Fullmetal Alchemist vs Brotherhood: Which Should You Watch?

Both series turn on the same night: two boys at home in Resembool, trying to bring their dead mother back with alchemy. Edward loses a leg, then gives up an arm to bind his brother Alphonse’s soul to a suit of armour. From there the two adaptations share a premise and less and less else. If you are watching one, make it Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009, 64 episodes, complete), which follows Hiromu Arakawa’s manga to its final chapter. The 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist (51 episodes, finished by the 2005 film The Conqueror of Shamballa) is a separate, darker story rather than a first season, and it works best second or instead.

Start here Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

• 64 episodes
• complete
• follows the manga to its ending

Two brothers hunt for the Philosopher's Stone and find a conspiracy that runs to the top of their country's military.

Explore anime

Why there are two

Arakawa’s manga began in 2001 in Square Enix’s Monthly Shonen Gangan. Studio Bones started the first anime in 2003, when only a handful of volumes existed, and the series caught up with its source years before the manga was done. Rather than stall, it wrote its own second half and its own ending. Brotherhood came six years later from the same studio, started again from the beginning, and kept pace with the manga’s final stretch to adapt the whole thing, finishing in 2010.

The practical upshot is simple. Brotherhood is a fresh start, and nothing in it continues the 2003 series. Pick one continuity and stay inside it until its ending, and the question of which came first stops mattering.

Where 2003 goes its own way

For roughly its first half, the 2003 series covers the same early chapters as Brotherhood, only more slowly, with original episodes that give side characters time before bad things happen to them. That extra room is its best feature early on. The episode about the alchemist Shou Tucker and his daughter Nina lands harder in 2003, because the show has spent longer in their house.

Around the midpoint it leaves the manga behind. In general terms: the homunculi, the human-shaped villains named after the deadly sins, get a different origin and a different purpose. Several major characters meet fates they never meet in the manga, and the secret at the heart of the country is a different secret. The last TV episode then hands straight over to The Conqueror of Shamballa, which resolves the brothers’ story somewhere Brotherhood never goes.

None of that makes 2003 the lesser show. It is a smaller, sadder story about two boys who did something unforgivable, in a world that keeps asking what they are willing to trade to undo it. If Brotherhood’s scale sounds tiring, that tight focus is the reason to choose 2003.

How they feel to watch

Brotherhood is an epic, and it moves. Its first dozen or so episodes rattle through material the 2003 series had already covered, and episode one is an original standalone mission before episode two goes back to the brothers’ childhood. After that the cast widens into a whole country: Colonel Roy Mustang and Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye, the vengeful Ishvalan known only as Scar, a foreign prince called Ling Yao who wants immortality for political reasons. The final stretch is one long, enormous battle in which almost every thread you have been following is pulled at once.

Brotherhood also leans much harder on comedy, which splits viewers. Characters snap into squashed cartoon faces in the middle of serious scenes, and Edward’s fury at being called short gets a laugh every few episodes. If that whiplash bothers you, the 2003 series has far less of it. Its score by Michiru Oshima and its slower pacing are built for melancholy instead.

Content warning for both: body horror, including cruelty to a child early on, and a state-ordered massacre in Ishval that shapes much of the story.

Side by side

The 2003 route

Second, or instead Fullmetal Alchemist

• 51 episodes
• then the film The Conqueror of Shamballa
• complete

The same brothers and the same first mistake, taken towards an ending of the anime's own.

Explore anime

Choose this version first if you already know you prefer grief to spectacle, or if Brotherhood’s gags would pull you out of a story about a dead mother and a stolen body. Plan it as 51 episodes and a feature film, about 22 hours in all, and watch the film soon after the last episode, since it picks up from the TV ending and assumes you remember it.

The 2003 ending is complete. Once you have seen the film, this version has told you everything it is going to, and Brotherhood will feel like a retelling from a different angle. That is a perfectly good way to spend another 25 hours.

If you watch both

Brotherhood first is the safe default, because you meet the manga’s plot and ending before any alternative version of them. The cost is that its brisk opening can feel thin, and if you then go to 2003 you rewatch that ground at a much slower pace.

If you already know you will watch both, there is a good case for 2003 first. Its slower early episodes do the character work that Brotherhood’s opening skims, and Brotherhood’s opening plays better when you already know those events. Brotherhood’s second half, where everything is new, then feels like a reward. The one risk is that meeting 2003’s darker ending first may colour how you feel about the manga’s.

Our call: one version, Brotherhood. Both, 2003 then Brotherhood. If what you loved about Brotherhood was a long conspiracy that pays off, our Attack on Titan guide is the next stop, and if 64 episodes is more than you can give, the completed-story guide has shorter shows with real endings. Already finished it? Tell the Finder and it will match the part you liked.