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Let me preface this by saying that season 1 of Link Click was one of the most enjoyable original "anime" (I know it's a donghua but it's my first and so far only one besides Scissor's Seven) that I'd seen in a long time. It instantly made it to the top five of my personal favorite time travel stories, just behind the legendary Steins;Gate. I loved the framing device of using photos to jump into the past, I loved that the main characters weren't the main focus for the majority of the show but still likable and intriguing enough to care about, and that the ... episodic stories told were all equally compelling and heart-felt, and I loved loved loved how all the plot threads came together in the end to culminate in a truly intense final arc that brought us even closer to the main characters personally, rounding out with a jaw-dropping cliffhanger while leaving so many questions open for another season to answer.
I ain't gonna lie, my expectations for this second season have just been building and building in the two-year wait (helped along by all the promotional material released, and promises of what to expect from the creators), until they reached admittedly unfairly high levels.

So it's with a heavy heart that I have to call this second season, in a word, a DISAPPOINTMENT. It wasn't terrible, but it definitely did not live up to the hype built by the first season (and the show's promotional team) at all.

With the way the first season ended, it was clear season 2 could not continue in the same episodic format. I expected this and in fact anticipated it, as I was eager to learn more about the main leads, Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang themselves. Unfortunately, far from just being different to the first season (and not in the right ways), this second season doesn't even feel like the same show. There are glimpses of what it used to be in the first few episodes, when the titular time agents actually do some time travelling, but the majority of the rest of the show is taken up with the things happening in the present time, which isn't a whole lot. I'm sure anyone who enjoyed season 1 didn't like it for being an action crime drama (because it wasn't!), and yet this season seemed to be trying so hard to transform itself into that... and ultimately failing. Look, the fight animations were cool, but they're essentially just filler scenes and they took up WAY too much screen time in some episodes. What's fun about watching police officers beat up a bunch of goons for FOUR AND A HALF MINUTES when the actual main characters are in danger somewhere else?

It wasn't only fights that ate up a lot of time that could've been dedicated to actual character exploration and plot development; from episode 6 onward, SO much of this show is just backtracking and redoing scenes over and over again for the sake of "revealing" things they could've shown the first time around. I swear the plot took a complete standstill for THREE WHOLE EPISODES while we backtracked and flashbacked our way through plot points we'd already seen or inferred. It really gave off this vibe of the show's writers wanting to stall as much as possible before moving forward with anything really TANGIBLE in terms of plot progression, because they didn't actually know where it was they wanted to go with this story. And it IS just one story here, unlike the first season. While that would have been fine, the fact is, this just wasn't a very INTERESTING story. The antagonist from the end of season 1 turns out to be pretty lame and too cartoonishly over-the-top in his mannerisms (complete with maniacal laughter that also goes on for way longer than it should...) to take seriously, and the other characters introduced aren't much better. I couldn't give a flip about Qian Jin because his motivation and backstory is so uncompelling and unsympathetic - the dude is just a douchebag and I only wanted him taken out.

And I haven't even talked about the over-abundance of fake outs and cliffhangers. This is a problem that rears its ugly head right from the first episode. Given that anyone who might be watching this season now won't have to wait for it, I don't feel any qualms about spoiling something that happens in that first episode. Do you remember how the first season ended? That big cliffhanger that left those of us who had to wait two years for this season on the edge of our seats, while each teaser and trailer that came out in the meantime made us believe that a certain character was going to die? Boy did that create a lot of expectations for what this season would be about. Well, halfway through the first episode of season 2, they reveal that... that character is totally fine. Not dead, not even in danger of dying. They play it off like a joke and move on.

That first episode basically represents how the show handles all its cliffhangers (and there's one for each episode!) for its entire run. They make you think something is going to happen, then bail on it immediately. Oh no, a character who's hiding is about to get caught? Next episode: Sike! No he doesn't! Oh no, a character is about to change something in the past that wasn't supposed to happen? Next episode: Nah, he doesn't. Oh no, some characters just got blown up! Did they survive?? Next episode: Yeah they're fine, they didn't even get a scratch. Literally every ending for every episode was done in a way just to string its viewers along to make sure they tune in next week, without actually doing anything major in the story. Maybe this will be less annoying to people who binge-watch this season all the way through, but for us weekly watchers, it was really aggravating waiting a whole week to see what consequences would occur, only to be shown that there weren't any.

