So, basically, the story is a quest of restoration. The Elric brothers lost their bodies and are looking for a way to regain those things. The journey of the Elrics takes them to various places, meeting various people, and with various plot twists and turns, ultimately leading them to the final confrontation with said Big Bad, and somehow regaining (most of) what they lost.
My one objection to the treatment of the narrative is that, much like in the original manga, it relies on these big sensational "moments", which are cool to read/watch, but ultimately take away from the verisimilitude of the work as a whole. All you end up getting are a bunch of puncuations that take away from the subtlety of the themes.
For the most part, we get a variety of interesting, and examined characters. The short-tempered but honest Edward and his more composed brother Alphonse. The ambitious and snarky Roy Mustang. His loyal subordinates. The over-the-top, larger-than-life Alex Louis Armstrong and his vicious, tough-as-nails older sister, Olivier Mira Armstrong. The affable, but wicked Greed (my favorite character). The king of trolls, Envy. The badassery-oozing-from-every-pore King Bradley. The adorable May. The butt monkey Yoki. The distant father with the weight of the world on his shoulders, Hohenheim. Some great characters.
The art and animation in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is pretty good, and what one would expect of an anime of this generation. The character designs are much closer to Hiromu Arakawa's art in Brotherhood than they were in the original series. The backgrounds and foregrounds can be quite beautiful, if oddly like watercolor paintings at times.The animation is mostly pretty good, though there are times when it noticeably isn't, and it's pretty clear certain episodes have a much higher quality animation than others.
A large part of bringing the characters alive in an animated television series or movie is the voice acting. In the manga, you just imagine the voices, but in animation, voices are provided, and ideally, these are voices that you will closely associate with the characters, so a strong cast is valuable. Fortunately, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood has an excellent cast.
The music in this series is excellent. Senju makes use of sprawling, almost pastoral, European-sounding tracks, establishing leitmotifs and conjuring up very operatic pieces for the most dramatic moments in the series.
It's not a flawless series, mind you. It seems overly drawn out at times, there are a few plot snags, some characters I don't care for, and adaptation missteps (Dublith/Greed arc, the Ishbal massacre). But, on the whole, looking at the big picture, it's absolutely more than just the sum of its parts
