Fullmetal Alchemist: Best Anime of All Time? 12 Lists, 3 Versions

Fullmetal Alchemist turns 25 this year, and in July ComicBook.com reported the manga at 90 million copies in circulation.¹ A 25th-anniversary exhibition opened at Matsuya Ginza in Tokyo in August and is now touring Hokkaido, Ishikawa, Osaka and Aichi, shared with Hiromu Arakawa's newer series, Daemons of the Shadow Realm.²

Few franchises were animated twice from the same source within a decade. Bones made a 2003 series that left the manga halfway and a 2009 series, Brotherhood, that followed it to the last page. Warner Bros. then filmed a live-action version in Italy. Those three versions are why Fullmetal Alchemist appears on twelve very different lists below.

Fullmetal Alchemist belongs on "greatest anime" lists and on two "worst" lists at once, and each time a different adaptation is the one on trial.

Brotherhood vs Frieren: the best anime series of all time

This ranking holds 67 series, and both Fullmetal Alchemist adaptations are among them: Brotherhood and the 2003 original.

Brotherhood ran 64 episodes from April 2009 to July 2010, directed by Yasuhiro Irie. It was the top-rated anime on MyAnimeList and Anime News Network until 2024.⁵ Rotten Tomatoes lists it at 100% from 14 reviews, and its consensus calls it a "pristine distillation of the shounen genre."

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End took that top spot on both sites in 2024. A slow fantasy about an elf mage grieving a dead companion has very little in common with a war story about two brothers and a conspiracy.

Other entries include Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop and One Piece, which was still airing new episodes during Brotherhood's entire run.

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Edward Elric vs Monkey D. Luffy: the greatest shonen protagonist

Edward Elric shares a list of 16 shonen heroes with Luffy, Goku, Naruto and Tanjiro. Most of them chase a title: Pirate King, Hokage, the strongest fighter alive.

Edward chases a refund. He lost his left leg trying to bring his mother back with alchemy, then gave his right arm to bind his brother Alphonse's soul to a suit of armour.⁸ The whole series is his attempt to undo that one night.

Fans voted for him early and often. He topped Newtype's male character ranking in July 2009, and IGN placed him seventh among the greatest anime characters of all time the same year.

Luffy's case rests on scale. One Piece has run for nearly three decades, so a single season of Luffy can outlast an entire Fullmetal Alchemist series.

youpick.best/ranking/the-16-greatest-shonen-protagonists-of-all-time

Brotherhood vs Hunter x Hunter (2011): the best anime remake

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is the model for this whole category: the textbook case of a studio animating the same manga a second time and getting a different show.

The first version caught up with Arakawa's manga while it was still running. Around the first dozen episodes the 2003 anime began writing its own material, at Arakawa's request for a different ending, and its second half reworked only volumes 7 and 8.⁶ Brotherhood, made after the manga was nearly finished, started over from chapter one.

Hunter x Hunter is the closest rival. Madhouse's 2011 series also restarted from scratch and went far past the point where the 1999 version stopped.

Below them sit Fruits Basket, Devilman Crybaby, Sailor Moon Crystal and Ranma ½, four very different reasons to remake a classic. The 2003 loyalists have an answer to all of them: the show they prefer is not a rough draft of Brotherhood, it is another story.

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The Promised Day vs the Frieza Saga: the greatest story arc

The Promised Day is the finale of Fullmetal Alchemist: the eclipse on which the Homunculi's plan for Amestris either succeeds or collapses. It shares a list of 12 arcs with Namek, Enies Lobby, the Chimera Ant arc and Shibuya.

Its weight comes from the setup. Arakawa planted the transmutation circle across the whole country years earlier in the story, so the last volumes pay off clues from the first ones. Mark Thomas of The Fandom Post called Brotherhood's ending a "virtually perfect ending to an outstanding series."⁵

The Frieza Saga is the opposite kind of classic. Dragon Ball Z stretched one fight on Namek across dozens of episodes and gave the world its first Super Saiyan, and people remember the length as part of the legend.

youpick.best/ranking/the-12-greatest-anime-story-arcs-of-all-time

Amestris vs Made in Abyss: the best world-building

Amestris is a military state whose founding crime turns out to be the plot. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood builds the country through its map, its chain of command and the civil war in Ishval that every adult character carries.

Made in Abyss goes the other way, down a single hole whose layers each have their own curse. Mushishi and Spice and Wolf build quieter worlds on the same ranking, one of folk spirits and one of medieval trade routes.

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Conqueror of Shamballa vs Cowboy Bebop: The Movie: Studio Bones

This list of 30 Studio Bones productions holds three Fullmetal Alchemist titles: both TV series and the 2005 film Conqueror of Shamballa.

Shamballa closed the 2003 continuity by sending Edward to 1920s Germany. It won Animation of the Year at the 2006 Tokyo Anime Awards.⁶

The frame pairs it with another Bones film. Cowboy Bebop: The Movie came out in 2001, before the studio's alchemy years, and Mob Psycho 100, My Hero Academia and Soul Eater show how far Bones went afterwards.

