User:Tommy-Vercetti

There was always something about FMA that drove me to it, but it wasn't the first anime series. I thought the first 10 minutes or so was great (where it had the same style as the manga I hadn't seen yet), but then it got so insanely cliche, melodramatic, and so poorly written, I found myself throughly bored by episode 5, I believe.

In fact, I would go so far to say the original series is one of my top 5 "worst animes ever", especially due to the fact at how INSANELY overrated it is. It's so imbedded into fans' heads (they think Sloth should be Trisha for example) it's insane. I was never impressed with that series and I never knew why it was so popular. However, once someone talked me into checking out the manga, I couldn't believe it. I was like "Not only does this make sense! But it knows what it wants to be too!" And so, I couldn't get enough. So, naturally when I found out that finally a new anime would be made following the manga, I was quite eager to check it out. Overall, I thought the beginning could have been a lot better (they breezed through it way too quickly), and even when they got to new footage, suddenly, it was still abridged. At first, I was afraid that this was going to be the new trend. Sure, we'd get the manga storyline, but without any of the story meat that made the manga so enjoyable in the first place. But finally, they got it down to a decent pace and I think overall it turned out to be a damn good series. One of my favorites, but I still prefer the manga due to that it basically has everything.

Now... I can't say the same thing about its english dub, however. Such a pity that most people who will come here will have ONLY seen the dub (commonplace in anime), and how there's such a bias for the original Japanese version (by english fans) solely because of how Ed is voiced by a woman or because they don't like to read subtitles. Well, their loss, but it's still such an idiotic way of thinking. The first 25+ episodes of the english dub had some of the worst script writing and acting since the Yu Yu Hakusho dub (my absolute favorite anime that was completely butchered by its dub). FUNimation usually does such great dubbing jobs now-a-days, but they really dropped the ball here. Yu Yu Hakusho was right after their DBZ period, so it's understandable, but with the new FMA, there's no excuse. Instead of recasting the group, keeping the ones who truly fit in their characters and recasting everyone else whose characters are very different in this series, they just kept everyone from the original series they could. Big mistake, and it shows very badly.

I think that's why the japanese version was such a step up from the original series. They kept who worked, but recasted a lot of others. The original story wasn't melodramtic, hammy, and cliche, so when you keep applying the same kind of """""acting""""", it falls flat on its face.

So, if anyone really wants to see FMA how it was meant to be, either read the manga or check out Brotherhood in Japanese. If you'd like examples of the countless plot holes created by the dub itself, do a little reading here on the episode pages. There's tons of them. Have fun with it.

Anyway, that aside, for what I do here, I like to fix tiny little things on this site for consistency's sake, spellchecking, and uploading better or new pictures. Wikipedias are so bland without any images in my opinion. Of course, overloaded is too much too, but the right balance is just perfect.

I'm not really too taken with the oasis skin though; it just really squeezed the layout to a very bad situation. I hope that maybe one day wikia will realize that many other editors share my sentiments regarding it as well.