Honestly, about the only things I can credit this season with that make it enjoyable are the FEW moments we get between the three main leads (and I think I can count those moments on one hand), the opening theme which is even better than the first season's and almost seems to tell a better version of this season's story, and the very last scene of the last episode which finally reveals something actually worth caring about.

And of course, sucker that I am, I am still looking forward to another season because of that reveal.

Because overall, this season was really just a transitional part of the story, the bridge that will (hopefully) lead to all the answers we originally wanted. And it really shows; it was clunky and not very well paced or prepared, and the plot never really goes anywhere, but I never missed an episode and it was fun to laugh at even as I was frustrated by it at times. And by the time season 3 rolls around, if the writers actually do it right this time, it won't have harmed the story much in the long run. (The only thing that could do THAT for me is if they actually make the two male leads a couple - please don't.)

I'm just gonna answer the two most burning questions a new-comer to this anime might have first:

1. No, it's not gay. There's no hint of a romance between the two "daddies", they just live together. There aren't even any cringe gay-baiting moments or jokes, and no character in the show automatically assumes they are in a relationship when they see them with a little girl who calls them both "papa".

2. No, this is not like Spy X Family. At least not exactly. Whether or not it was intentionally released so soon after Spy X Family shook the anime community with its TV debut in order ... to ride its coattails, don't go into this expecting the same thing. I would liken this show more to something like Bunny Drop or Sweetness and Lightning, in that it leans a lot more into the child-rearing aspect of the story than the assassin/spy gimmick.

With that said, to me this turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable one to watch this season (which is saying something when I've also had Trigun Stampede, Tomo-chan Is a Girl, and the remainder of Blue Lock and To Your Eternity to look forward to). I honestly just opened the first episode out of idle curiosity, and nearly gave it up a couple minutes in because I was already bored with the car chase that was happening. That first episode, and maybe just one or two others since then, is really the most that you'll get from the assassin's side of the concept though - the majority of the rest of the show is just about, well, the two male leads being fathers to this little girl. Being a sucker for male adult characters becoming parental figures to children, a la Three Men and a Baby, I personally have no complaints about entire episodes being dedicated to the assassin dads trying to find a daycare, cheering at a sports festival, or worriedly monitoring a school trip from afar. In fact, I feel like this show has kind of filled the void that Spy X Family so conspicuously left even while it was airing (given that, while I wouldn't say he doesn't care about Anya, Loid hardly ever had some real fluffy dad moments withher). Sometimes that's all you really need from an anime to enjoy it; genuinely sweet fluff in everyday moments.

That's not to say it was all great from the get-go; I will agree with a few other reviewers' sentiments that Miri was a little annoying in the beginning. I don't agree that she's an annoying character because she's "useless" though; there's no reason to expect this perfectly ordinary child to have to be useful on missions, and aside from one instance where she follows them on her own, Rei and Kazuki don't even take her with them on jobs (cause again, unlike Spy X Family, that's not what this show is about). Nah, my personal beef with Miri was that she was wayyyy too obnoxiously happy in the first few episodes, which made her feel less believable (even if a kid has never seen a gun before and doesn't know what it does, how was she not freaked out by all the loud noise and screaming and running people?).
She gets better as the show goes on though. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that the focus starts to shift a bit away from her to Kazuki and Rei's point of view. I think whether you like them as characters will determine whether you'll stick with this show or not. Rei is the typical gloomy-faced shut-in, Kazuki is the more emotional "mom" of the pair, and both have dark pasts that they're trying to forget. Neither are an archetype I particularly dislike, and they play off each other and Miri pretty well. They're not exaggeratedly dense or laser-focused as Yor and Loid are, they're just two pretty decent guys involved in some shady business. Both have their own ways of interacting with Miri, and both change for the better in small ways because of it.

