This is a very good show, but it was still disappointing because I started the show thinking it would be a masterpiece, seeing as it is ranked #1 in MAL and so highly praised by so many people. Here is all the places I thought the anime felt off:
SPOILER ALERT
- I don't understand why it started from a random point in the timeline with episode 1 and then episode 2 onwards it starts it for real. Its a bit weird.
- Episode 10 : Hughes was starting to put the pieces together, so Lust was sent to assassinate him. But she failed to do so in the first try and Hughes manages to escape her. But after managing to leave the room what does he do? You would expect him to go to somewhere populated in the office or maybe call out for help. But no, he does the opposite of that actually. He wanted to make a phone call to Mustang and inform him about the recent developments. He could have done that call from the office, but for some mysterious reason he thought it was better to leave the office and go to a phone booth in the middle of nowhere.
One way to explain this could be that he thought that many in the military were traitors so staying in the office will be worse. But this is not true since he said that he should inform Bradley about the recent developments before. Which means he did not know that all of the higher officials were corrupted yet.
Another explanation could be that since he had planted a knife right in the head of Lust he thought he was dead and thus did not call out help. But that is still not good enough explanation of why he had to leave the office as there were telephones in there as well. Not like there were no telephones nearby and he HAD to leave the office.
So this was a big weakness of the plot in my opinion
- Episode 17, there was no reason for Barry to free Ling, just because he was a foreigner.
- Throughout the series Ling and also May Chang seek immortality. It says that somehow that will help their clan, help them become rulers etc etc. But there was no clarification on this matter till the end. It makes no sense to me why both of them were strangely searching for immortality.
- We know that Bradley became the king and manipulated all the higher officials of the military. But how did Bradley infiltrate the military in the first place. How did he manage to become the king? There is no explanation to that in the show
- Why did Van Hoenhan have to leave his kids and go away. I find no good explanation for this throughout the series. It is evident that he cared for his family and kids plenty. Yet for some reason he left. It said in the anime that he conversed with all the souls inside him and sorted them. But that has nothing to do with leaving home.
- Episode 46: Winry asks why Elric doesn't go see Al at the station, and the reason given was that he was a fugitive so he does not want to go. I don't think there is any connection between being a fugitive and not going to meet his brother after such a long time.
- Episode 51: Al came up with a brilliant plan of trapping Pride in darkness to remove him until the end of the fight. It happened successfully too. After getting trapped Pride kept hitting Al's head for the whole night. He was signaling his location, but Al was unaware of it. Now I can understand that he did not know that Pride was signaling his location, but still, creating that annoying noise throughout the night, at least he could have not let him make that annoying sound. In the morning when he was asked why he allowed him to make that sound continuously, his reply was that Selim was a little kid so he was just playing. When he knew full well that Selim was no kid.
- The show always kept saying "Human transmutation is a taboo, for what could be the value of a human being". And finally guess what was used as equivalent exchange to bring Al back to life. It was that Elric could never use alchemy again. Seriously, that's all it takes to do human transmutation. Something that lost Elric 2 of his limbs and Al his whole body and still was not equivalent to bring their mother back to life, it took only the sacrifice of never to use alchemy again to do the same thing at the end of the show. This really made me hate the ending.
You could say that unlike their mother Al was not dead, but trapped inside that weird dimension of truth. The price was only to take him back to the human realm. Yea, that's an explanation, but I still don't think that it is satisfying enough.
