I said read, not watch. The anime blows all kinds of ass compared to the manga. And while I’m at it, go read the FMA manga as it branches off into a different story line (a better one) after Hughes dies.
I rather prefer the FMA anime to the manga. The manga’s not bad by any means, but the anime provides a much better reason for the homunculus being what they are.
Here’s something you might like:
Perfect Blue
You can watch it for free on Youtube, albeit in several different segments. Just type in “Perfect Blue part 1” in the youtube search engine, and then click on the username of whoever hosts that to get a list of all the parts.
Yeah… he might like Pefect Blue… but it is nothing like Cowboy Bebop, or Death Note.
For starters it is a film not a series… and more importantly it is a complete mindfuck. Nothing like Cowboy Bebop or Death Note.
Oh and Curtis also I think most people know where to find things online to watch… and how to use YouTube. Just so you know.
Most people don’t, since I didn’t know until very recently, and it doesn’t seem like Sinistral is an anime addict and would naturally know you can find lots of this stuff online for free. But whatever.
Not exactly an Anime, but I have the nagging suspicion that you’ll like The Dresden Codak webcomic series, Sin. It’s obviously Anime influenced and- well- see for yourself. 
http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_031.htm
(The rest of you check it out, too- it’s wordy, but it’s well done!)
The GANTZ anime is fucking horrendous, much more so compared to the manga. It’s better to pretend it never existed.
How so? It leaves the whole deal with their names unresolved, or why each one has special skills if they were made “accidentally”. Not to mention it makes it so that half of them just popped out of nowhere since you never find out who made them. Frankly, much like the LOL NAZIS ending, it seemed like a horrible form of plot-patchwork.
And it has shota Wrath. God fucking damnit that kid needed to get kicked in the teeth. I’m almost sad he wasn’t included in the manga just because homunculi defeats in it tend to be really goddamn gruesome.
I found Wrath one of the most disturbing and conflicted characters I’ve yet seen - especially since he has incredibly close relationships with four important characters, all of which pull him in very different ways. The one thing I love about FMA is how very few characters could really be considered “good” or “bad”.
Originally Posted by Seraphim Ephyon
[i]
Quote:[QUOTE]Originally Posted by RoguePaladinTrian View Post
I rather prefer the FMA anime to the manga. The manga’s not bad by any means, but the anime provides a much better reason for the homunculus being what they are.
How so? It leaves the whole deal with their names unresolved, or why each one has special skills if they were made “accidentally”. Not to mention it makes it so that half of them just popped out of nowhere since you never find out who made them. Frankly, much like the LOL NAZIS ending, it seemed like a horrible form of plot-patchwork.
And it has shota Wrath. God fucking damnit that kid needed to get kicked in the teeth. I’m almost sad he wasn’t included in the manga just because homunculi defeats in it tend to be really goddamn gruesome.[/i][/QUOTE]
Actually I think he’s referring to how in the anime the basis of the homunculus formation was due to the failures of human transmutation and thus would eventually bare the identities of those who they were intended to be resurrected as once they were found and reconstructed into their more sinister and deadly forms. In the manga it has so far been revealed that some sinister dude known as ‘Father’ provide ‘Philosopher Stones’ to people living or possibly dead (it hasn’t been covered that well yet plus wtf Gluttony you grotesque living bag of holding you).
However Wrath, Sloth, Lust, and Envy were the only characters to really benefit from the anime so far vs their manga counterparts (kinda since Bradley is Wrath in the manga and Pride has yet to be introduced yet, though, I already know what his big shtick is going to be and it doesn’t really stand up to anime’s Wrath). The manga has done it’s share of character development that the anime never touched like the relationship between Mustang and Hawkeye. Other characters have also been introduced as well like Armstrong’s Sister (don’t remember her name and also not the one that rejected Havok), The prince from the eastern country (also don’t remember his name, well, aside from his current name Greed mk 2), and his two bodyguards (who are currently dealing with becoming redundant among other things) and so on. Of course the manga’s still not finished yet (WTH! Narutard can get ten volumes released in less than two months yet it’s been about a year since the last volume of FMA came out?) so it’s still kinda hard to judge which is better.