This show is just a good time. It's not played for over-the-top gags, nor is it too serious, it's just wholesome family fluff. There might be some more heavy stuff coming in the last few episodes, but I think I've seen enough to trust that the overall tone of the show won't change too drastically. Like I said, give it a watch if you're looking for something more like Bunny Drop. Look somewhere else if you want the comedy and shounen action of Spy X Family.

You ever read a little novel called 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King? (Yes, THE Stephen King). Well if you have then all you'd need to know about Shiki is that it is basically the anime version of 'Salem's Lot, and knowing that, you'd come to the conclusion that it is *pretty freaking good* (unless of course you disliked 'Salem's Lot...)

For those of you who haven't read it, well, then allow me to draw up the parallels:

Story (9/10)
-We are introduced to a village/small town
-We are introduced to various residents of said village/small town
-New arrivals move in to the village/small town
-Shortly after there are mysterious deaths and ... disappearances
-A few of the characters we are introduced to, including some kids, a doctor, and a monk/priest, start piecing together that these deaths might be the cause of the new arrivals who might actually be vampires (with their own familiar/werewolf servant)
-People continue to die as our main characters fumble around in their own separate attempts to take care of things
-And I might have to stop here or else risk spoiling the ending for both this anime and a really good book. Just know that both endings are pretty similar as well.


As for the differences though, I'd say it's in the ways that Shiki differs to 'Salem's Lot that made it really good, and that being the vampires themselves; while in King's novel the people turned into vampires become mindless, soulless drones you don't feel bad about killing, the vampires in Shiki retain their personalities and feelings. This makes it so that, before you know it, half-way through the anime you find yourself flip-flopping over whose side you're on. You sympathize with the vampires, or shiki, and feel bad about what's happened to them (especially knowing who they used to be), but at the same time know that they have done things that are unforgivable and cannot be allowed to live.

This element doesn't really come into play until well into the anime though. I have a hard time judging seeing as how I'd marathoned all 22 episodes (plus two extra episodes) with my friend in a single day, but the truth is that the beginning starts out pretty slow. I feel like it would have taken me awhile to slog through the first ten episodes or so had I been watching it alone, not because they were uninteresting - far from it, I found myself able to continue each episode solely out of curiosity for the mystery surrounding the shiki - but because of how many characters we had to be introduced to and how we had to see each of them unravel the mystery. Furthermore because the concept of vampires is familiar to us, after awhile it becomes more a matter of just waiting agonizingly for the human characters to catch up and finally get a step ahead, and confront the shiki head on.

Also, going into the anime I was expecting to be chilled to the bone, particularly since my friend told me she'd held off watching it before because she didn't want to do so alone. Aside from body horror though this anime didn't scare me in the slightest - I'm not even entirely sure if it was supposed to. Regardless, it's pretty relaxed in the first half, and even after things start to get more bloody it isn't anything an average person couldn't handle, unless blood and bodily harm makes you squeamish.
As far as the ending goes, I think it'll be relative to you whether it's good or bad. For my own part, as we neared the conclusion I could see it ending one of two ways, and the anime went for something in the middle. So I was satisfied, and at the same time... a bit not. If you're like me, then in all likelihood the characters you want to survive will end up dead, and the characters you want dead manage to survive, which sucks quite a bit. And this brings me to -

Characters (9/10)
Yeah I know Art comes next but the characters are more important to me, in anything I read or watch. And as far as Shiki's characters go, I'd say they deliver. I can potentially see people complain about the large cast, but the anime seems to be aware of the struggle the viewers might go through and makes it easier to keep track of them (which I will get into in the Art section...) But what I liked about Shiki's cast was its diversity. Falling back onto my 'Salem's Lot comparison, it was easy to see which characters were supposed to be the 'good', 'main' characters in that book. We get a peek into the lives of a great deal of the other residents of the town as well, and they're all, to put it bluntly, pretty rotten people. And these two camps of characters that are good and bad *stay* in their respective camps. So it's hard to really get affected by what happens to them - you don't really care if the whole town disappears, nor do you much care which of the main characters survives, since they're just your standard good guys and nothing else.

