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RIGHT TURN ONLY!! - Sodium Hypochlorite

I tried for years to like Banana Fish, but could never quite appreciate it. I didn't mind the art, and found the characters interesting, but I couldn't get past how incredibly unrealistic it was, despite trying very hard for realism. It's got that problem where a foreigner tries too hard to recreate a culture they're not really that familiar with (likely experiencing only through movies and TV), and ends up making all sorts of mistakes that natives would find laughable. (For example, mixed race street gangs, and homosexual Italian mafia dons.) Perhaps I'm too much of a realist, but as a New Yorker I found much of its inherent worldview far too ludicrous to take seriously.

penguintruth wrote:

I think it was around the chapters in volume 18 of FMA that I was starting to get pretty tired of the Briggs arc. And worse, afterwards were the ridiculously lengthy battles with Pride.

I still don't think these battles are as long as you make them out to be. Especially if you consider that Pride is the strongest homunculus and these battles were heavily broken up. So each chapter was not just the Pride battle, there was other stuff going on as well. At the very least I find fights on average much shorter than your typical shounen series.

I will say that Fullmetal Alchemist does seem to have less one on one fights as the series goes on. I prefer one on one fights to fights with a lot of characters because yeah then sometimes it is hard to zero in on individual character moments during battles. But then I don't read Fullmetal Alchemist for the fight scenes. I am more interested in the plot & characters.

As for keeping track of all the characters I never felt it was an issue. At least not with the major characters. I tend to focus on core characters in a group and go from there.

Fullmetal Alchemist isn't some shonen tournament, its a war between humans and Homunculi. Why wouldn't the humans gang up on the homunculi.

One of the things I hate about shounen is how many times the battles end up being one on one fights in which people watch other people get their ass kicked and sometimes die.

Yeah it makes sense if this is some shonen tournament but frequently its not. Dragonball Z was easily the biggest offender

@Cait, actually, it's Viz, not Tokyopop. It might be josei and not shojo as well. I think at this point they're mostly easy to still track down most of the volumes but I don't think that'll be true for very long (as is it's difficult to get a hold of volume 3). I only got them all this past winter, so it's still doable at this point.

I think the art bothered me in early volumes, but as it went on it improved. Like the first 5 or 6 volumes kinda had some scenes that looked a tad lazy, but after that it improved a lot.

You don't have to point it out in every f****'n review! Ugh screw this shit. Dipshits like the ANN staff never listens anyway.

Banana Fish is overrated, since it pretty much spoon-feeds you all the "surprises" and pulls back on the potential action and adventure in favor of conversations. It's not bad, if you're looking for something slow, but if you want excitement, you could do better than BF.

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