Originally Posted by Wilfredo Martinez
Not exactly an Anime, but I have the nagging suspicion that you’ll like The Dresden Codak webcomic series, Sin. It’s obviously Anime influenced and- well- see for yourself.
Seconded. Though the earlier strips are more one-shot in nature some of the points that were covered were eventually used in the story arc that just finished recently (or is very nearly finished as it does seem to be taking forever).
Huh? Pride was introduced a long while ago, it was a pretty huge twist, and both Fu and Lan Fan ended up being pretty useful in the last chapter, Lan Fan in particular is considerably stronger that Lin/Greed at this point.
I think Trigun’s tragically archetypal plot ended up being its main weak point. The lighthearted first half/darker second half could have been handled in a far better way so as to make it not suck, even keeping a very similar storyline. It lacks an understanding of proper use of dramatic tension and timing, and replaces this with an effectively constant melodrama in the second half, and comlete lack of drama in the first half.
This creates a feeling that, until the second half, there was not a real plot or overarching narrative structure. A vague, undefined journey of a story that doesn’t know where its going ensues, with fairly comedic, entertaining adventures. Then, Trigun gets this crazy idea it is going to become a work of art. Now, instead of building on threads in a sort of reverse foreshadowing, to create consistancy, it creates a hollow quest rife with exposition and very predictable more dilemmas which are given only cursory attention, while how upset people are after they make them is given far too much attention. The most interesting parts of the series (Wolfwood’s christianity, Legato’s strange hybrid of nihilism and Kantian moral imperative) are treated instead as external factours causing emotional pain for Vash, who is at this point the only character with which anything meaningful is concerned. The socio-economic status of the burnt-out world they live in, a constant undertone of the first half, is abandoned, when it actually could have made a far better backdrop than mysterious vaudeville villains with angsty spaceship haircut pasts. Oh, and poorly developed romance just so romance is present. Always great.
Cowboy Bebop, on the other hand, draws more artfully and intentionally towards its predetermined, tragic end. The ending itself, I’m not sure I artistically agree with (while it’s very much an “easy way out” of a story, it follows through with many of the established themes, and possesses more legimitate emotional impact than other cop-out endings usually do), but the process leading up to it was honestly pretty masterful.
Read Berserk
You can watch the Golden Era if you want, but it’s not very good.
Edit: Sin, are you gonna be the doctor I come to when I need oxycontin for my migraines or do I still have to go to Mexico
Maybe he wants a mindfuck 
From what I gather, neither Cowboy Bebop and Deathnote are particularly like each other either.
My experience with Anime is pretty limited, but I was majorly surprised by Perfect Blue. Its a thriller with heavy metaphors that really makes you think.
Looks like they’re going to be making a new anime based on the manga 
----Sinistral----
I’m not going to give you oxycontin :P.
Originally Posted by Crotanks
[QUOTE][i]Originally Posted by Seraphim Ephyon
Huh? Pride was introduced a long while ago, it was a pretty huge twist, and both Fu and Lan Fan ended up being pretty useful in the last chapter, Lan Fan in particular is considerably stronger that Lin/ Spoiler: Greed at this point.
Looks like they’re going to be making a new anime based on the manga [/i][/QUOTE]
FREAKIN 'SWEET!!!
Maybe that will motivate TP (or whomever is releasing the manga) to hurry up and release volume 17 already.
Wait, you’re buying the edited shit? (And yes, they’ve been editing shit)
No. I’ve been reading the edited shit. I haven’t bought volume 1 (and I don’t mean the first volume) from those slugs. Besides aside from Greed Mk1’s death scene what have they really edited?
(I’m also way too lazy to hunt down translated copies of the later volumes on-line. In case you were wondering.)
It’s easy as hell. Do you know how to use IRC?
Killmore is spot on with his explanation of my inner thoughts. Now that I’ve donned my tinfoil cap so he can no longer get at them, I’ll post them as well. Yes, the link between the transgression of human transmutation and the birth of a homunculus provided much stronger ties between many of the characters in the story. It also enabled the method of killing the homunculus to be an emotional one. The manga errs (for all its many good features) by making the homunculus somewhat duller. Pawns, robots without the almost-humanity that made Wrath and Lust what they were to the anime. In particular, their “true form” additions made me sigh in resignation - such unique villains in the anime tainted by typical shonen “now I’ll show you my REAL POWWAAAA~” nonsense.