With Shiki, you'll also have characters you'll like and characters you won't like, but those characters won't necessarily fall into the same categories all the way through. There were characters I disliked in the beginning that I end up rooting for, and characters I used to like I end up rooting against. As a result, whether I would cheer or moan in sadness, my feelings for those characters were that much stronger whenever something happened to them. You see them struggle and saunter on, have their ideals challenged and their lives ripped apart, and each of them deals with those things in different ways, sometimes opposite ways.
And I rather liked that.

Art and animation (8/10)
If there was anything that might have put me off about this anime at first sight, it probably would be the art. Character designs are tall and insect-like, a little reminiscent of Code Geass or Vampire Knight. Other than that it looked pretty decent, surprisingly brightly colored considering the subject matter, although it knew to get dark when it was supposed to.
The most stand-outtish aspect of the art, though, would be the HAIR STYLES. I'm pretty sure the anime's a little infamous for the characters' ridiculous hair styles. Seeing as how lots of anime have characters with weird-looking hair it wasn't TOO distracting - but it did provide a lot of probably unintentional comic relief whenever I or my friend commented on a character's hair and where it ranked on the ridiculous-scale. They definitely helped a lot in making them more memorable though, so even my friend, who unlike me is very bad with names, could keep track of them all.
The animation is solid in my opinion - characters move fluidly and action scenes are cool to watch. The only weird thing about it was the crying animation - at times the way tears flowed in a scene would be almost as ridiculous as the hair of the person crying them, making them hard to take seriously.

Overall Enjoyment (8/10)
Because it was her own idea to marathon this anime, my friend would ask me in between episodes what I thought so far (seeing as how I told her I would only agree to a marathon if she had something AMAZING to show me). My answers were a consistent "it's good", "it's interesting", "yeah it's alright so far". I did also tell her about how much it reminded me of 'Salem's Lot and assuring her that was a good thing. Shiki had been under my radar ever since I first became an anime fan, and I probably would have gone the rest of my life without sparing it a thought if it hadn't been for my friend. But I don't think the anime ever reached real levels of amazing, or even exciting until the last few episodes. I will say though, that after finishing it and waking up the next day, I was a bit disappointed I wouldn't get to see more of it. Cause this is an anime that's actually worth enjoying for more than a day, and I'm glad that I saw it.

At first glance, this looked exactly like the kind of manga I would avoid on principle. For one I'm not the hugest fan of the Victorian Era, or the Elizabethan Era, or whatever the heck it's called - the time period of stuck-up aristocrats and snuff boxes. For another, those character designs looked like the perfect bait for that class of fangirls that label themselves 'fujoshis' and go around shoving their gross ships down everyone's throats, whether it's a manga that even supports that sort of thing or not (one of the main reasons why I still avoid Black Butler, if I'm being honest) - ... the cast is populated with bishounens (beautiful men) and lolis (cute girls with doll-like features). I swear Arakawa Hiromu is the only female mangaka that draws male characters that actually look like real men.

But I still had incentive to give this thing a shot because a) it was recently completed (having to wait an entire month for each chapter update kinda kills a manga for me - that or Attack on Titan just got really boring) b) I kept reading comments of fans saying how amazing it is and how shocking the plot twists, which I could totally get behind; I love a good mindf*ck as much as the next person; and c) despite there being bishies and lolis, the character designs did look awesome (and, heck, beautiful men), and the artwork itself looks freaking gorgeous - I mean just look at the first volume cover.

So yeah, I dove right in and started the breathtaking, heartwrenching, soul-crushing experience that is Pandora Hearts.

Oh my God, what a beautiful story, in every sense of the word.

