Story: 10/10 The story line for FMAB is phenominal in my opinion. I have never watched the original series but this series closely follows the manga unlike it's predecessor. As a person who often falls asleep when watching TV, even with shows I'm interested in, this one kept me awake and completely enthralled. I never felt bored during an episode. Each one is important for the overall plot. Quite oftten I find beginnings of anime to be hard to get into and they start off slow. FMAB was not like that. I was hooked right away after one episode. The way the story is told makes you want to find out what's going to happen next. It's hard for me to properly say exactly how the story is amazing, it just it.
Art/Animation: 9/10 Overall the animation is also spot on. It can be simple yet also have major detail where it's needed. The animators didn't cut corners with this show. It was solid job well done.
Sound/Music: 8/10 This is score slightly lower than the rest only because I wasn'y totally crazy with some of the opening themes. But the music in the show was fantastic. It brought emotion to parts that otherwise wouldn't be as exciting. For example, towards the end, someone is slowly walking towards a door and because the viewer knows what's on the other side of the door, the music brings all that much more emotion to the situation.
Characters: 10/10 One of the very best parts about FMAB for me was the characters for several reasons. One would be that there was no single character that didn't serve some sort of purpose. Side characters were used brilliantly and conncected the story together in ways that just worked so well. Even people that you thought were a once and done single episode character, would come back later in the series and be super important. The other reason the characters were so brilliant was because they were just well written. There wasn't one character I didn't like. Of course the villians weren't always likeable as people but they were just great villains. For a majority of the story you could easily hate them but somehow get attatched to them And even when SPOILER some of them die I felt myself feeling sorry for them even though they had been bad the entire time. And as for the good characters, there was something I liked about all of them and I just loved how they all worked together even when they sometimes didn't like each other. It was just a wonderful cast of characters.
Overall enjoyment: 10/10 There really isn't anything else to say other than that I strongly recommend you try this series. If you aren't familiar with the FMA universe this is a good place to start. While I haven't seen the original series, I've heard from various other people that this is much better than the orginal series. If you have seen the original series you'd probably want to try this as well because it can only get better. As far as dub vs sub I watched the dub so I really can't say anything about the subbed version. But I usually am someone who watches subbed and I usually can't stand dubs. But this one was fantastic and Funimation did a great job. So if you feel in the mood for a dub it's worthwhile. And if you like to stick with subs, then I'm sure that's going to be great as well.
