Short Synopsis: The Shou Tucker arc, compressed into one episode.
Episode Rating: 7/10 (Enjoyable)
I’m amused at the people who are already disappointed by the new FMA series. I mean, it’s only been three episodes; what did you expect? The new series lacks the novelty of the original, and the series has mostly been simply building up. At the start of the season, did people expect the new Evangelion in only three episodes, or something?

Not that the new series is perfect and all, of course. The producers right now are trying to rush through the first few episodes a bit too badly, and hardly allow for any quiet moments right now, but at least these beginning episodes are a lot more easy to go through than the original series was. There were a few differences here and there, mostly involving Scar: this episode sees him kill off Basque Gran, right after he was introduced, and he kills off both Shou Tucker and his daughter. It’s good, since I never liked that guy anyway.

As for Basque Gran’s death, it was a shame he died so early. I remember his death in the original series as being one of the first memorable scenes, because it was so ironic: here the show was building him up as one of the major bad guys… and then he gets killed off so easily. But I do guess that it makes more sense this way: after all, Scar was a smart guy. Why the heck would he show his face in front of half a dozen officers. It’d be much harder for him to move around that way. Looking back, it was just another cheap trick to get Ed involved with the main storyline.

Strangely enough, this episode also showed that Scar has some sort of inside-knowledge of what’s going on inside the military. Otherwise he would never have known where Basque Gran would be, or where he could find Shou Tucker, right after he created his next chimera. At this point, I can’t remember whether or not the original series answered that question, though.

Normally I don’t mind when the creators of an anime insert their own stuff, insert fillers or go with a different storyline, but in the end it’s all going to depend on their ability to write a good storyline, which for the original FMA unfortunately didn’t go too well at certain times. The first thirteen episodes had their charms, definitely. The small scenes in which we see Scar, right before Ed arrives for the first time in Central City for example were a nice touch, as they showed how Scar was when he just received his arm (either that or my memory is deceiving me again and Brotherhood also had that scene… something must be wrong with either me or the series if I can’t remember a simple fact that happened two episodes ago…).

Anyway… it’s a shame that the fillers of Full Metal Alchemist were all just too formulaic, with dull characters and a predictable role for the two lead characters, with the only exception being the one with the dog and Armstrong’s family; that one was fun, granted. In the second half, the original material improved a lot, and the storyline was really competent, but at the same time it screwed up by trying too hard to make characters from the earlier episodes return, combined with a set of certain other characters that just got on my nerves. But I think that my biggest problem with the original series is that I could never really buy Ed and Al as the two lead characters. That’s why I appreciate Brotherhood’s attempts to make the two of them more likable.

Short Synopsis: Kou and Aoba find a creative way to catch a burglar.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
It’s interesting that, even though Adachi’s series are all about the same thing (talented guy playing baseball), the anime adaptations of his works all have these subtle differences that make them totally different series (or at least the ones that I’ve seen so far, being this one and Touch). It’s going to be a bit hard to talk about these differences due to my fear of Touch spoilers, but even though Touch and Cross Game look a lot like each other, I just don’t see them as rip-offs of each other, and they both have their own unique parts.

The big difference between the two lead males is that Kou of Cross Game has nobody to look up to: he’s already the most talented at baseball, and instead we see him in this episode pull everyone along, even though he isn’t actively playing baseball, whereas Tatsuya had Kazuya and was only able to come as far as he did because of his brother’s influence. I’m interested to see what’s going to happen when Kou enters high-school, as it seems that he’s going to be joining the same team as that arrogant baseball-guy whose name I can’t find, which seems to suggest that the baseball in Cross Game is going to be much more about rivalry, rather than commitments to the past like in Touch.

And while I can’t say this for sure, since Touch also took around ten episodes for the first real baseball match to occur, but according to the things I’ve heard about the manga Cross Game seems to focus a bit more on slice of life than Touch did, and you can hear that through the music as well: the soundtrack of Touch was very typical for a sports game: fast-paced, up-beat and overall cheerful, while you wouldn’t be able to guess that Cross Game was a show about baseball by solely hearing its soundtrack: the background tunes here more sound like that of a heart-warming slice of life series.

The sense of humour also feels more tongue-in-cheek than its predecessor: in Touch, you knew when to laugh and when to take the show seriously. In Cross Game, you only realize something funny has happened, two second after it’s already over, and it’s another example of the unpredictability of Adachi: while in Cross Game the overall plot might be easier to predict, this time it’s the humour that you can’t see coming.

In any case, this episode was a bit strange; I mean, how often do you see a burglar through a window in a house inside a metro in broad daylight? That thug must have been really stupid in order to allow for such a miss. And yet it had its purposes: we now know that Kou isn’t a complete lazy bum, and for some reason he also always carries a baseball ball with him. Something tells me that he doesn’t exactly know what he wants to do later, which in a way is typical of a teenager his age, especially after he had been scared out of the baseball club like the way he was three years ago.

Short Synopsis: It’s time for some cleaning duties for Squad 7 as another commander gets his ass kicked in battle.
Episode Rating: 7/10 (Enjoyable)
Okay, so obviously this episode was meant to build up. It wasn’t anything special at all, but it did flesh out the characters pretty nicely. It’s good to see that a show really takes its time before it really starts up, but of course the bad thing with such an approach is that it’s virtually impossible to tell early on in the series whether it’ll succeed or fall apart in the end.

My biggest problem with this episode was the newly introduced arrogant fat guy. He was obviously meant to show that there are no other competent commanders in Gallia aside from Welkim (and Faldio perhaps, but I first have to see him in action before I’ll believe that). It’s an often used trope in which an arrogant bastard with a bit of power for himself gets his ass kicked really badly, and it just fails to make any impact whatsoever. And on a side-note, the levels of Engrish in this show are also… ‘inaccurate’, to say the least…

On a more positive note, I liked that old commander of the Empire. In this episode you could see why this guy made it big, and the next episode is going to be interesting when Welkim has to take him on, so I hope that the creators can pull it off right. It’s also amusing that Maximilian (the guy who is leading the Empire’s troops into Gallia) dresses himself like Julius Caesar. In a way it’s quite typical. ^^;

So yeah, Fanservice + Alicia = Annoying, but this shouldn’t become that big of a problem. The thing with Alicia is that she definitely gets on your nerves when nothing is happening, but she becomes an interesting character once the action and strategy start and she’s too busy with her own duties to whine about having seen Faldio naked.