I think the first clue I got to how great the series would be was when I started getting my first inklings of de ja vu; I've read a lot of manga since starting university, but no other manga has ever been able to completely measure up to the amazingness of Full Metal Alchemist in my book - until Pandora Hearts. Gosh, but did I get big FMA vibes from this manga. It's not that the plots are overtly similar (although reading it over the second time with my sis [yes, this manga warranted an immediate reread] I did find I could make a lot of connections between certain elements of both series - the Tragedy of Sablier and the city of Xerxes/Cselkcess, the Baskervilles and the Homonculus, the Abyss and the Truth, illegal contracting and human transmutation, etcetera etcetera); it was more the feeling I got while reading of slowly discovering, piece by piece, something bigger and more dangerous than what the story initially presented, but foreshadowed it would; a hint here and there of a giant trump card the author is keeping hidden up her sleeve, ready to hit you with. I understood I was reading something carefully thought out and planned from beginning to end, and that no event, character, not a panel was going to go to waste (and so I tried to pay as much attention as I could, except, more fool me, I was reading this online and the translations available are awful and made things a lot more confusing than they should have been).

And it paid off really well. The plot twists, the reveals, every dirty secret, they were every bit as brain-numbingly jaw-dropping as people said they would be. Practically every mystery is explained, every loose end caught and tied, and the ending, which far from being the perfect happy ending that was FMA's ending, was nonetheless perfect for its aching bittersweetness. I can't remember the last time a piece of fiction has made me reel in shock as much as this manga has since... since... shit, maybe Harry Potter? And that never left me wanting more simply for the sake of wanting more, rather than because there was anything left to be explained. I desperately needed to listen to something appropriately beautiful and tragic before I could even begin to put my life back together to move on to something else and sadly not even any of the anime openings I had seemed accurate. Someone needs to reboot the anime and give it Brotherhood worthy openings!

In case you haven't picked it up by now, prepare for all kinds of tragedy and despair and wailing at the screen/page in anguish while reading this series. Pandora Hearts does not pull any punches, and I love it for that. More than simply having a great and thickly woven plot that only held me enthralled with its mysteries, the characters - all of them - were so delightful, so multi-faceted, and all so colorful, they provided the main drive for me to want to know what it is that happened, and will happen, to each of them as the story progressed. The attachments you will form to any or all of these characters will prove fatal, though: this manga has probably one of the highest death counts I can think of out of any other manga I have read, and as heart-breaking as it was, I loved that every death was final, and that every death meant something and affected me in some way, whether I even liked the character or not. So often in literature, or any form of media really, the death of a character would almost always feel like a plot device, something that only happened because the writers felt it needed to happen, and the knowledge of that, and how much easier it became to predict which death it would be, would mostly numb me towards the actual death when it happened. Yeah, it was sad, but now the chances of any other character dying has lessened severely. With Pandora Hearts, even knowing a character was going to die, I'd scream for it not to be true, because I genuinely loved these characters and wanted them to stick around. It wasn't sad just for the sake of it being sad that someone died, or because it was sad for the other characters, it was legitimately sad because I really really enjoyed their company and wanted them to get their happy endings. None of these deaths felt like they happened exclusively to manipulate my feelings or move the plot along, or just tossed in there for no real reason. It was a combination of everything, and at the same time because, well, shit happens, and people die.

If I had to fault this manga for anything, it would be for once again raising my standards that much higher and making it even more difficult for me to find a manga I could equate to greatness. I've read it twice over and it's already been two weeks since my second reading, and I still want more. Please, please, let there be at least one more manga out there that could make me feel even a fraction of what I felt for Pandora Hearts and Full Metal Alchemist. Let that manga be a completed one. And if not, let that manga be D. Gray Man. D. Gray Man looks cool. I really need to read it.

Also, I might need to suck it up and give Black Butler a chance, because who knows?

Story: 10/10
Art: 10/10
Character: 10/10
Enjoyment: 10/10
Overall: 10/10

Very obscure anime that I saw all of one time as a kid Arabic dubbed on TV and finally found again after years of wondering if I'd imagined it. And it is beautiful. Children's rating though? That's a lie - the only reason anyone would have to believe that this is a children's anime is the fact that the characters look like little Teletubbies. But it's an anime with lots of blood and violence, themes of war, love triangles and melodrama - heck, there's even (somewhat...) an attempted rape scene! If there's one major problem it's the very abrupt ending, as if the show had ... been cancelled or something - but given that the beginning was just as out-of-nowhere and abrupt, it seemed kind of fitting.

