairly actually) that set the Elrics on their journey to proper the wrongs of their wide-eyed hubris. Their journey, finally, is not to seize a brand new degree of energy as we’ve develop into accustomed to in shonen however to give up it.
Alongside the method, FMA builds a story scaffolding round the brothers’ odyssey that refuses to flinch from its politics. It presents a forged of so‑known as heroes wrestling with the reality that, beneath all the medals and the mythmaking titles, they’re conflict criminals residing each waking second haunted by the occasions that made them so. Key amongst them are Colonel Roy Mustang and Normal Riza Hawkeye, a duo whose austere obedience enabled genocidal atrocities, giving rise to the “villain” they insist on calling Scar—a survivor of their crimes in the Ishval Civil War.
Deep of their souls, they know that whereas they’re meant to thwart his terrorist acts, his vengeance is justified as a result of he is the residing consequence of their sins. And nonetheless, they push ahead, attempting to safeguard a world they helped break. The present lets that contradiction sit closely on their shoulders for all 64 episodes, by no means providing them—or us—a simple method out of the messiness of their street to redemption.
And but, for all its heaviness and Lovecraftian horror, FMA is additionally goofy as hell. It’s an anime that’s unafraid to take pleasure in slice-of-life-tinged wanderlust, found-family softness, and the outright clownery of its world in an equal trade of tonal mastery. It additionally doesn’t harm that one in every of its many contributions to the anime zeitgeist is its feminine forged. Drawn with Arakawa’s signature “va-va-voom” sensibilities, her heroines are the gold customary: competent, difficult, emotionally layered characters who are allowed to be humorous, livid, tender, and terrifying suddenly. Most exhibits are lucky to have one woman written this well; FMA has a whole roster of them.
What makes FMA so excellent is its belief in you to sit with the weight of it, interrogating heady ideas like grief, sacrifice, state violence, the price of ambition, and the ethics of energy with a readability sharper than most status dramas. What’s extra, it stands the take a look at of time as a uncommon shonen collection that grows up with you with out ever speaking down to you. And in contrast to so many collection that include the promise of “getting good after X episodes,” Brotherhood is the picturesque horse-on-fire meme—good from the first body to the final, rivaled solely by its authentic anime collection’ opening stretch, which handles its first big WTF moment with far larger poignancy.
FMA‘s touchstones echo in every single place I look: I see its earnest name to motion in Witch Hat Atelier; its mix of the grotesque and the divine in Delicious in Dungeon; its unflinching critique of cults of character in Attack on Titan; its quiet awe for the mundane in Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End; and its brutal street to absolution in Vinland Saga. It’s additionally why I’m downright giddy watching Studio Bones and Arakawa spin the block with Daemons of the Shadow Realm, which is already displaying early glimmers of the hallmarks that made FMA the undisputed GOAT.
Many years later, FMA endures as an anime I can’t assist however measure the whole lot else in opposition to, as a result of nothing else has ever fairly reached its degree, as a result of it is the peak.
You may stream the anime on Crunchyroll, Netflix, and Hulu.
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