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Reviewed by Park Cooper Well, in my review of FullMetal Alchemist volume 1, I saw the potential, but I was disappointed... after the Elric brothers’ (I wish they weren’t named like Michael Moorcock’s best-known character, sigh...) first adventure, the rest of volume 1 got off to a rather boring start, and I gave the volume only a B-. Well, I’m happy to officially say that things got better after that. I already returned volume 2 to the library, and I’m too lazy too look it up, but some time between volume 1 and volume 3, Jake Forbes came on board as the adapter of this series, and that certainly couldn’t have hurt things. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was the adapter on volume 2, and that I just didn’t notice right away, because right away with 2, it’s like we decided to really commit to the plot again. But, as I said, that one’s no longer right in front of me, so let’s focus on volumes 3 and 4, where that trend more or less continues. First of all, I’d like to say that I realized, at some point while reading these, that the creator is female. Well hoo-rah, I’m always up for another female writing some supernatural action-adventure. My own wife does it, but she’s generally so rare that there’s a metanarrative out there in the world that it’s not something women can do/can do well/like doing. To do an impression of the late, great actor Barry Fitzgerald, “What a dirty lie!” Women DIG action-adventure, and supernatural act/adv is even better. So I’m happy to realize that there’s another female to add to the list of evidence. Okay, having gotten that out of the way, let’s look at the plot. We repair Edward’s prosthetic arm, and get a lot of decent characterization. Except that the mechanic girl forgot to notice until later that she had one small part left over. Oops. But they don’t treat it like “oh no, he’ll be in deadly danger in a fight!”, they treat it like it’s dopey sitcom humor, which I did in fact find amusing, although just a little odd considering that sure enough, his arm breaks again in the middle of a fight in that very volume. Geez, make a phone call and warn a guy or something... Anyway, after a cute bit in which the library has burned down, but an overactive bookworm librarian with a photographic memory rewrites the important destroyed files, the Elric brothers crack the code the files were written in and discover a horrible secret—Philosopher’s Stones are made by using human sacrifices. Oops. This pretty much means that our highly moral characters will never make one—but the reader immediately understands that since the bad guys are interested in these things, our boys could always find one that’s already been made and possibly put it to a good use... Anyway, we have a not-horribly-interesting fight with two enemies, but one of them puts a terrible doubt in the mind of Alphonse, the brother who’s just a soul animating a suit of armor—What if Al isn’t really Edward’s brother, but just some sort of magical program or something that Edward conjured up and gave false memories to, to help him out in his quest? See, just when you’re like “yeah yeah, fight fight, whatever,” FullMetal Alchemist will pull this Ghost In The Shell type stuff on you. Finally, over in volume 4, the fight ends, we have some more decent characterization, we call the mechanic girl to come fix the arm again (and she’s really happy they haven’t figured out she forgot to add that small part last time)... and we kill a supporting character that you REALLY never thought we wouldn’t kill, and have a very moving funeral and everything. If I had seen that the character was being set up to be killed, I would have groaned, but I never saw it coming, I really thought they’d never do it. In a world where the guy with the scar on his forehead will blow stuff up just as soon as look at you, this death was really turned into a somber big deal, reminding the reader: “Hello, creator Hiromu Arakawa here... just reminding you that this isn’t just wild adventure, I’m trying to say something about the real world here, with the warfare and the terrorism and the deaths and the shady government cover-ups and the moral issues, got it?” But weaving it all into the plot, as the Scar guy finds a little outpost of his lost people that were almost wiped out in the last uprising... his sort of brownish-skinned people. Uh-huh. Yeah, we hear you loud and clear, Ms. Arakawa. There’s a reason FMA seems to take place in deserts and southwestern boomtowns with trains and stuff like that instead of bamboo groves and temples, after all... I’ve already got the next couple of volumes of FMA (gahh, I could just call it FullMetal if it wasn’t for Full Metal Panic, but instead, it’s all or practically-nothing, since every time Barb says “FullMetal” and stops, my brain asks “Full Metal Panic? Where, where? Regular or Fumoffu?”) on order from the library. I might be too optimistic, but this time I’m giving a grade of A-, for Most Improved. Comment on this review of FullMetal Alchemist v3-4 on the Manga Life Forums. |
6 October 2009
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