The story talks about two high school girls, Natsuno Eri and Miyabe Yuko, who find themselves lost in a world inhabited by 'humans' that are barely 2 or 3 feet tall and have the body shapes of marshmallows. The anime literally just starts with them walking around in this world wondering where they are and how they got there, which I think is great; no time is wasted seeing what they were doing before they got there, or how they got there, or anything of the sort. The importance of the story happens in this fantasy world, and ends as soon as they leave.

The same could be said for the two main leads themselves actually, as while you're watching, you don't get the feeling the story is really about them either - they're just sort of there. There's nothing special about them other than the fact that they are three times the size of every other character, and the fact that their personalities are completely polar opposites. Insofar as the anime focuses on their struggles, it's mostly in the daily necessities that the fantasy world is sorely lacking in - bathrooms, sanitary napkins, a change of clothes - you know, the things that are never really addressed all that much in other anime, or any story really, that involves a character being transported to a past-times fantasy setting.

The REAL importance lies in the inhabitants of the fantasy world, the little people of Belzerg, who are trying to protect their village that's being caught in the middle of a war between two neighboring countries. These are the characters you'll find yourself caring about or hating, and these are the characters that go through trials and epiphanies and realizations by the end through their interactions with each other and the two main leads.

While I was watching the anime, I found myself able to enjoy it that much more after I decided to distance myself a bit from Miyabe and Natsuno and view them the way the little people did - as otherworldy beings with unimaginable powers, unable to empathize with human emotion. That way it made a bit more sense for their personalities to be so extreme, with Natsuno being quiet, uncertain, but trying to be helpful and Miyabe being loud, contrary, and completely uninterested. Even if you do try to put yourself in the girls' shoes though, when you think about it, their actions do still make sense - they don't really get full grasp of how serious these little people are taking their personal dramas and their war, and that their fights aren't just little squabbles but dangerous brawls with real weapons where people do die or get hurt, because the whole situation doesn't feel real to them, especially given the fact that, again, the little people look like baby Teletubbies.

Not to dump on the character designs though; they do look cute, and more importantly individualized, and the art and animation is actually more solid and fluid than you'd expect. I love the bright colors in the anime, and the music is simply breathtaking. The one that stands out the most would be the opening song. It was actually the opening theme I was looking for when I found this anime, as it was what I had remembered most from the Arabic dubbed version I'd seen before. It sounds just as gorgeous in its original Japanese as it did in Arabic, and I advise you to give both a listen even if you don't want to watch the rest of the anime. I actually hadn't planned to either, at the start, but after sampling the first few and continuing to end on a cliff hanger with each episode, I ended up watching the whole thing in two days (when I should have been studying for a midterm too...)

Sep 21, 2014

OMG yes baby it's happening! Tokyo Ghoul;Re, the sequel, exists! Chapter 1 is out now!!

Update:
This manga was so good I gave it an immediate reread, which I haven't done before. Oh and I changed it back to five stars in light of the fact that there is a sequel in the making now, so the ending doesn't bother me so much; and also because I kind of take back what I said about not liking the Investigator side of the manga - in retrospect, it's a necessary side to the overall story that needs to be told in order to balance out the ... human and ghoul aspects, which strengthens the 'who-is-the-real-monster, which-side-is-right?' theme. Giving the manga a reread, I was more patient with those chapters where Kaneki and the ghouls don't show up for awhile. Also, it seems as though a lot of those Investigators whom we only caught a few scenes here and there of will be playing bigger roles in the sequel manga.

