FMA Brotherhood, episode four

[afuna]

I'm catching up to FMA: Brotherhood, and I'm in episode four, where Edward and Al are playing with Nina and Alexander.

I know how this ends T___T

Maybe I should hit pause.

Comments

[branchandroot]

So... how is Brotherhood looking? I got two eps in and gave up until the whole thing was done because the way the initial story was rushed annoyed me. Does it smooth out again?

[afuna]

The first couple of episodes are very fast; it feels as though they're assuming you're already familiar with the series / characters, so they spend less time on setup, leaving very little time to bond with the characters.

On the one hand, we jump into the action much faster. OTOH... when H dies (and d'oh probably everyone here already knows the spoiler from the first time around, but obscuring a tiny bit just in case), I didn't feel much. It may have been because I knew it was coming, but I think a bigger portion of that is that he just hadn't had much screen time in this series before he was killed off.

I suspect that we're simply rushing past the earlier scenes of the anime, to reach the point where the anime more radically diverged from the manga. I'm at episode 13 right now, and the pacing is much better, but it took a while to get to a point where I was satisfied. I would say episode 11 is where we finally slowed down enough that I could start connecting.