I’ll touch Trigun now too, since I have wandering hands today. For all it’s criticized, Trigun’s alleged schizophrenia never stood out to me as anything other than a good move. Do we really want 26 episodes of zany antics? No. From the very beginning the series sets Vash up as the Wandering Jew. I’ve always been partial to that character type, but it’s a character that doesn’t work unless the story just happens to cover the period in which his wandering ends. It’s not like Vash’s personality does a 180 to suit an arbitrary style change - we just learn from the second half why Vash has lived as he did. Berserk doesn’t get this shit about its HUGE change near the end, neither does Cowboy Bebop for inserting comedy episodes in an otherwise realist series. I know Trigun’s tone change makes the series a bit more stratified and the darker tone seem more relentless, but I think it’s undeserving of such criticism as it gets.
I thought that humanizing the homunculi was one of the worst moves the anime pulled, a strong part of the “dramatic for the sake of being dramatic” stuff that stained the anime original material, sometimes contradicting or down right killing characterization.
There’s this somewhat recent trend to believe every character, especially villains, require humanization. A villain cannot be good unless he is morally ambiguous and, if possible, tragic.
I think that’s total bullshit.
Sure, human characters are good, but I don’t need every single one and their mother to be a walking ball of conflict and philosophical conundrums. Sometimes I just want someone I can hate. Those are the villains I’ve always remember most fondly and the ones I’ve been missing lately, not the tragic this-didn’t-need-to-be-like-this overdramatic stuff I’ve been getting, just some blatant asshole I can loathe, someone I want to see defeated so that the victory actually matters. Maybe he has reasons to be like that, HURR DURR I’M EBIL is no good either, but make those reasons the basis for their actions, don’t try and JUSTIFY the shit they do, because I WANT to desire to see them beaten.
Greed is a perfect example of this. He is Greed, he is the greed that was taken from father’s heart, so he is greedy. That’s it, that’s all the humanization I needed. Over that, you give him a pretty cool personality and you end up with a very charismatic selfish asshole who’s greed actually ends up helping his friends in a twisted way, and is such a prick that he can die giving a loud and hearty FUCK Y’ALL NIGGAS as he is being melted alive. That was great, everyone loved Greed.
But oh no, we need more ambiguity. So we make him part of some unfulfilled wish of an old woman and give him a dramatic “Ah so you have beaten me, fair battle young warrior, now we must part and yada yada yada” and have him go like some Shakespearean tragic hero.
I guess the homunculi needed something added to them since the true villain ended up being a half-cooked generic mysterious overlord shit nobody actually cared about, but the only one who really struck me as somewhat well done was Sloth. Lust and Wrath, particularly Wrath, just got on my nerves as a pair of unnecessarily overdramatic drones who would just not shut up about their troubles. Even Sloth herself was just another hit to an already dead and buried horse: Ed and Al lost their bodies, their childhood, their innocence, their home and got to see the grotesque abomination they created in place of their mother, did we NEED to have them kill her clone too? Yes, HUMAN TRANSMUTATION IS BAD, WE GET IT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MOVE ON. A lot of characters just stop at that and just don’t get over it. Marcoh, Hoenheim, Mustang, Scar, they all did horrible things, but instead of sitting around angstying themselves to death or REPEATING the massacre (Scar attempting to make the stone was one big fat “Fuck You” to his entire character), they all take an active role in stopping all that from happening again in the manga. Probably the all-time low in the anime was when Mustang threw his entire career and life work down the drain to kill Bradley in what was little more than a cheap badly-planned vendetta that defeated the purpose of having lived like he did up to that point. It was him giving up, however flowery the anime tried to make it look.
As for the “true form” thing, I don’t know what you’re talking about. The only one with a “true form” was Envy, and he didn’t use it so much as a last resort powerup but rather simply to screw with Ed’s head by showing what kind of abomination he really was, as well as what they had done to Xerxes. He did that because that’s just how he is, for the same reason he became Hughes’ wife before killing him and why he tells Ed with a huge grin about how he started the Ishvalan war. He’s a sadistic arrogant bastard, which made his incredibly humiliating defeat all the more satisfying.