****

AS MUCH as I would love to give this five stars - because it left me breathless, it gave me chills, it hit my feels, it has amazing characters, it's dark and twisted and completely messed up and I LOVE stuff like this - I have to be honest with myself and knock off a star for 1) that absolutely appallingly open-ended, unsatisfying ending (although it left me satisfied in that I'd finally reached the end and could take a breather - my heart couldn't bear anymore pain) and 2) anything that did not concern my favorite characters, whether ghoul or human, couldn't manage to hold my attention very long so that I would only read them quickly just to get back to things I cared about.

What made me decide to read Tokyo Ghoul in the first place was that its premise - a regular somewhat timid kid being thrown into a set of unfortunate circumstances that lead to him becoming half a 'monster' - reminded me of the Cirque du Freak series by Darren Shan, which I have always claimed love for. I am also somewhat of a sadist - I love despair and tragedy and horrible things happening to the main character, not because I honestly want to see them getting hurt or because I hate happy stories, but because it allows me to feel real emotion and real anticipation for something good to happen. In any other genre I can count on things turning out all right for the heroes and for characters to not die, but in these kind of stories I can never be sure. As a reader, I love being thrown off guard.

And Tokyo Ghoul definitely delivers on that front. This is as deep and dark a tragedy as I could hope for. It also has my favorite kind of protagonist, that of Kaneki Ken, who starts out like any other average college student, book-obsessed, quiet, and a bit anti-social (like me) and ends up being someone completely unrecognizable by the last chapter. Not only that, but the way in which this character develops and transforms is disturbingly drastic and shocking to both the heart and mind. The other characters in this manga (the ones that matter anyway) are no less very well characterized.

In regards to the supporting cast, however, I do have one complaint, which is that there is a bit too much focus on the Investigators. The Investigators that matter, such as Suzuya, Amon, Mado, Shinohara and Akira, I have no problem reading about. But whenever something extremely intense is going on with Kaneki and the ghouls and we suddenly switch to this other fight involving all these nobody Investigators, whose names and ranks I honestly don't care about keeping track of, I can only feel frustration; no offense guys, I know you're all laying down your lives to protect humanity (in the way you see fit, that is) but you're kinda getting in the way of the part of the story that makes me love this manga.

I also have to note that in some cases the fight scenes are not very clearly portrayed or fluid. If a fight involves Kaneki using tactics he learned from training to weave through and dodge attacks from an opponent, the effect looks very cool; a sort of Matrix-ish feel of slow-motion break dancing that defies gravity. However when it's a fight between two really buff, bulky characters, or an Investigator in Kakuja armor, and there's kagune and quinques being waved around, the movements get a little disorganized and lost, resembling not so much a series of attacks as a giant mess of blurry charcoal streaks.

And of course, there's the ending, which really just screams sequel, seeing as how it didn't wrap up anything and added more mysteries than it did solve them. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, although there's a very good chance that the author will do a sequel (mostly because I just can't see how he couldn't have more planned, considering that ending). If he does, I will most definitely be reading it, and I do so hope I will be able to see more of these characters that I love so much grow and learn and get the happy endings they're owed.

Full Metal Alchemist is the Harry Potter of the manga world. And when I say that I don’t mean that their plots are remotely the same (although both have a main villain who splits himself seven ways… that’s actually cool) or that they're such big names in their respective mediums and genre (while it's true FMA has nowhere near the same amount of fame internationally as Dragonball or Naruto, it's almost always one of the first anime recommended to new-comers and frequently put on top anime lists); just in the way that absolutely everything about FMA has set itself apart from other shounen manga - ... heck manga in general - as something special that can't be replicated; near-perfection. The plot is well-rounded, exciting, original, and clever, the world is fun and comprehensible, and its laws obeyed consistently, the characters are all likable, whether friend or foe, and each has a role to play, there are equal amounts of drama, humor, and action, and well… just everything. The ending; absolutely perfect, and it ties up all loose ends. It’s one of those stories that you wish you could erase your memories of just so you could experience the whole thing again for the first time.

