Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) from Aniplex Japan (Oct. 29, 2014)

[Shingster]

Originally Posted by Lacenaire

I'm probably in the minority here, but I prefer the original to Brotherhood. For me, the original just has a tighter story mainly focused on the two brothers, which I feel worked very well for an anime series. I felt Brotherhood just had too many characters and too many plotlines to cover. It just felt very chaotic to me.

That's because they took a 26vol Manga serial and crammed it into 63-64eps (forget the number now!) which is an insanely low amount of episodes for that much manga material (63eps of anime usually translate to about 12-15vols of manga for a standard Shounen action manga). It's great that they took the time to adapt the manga for the fans given that the original anime series was such a huge success in Japan and abroad (in fact I think it was even more popular in Japan than the manga and subsequently brotherhood itself!) but it really does grate that they chose to half-arse the show by not giving it the room to breathe. Everything is at breakneck pace in Brotherhood and that does get tiresome.