About.com Rating
This collection of four fifteen-minute short episodes and a slew of three-minute blackout skits set in the Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood universe uses the former for tangential side stories and the latter as quick laughs.
Unfortunately, most of the short episodes are underdeveloped and the skits are throwaways, which makes the collection of interest only to existing FMA:B fans.
Pros
- One good installment that is worthy enough to have been part of the original storyline.
- The episodes are all too short to do more than be amusing.
- For diehard fans of the series; casual viewers won't be as interested.
- Director: Yasuhiro Irie
- Animation Studio: BONES
- Released By: Aniplex
- Released Domestically By: FUNimation Entertainment
- Audio: English / Japanese w/English subtitles
- Age Rating: TV-14V (violence, language, thematic material)
- List Price: $24.98 (Blu-ray Disc / DVD combo)
Anime Genres:
- Fantasy
- Action/Adventure
- Drama
- Comedy
Related Titles:
A side dish of "FMA:B" side stories
With a franchise as successful as Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood has been, it’s scarcely surprising the creators of the show would develop auxiliary material to keep its fans happy. This is a natural for an ongoing series like Naruto or One Piece, where a seemingly-endless stream of side stories and theatrical films extend on the core TV show—but it goes double for a series like Brotherhood which has already concluded its run.
If you can’t continue it, expand on it from the inside.
That’s the idea behind the Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood OVA Collection, which compiles about an hour and a half of newly-animated material for the franchise. None of it takes place after the end of the series, so it’s not a postscript or sequel or anything of the sort. Rather, it’s side stories and filler, extended versions of the kinds of things that would normally have been tacked onto an episode after the credits.
Most FMA fans would be thrilled to have that much more for a favorite franchise of theirs. The bad news is this collection really doesn’t do them justice. The four short OVAs vary widely in quality: one is well worth the effort, two are decent, and the fourth is fairly forgettable. The skits are just that: lowbrow skits which are good for a laugh but don’t lend themselves to being seen more than once.
One hit doesn't an anthology make
The opener, “The Blind Alchemist”, has Ed and Al investigating a household where a blind alchemist is said to have created human life, and wonder if his power can be used to restore Al’s body. (Presumably this is early enough in the brothers’ alchemy career that they haven’t yet found such a thing repugnant.) They find instead something quite ghastly—but it’s too closely an echo of many of the same story and character beats explored in the TV series itself, and it feels like it brings up too much to be effectively explored in such a short space. “Simple People” is lightweight, but also doesn’t bite off more than it can chew: it’s about Ed and Winry, and how the former gave the latter her earrings.
“Tales of the Master / Master’s First Love Story” gives us Izumi (“I’m a housewife!”) Curtis’s origin story, which involved her spending a month in the frozen wastelands of Briggs as a way to curry favor with her mentor Gold Steiner. The idea, I guess, is that it shows us how her own philosophy of alchemy (which she then imparted to the Elric brothers) took shape, although its fundamental silliness eventually undoes it.
“Yet Another Man’s Battlefield,” the best of the bunch, could easily have been expanded into a storyline all its own within the main plotline of FMA:B. It shows us Maes Hughes and Mustang as cadets, before their war experiences, clashing over the treatment of a fellow cadet who is Ishvalan and thus the subject of prejudice. Then the story shifts to the battlefield, where they find a traitor in their midst, and there is a conclusion that packs remarkable emotional force.
Diehard fans only need apply
This last segment is, again, so good it shows up the thinness of the rest of the anthology. What's a little dismaying is how the original series director, Yasuhiro Irie, was also brought back in for this anthology. His work here is as scattershot as his work on the original series was solid and self-assured. That leads me to think so much of how FMA:B worked as well as it did was because it hewed that much closer to Hiromu Arakawa's original manga—but then there was Hero Tales, the Chinese-mythology and martial-arts-novel-inspired series she also had a hand in, and which isn't anywhere nearly on the same level as any of FMA.
A casual Alchemist fan will want to rent the disc for the sake of seeing how the stories add, however minimally, to the mythology of the series. Only diehards will need to buy it, but I wonder if even they will sense a missed opportunity or three here. The Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood film The Sacred Star of Milosmay also be flawed in its own way, but it's far better as both side story and full-fledged entertainment.
Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.
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