The best aspect about FMA is that it is never boring; it has you gripped right from the first. Just reading the basic plot is enough to get a person piqued. Brothers Alphonse and Edward Elric try to bring their mother back from the dead using alchemy, which, as a science, is based on the law that mass can neither be created nor destroyed; equivalent trade. Failing to do so, older brother Edward loses his leg in the process, and Alphonse his entire body. Edward then sacrifices his arm in order to transmute Alphonse’s soul onto a suit of armor. Now the brothers, in an effort to fix their mistake, set off on their journey in trying to recover their original bodies.

Like any good story, this main plot develops into something bigger and heavier as the series progresses, and to carry you along are the main characters of the Elric brothers, and the strong bond they share with each other. They are great protagonists, and they are so filled with emotion (even Alphonse, whose armored face can’t convey much in the way of emotion), and you really do feel for them and want them to accomplish their goals. The characters they encounter, the people that support them, hinder them, or go outright against them – all of them are more complex than simple black-and-white good-v-evil characters. I don’t think there’s a single character in here you could hate (except perhaps the villain, and not because he’s a lame villain but because he’s flipping insane - not even intentionally evil – which is a good thing. Him, and the gold-toothed doctor.)

What’s also nice about FullMetal is that it can’t be easily divided into arcs – the story runs on a one-way track with no sidestops, and it was all very well thought out, with no inconsistencies or any use of deus ex machina. There are several villains, but it’s not a case of defeating a baddy a week and then meeting up with the next. There are no chapters that feel like filler, no stalling for time – every panel is worth something, each page dedicated to forwarding the story or developing a character in some way.

Now I don’t think I can talk about the manga without mentioning the anime – both versions. There are two adaptations, the first loosely based on the manga in the beginning and then deviating entirely a third of the way in, and the reboot that is pretty much exactly the same as the manga, with only a few differences in details. There’s been an endless debate on which is better, although the general consensus is that Brotherhood (the reboot) is hands-on more epic.

I started the manga and the original FMA series at the same time. Although the anime is supposed to be the same as the manga in the beginning, even as early as that I started getting into the manga more than the anime. Near the middle I just gave up the anime entirely in favor of the manga, because the manga was just that gripping. I only continued the anime after I’d finished reading, since I was curious to see how that version would end; the manga hadn’t been finished at the time of its making and the creators had to complete the story themselves.

In my opinion, the manga is easily the best medium through which to tell the story, better even than the reboot anime. Hiromu-sensei’s artwork is so alive and fun; when characters are distressed or scared, you can genuinely see that in their faces; they can be serious one minute and then switch to goofy and hilarious the next with ease. The original FMA anime takes itself a bit too seriously and goes overboard on the drama and dark aspects, and while that actually paid off really well with two important deaths that occur in the beginning that made them more devastating and gut-wrenching than they were in either the manga or the reboot, it had the unfortunate effect of making the character of Edward more gloomy and serious than he was supposed to be. The Edward in the manga is always full of confidence and determination, and although he too doesn’t like to treat human lives lightly, he doesn’t dwell on his regrets as much as his anime counterpart does. The manga, while being light-hearted and cheerful, combines that light-heartedness with drama and action seamlessly. It does a better job of presenting the story than either anime and it gives you more time to spend with the characters and get in touch with their individual personalities. Even if you’ve watched Brotherhood, you’d still be missing out on a lot by skipping the manga. Reading it, you’ll feel like you’re hearing the story for the first time. I’ve read through it three times already and am still not bored.

A word about the English omnibus releases, though - I've bought the first four so far, and I couldn't help but notice how many typos there are. Also, even though the rating is for teens and above and words like 'crap' are used, there are a few instances where swear words are replaced with stuff like '@#&$!' which is only fine when used in comedic purposes. There was also a serious case of mistranslation in volume 4 that I feel like someone in the editing department should've realized, as the translation they put in doesn't make sense in context. Other pet peeves include writing Ling's name as 'Lin' (c'mon, they are obviously saying Ling in the anime!) and writing Xerxes in a way that looks even more unpronounceable, but otherwise it's great to have a hard copy of my favorite manga. All the little sidestories and author biographies are included as well.

Story: 10/10
Art: 8/10
Character: 10/10
Enjoyment: 10/10
Overall: 10/10

My favorite story of all time.