Imagine that you're a dog and it's dinner time. You run up to the kitchen only to find your bowl completely empty. You look up at your owner thinking "what's the deal here?". Turns out your owner decided to play a little game. You'll receive one single nugget for every 5 minutes you sit like a good boy. You end up finishing your meal in 7 hours.
That's how watching FMA 2003 felt. For every piece of relevant or exciting content, you had to sit through an unbearably useless 15 minutes. It's only towards the last 10 episodes of the show that everything starts flowing at a decent pace.
Normally, when a show has slower pacing, it's to help with character development. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case. 50% of the episodes felt like dragged out fillers.
Story-wise,
It felt like a Bioethics class' case study for an exam, and I mean that in a positive way. As viewers, we were given alchemy in a somewhat scientific form, without straying too far and turning it into god-like powers. It was very fairly dosed and that's a great way for the show to keep the power ceiling consistent throughout the whole show. It was then easier to immerse ourself in the context, seeing that the main people suffering were humans and those pseudo-humans, which we can draw a lot of parallels from in today's world, with what we're foreseeing in artificial intelligence's future.
The story nicely touched on the elements of souls and more specifically the process of doing alchemy itself, getting a first-person view of the actual "process" that takes place when doing it (i.e. the gate). The way it touched on alchemy being "playing God", with the introduction of a specific faction, was a good way to approach it from a religious point of view (i.e. Scar's "logical loophole" for using alchemy).
There are a lot of parties are involved, which makes for a nice intersectional story. We get to see the various factions (military, humans, pseudo-humans, the main characters, etc.) fighting for the same prize, and not only that, but some factions had to rely on other factions to get their plan working accordingly. Those crossroads in the story were nice to see because it kept the story connected with everyone (although at times felt slightly convoluted with the amount of backstabs there was).
There was a ton of plot twists and shocking scenes, and they were all surprising and well thought-out. A lot of focus was also put on family drama, which can sometimes be daunting, but in this case, it integrated itself successfully in the story.
The ending was phenomenal, especially with the way it re-opens up an entire saga that could loop forever. It also doesn't need a movie sequel. Everything wrapped up so nicely at the end. You also get a little philosophical debate on a key part of the story (who's right, who's wrong). Very satisfying wrap up.
The main issue with the story was the point I touched about in the beginning of the review. Lackluster pacing. Half of the "incidents" that happen can easily be cut out of the show and wouldn't the change the story one bit. The pre-text for most of those useless scenes were "looking for answers", which was quite honestly cheap.
Character-wise, the show wasn't great at forging any character except for Edward and Scar. Most characters are extremely average, and in fact, in some cases, characters you were supposed to get attached to didn't have much of an impact. Some scenes fell short exactly because the impact wasn't great enough. The humor felt a bit repetitive and not exactly the best (Ed's height being the running joke for instance). They also used recurrent flashblacks a little too much, especially in the case of Scar. It's not terrible, just not really good.
Combat-wise, I'm glad they kept alchemy fairly equal across the board. They even added underlying scientific reasoning in the attacks/techniques some people used. The only issue was that the fights themselves weren't too exciting. They could have done much better with the animations and camera work. We never got to saw the quality of the scenes we saw in the intro's.
Overall, a very good subject that introduces very good topics and ethical dilemnas, but with an unfortunately horrible pacing that stagnates character development and and otherwise perfect plot development.