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Fullmetal Alchemist vs Daemons of the Shadow Realm: Square Enix's manga on screen

Every series in this ranking began in a Square Enix magazine, and two of them came from the same artist. Fullmetal Alchemist ran in Monthly Shōnen Gangan from July 2001 to June 2010, 108 chapters collected in 27 volumes.⁴

Daemons of the Shadow Realm is Arakawa's current Gangan series, begun in December 2021. Bones Film's anime of it finished its first season on 19 September 2026, and a second season was announced as the first one ended.³

Arakawa's path into the magazine ran through it. She started as an assistant to Hiroyuki Etō, the author of Gangan's Magical Circle Guru Guru, before her own work appeared there.⁹

Soul Eater, Black Butler, Kakegurui and My Dress-Up Darling share the list, with a gothic mystery and a cosplay romance among them.

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Fullmetal Alchemist vs Legend of the Galactic Heroes: military anime

Edward Elric is a soldier. Fullmetal Alchemist makes him the youngest State Alchemist in the history of Amestris, which gives him a military rank and makes him answer to Colonel Roy Mustang. Both versions of the story are in this ranking.

The army is the series' moral problem. The State Alchemists were used as weapons in the Ishvalan war, and most of the adult cast are veterans of it.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes treats war as strategy and politics across 110 episodes about two commanders on opposite sides. Gundam, 86 Eighty-Six and Violet Evergarden show three other ways a war can shape a story.

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The Elric brothers vs Grave of the Fireflies: the best anime about siblings

Fullmetal Alchemist is, before anything else, a story about two brothers. The 2003 series and Brotherhood both open on Edward and Alphonse's attempt to bring their mother back, which costs one of them a leg and the other his entire body.

Grave of the Fireflies is the heaviest entry on this list. Isao Takahata's 1988 film follows Seita and his little sister Setsuko through the final months of World War II in Kobe, and it ends exactly as its first scene says it will.

Demon Slayer, Totoro, Mob Psycho 100 and Oshi no Ko show siblings as protectors, playmates, rivals and co-conspirators.

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Castle in the Sky vs Brotherhood: steampunk anime

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is steampunk by its machinery. Amestris runs on railways and early-20th-century factories, and Edward's arm and leg are automail, steel prosthetics built by his mechanic Winry.

Castle in the Sky, Howl's Moving Castle and Steamboy are the genre's pure form: airships, gears and coal smoke. Last Exile, Kabaneri and Princess Principal fill in the television side, with airborne battleships, armoured locomotives and a London split by a wall.

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Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) vs Naruto: the worst filler

The 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist appears here for the same decision that put Brotherhood on the remake list. With the manga only a few volumes in, Bones and Arakawa agreed that the anime would invent its own second half and its own ending.

That half divides people. Its defenders point to the awards: the 2003 series won Best Title at Animage's Anime Grand Prix and topped TV Asahi's online poll of the top 100 anime in 2005 and again in 2006.⁶ Its critics count every episode after the split as material the manga never had.

Naruto shows what filler usually means: whole arcs written to stall while the manga stayed ahead. One Piece, Bleach and Dragon Ball Z share the list.

The 2003 case is different in kind, since nothing was paused and the story simply went somewhere else. Fans of the 2003 ending would call that a choice, not a stall.

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Fullmetal Alchemist (2017) vs Dragonball Evolution: the worst live-action adaptation

Warner Bros. filmed Fullmetal Alchemist with real actors in 2017. Fumihiko Sori directed, Ryosuke Yamada played Edward, and much of the film was shot in Volterra, Italy, standing in for an Amestris town.

Netflix released it worldwide in February 2018. Rotten Tomatoes counts 28% positive reviews from 18 critics, and the film took $8 million at the box office.⁷ Two sequels, The Revenge of Scar and The Final Alchemy, followed in 2022.

Dragonball Evolution is the usual benchmark for this ranking, and the American Death Note and Ghost in the Shell films are on it too. Alphonse is the hard part for any live-action version. A suit of armour with a boy's voice is simple in a drawing and costly in CGI.

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Three versions of one story

The same 27 volumes produced a contender for the best anime ever made, a 2003 series that is loved and listed as filler in the same breath, and a film that ranks among the worst adaptations. Each list above picks one of them, and the version a list means decides whether Fullmetal Alchemist belongs among the classics or the cautionary tales. All twelve are settled one pairing at a time, Edward against Luffy, Amestris against the Abyss.

Prefer a question none of these twelve ask? Start your own ranking with it, and put whichever Edward you like on the card.

More rankings, more angles

• Is Cowboy Bebop the Best Anime Ever? 26 Sessions, 16 Lists — the other Bones-made movie in the frame
• Is Attack on Titan the Best Anime of All Time? 16 Lists — another walled-in country at war with itself
• Demon Slayer: Best Anime Ever or Overrated? 15 Lists — a brother and sister against a demon war