Fullmetal Alchemist Review

Equivalent exchange is a real constraint here rather than a slogan. Alchemy costs material, the cost is paid on the page, and the two brothers spend the series carrying a bill from the first chapter that the ending finally settles in the only currency available. Arakawa's structure is the achievement. Characters introduced as jokes in volume four turn out to be load bearing in volume twenty, the military politics resolve into a conspiracy that was fully planned rather than discovered, and the homunculi are assigned sins without being reduced to them.

The Ishval flashbacks are a serious piece of writing about a genocide told from the side that carried it out, and the series does not let the sympathetic soldiers off. Arakawa's line is clean, legible and functional rather than beautiful, which is the one place the book gives ground to its peers. The chibi comedy interrupts scenes that did not need lightening. What almost nothing else at this length manages is the landing, because the final volume answers the opening question with a sacrifice that costs the protagonist exactly the thing he spent the story acquiring, and it was set up from the start.