Fullmetal Alchemist

• 1. Introduction

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  Fullmetal Alchemist began in a single magazine page published on the 12th of July 2001 in Monthly Shōnen Gangan, the monthly anthology put out by Square Enix. Its creator, Hiromu Arakawa, had spent long nights reading contradictory books about the philosopher's stone before a single question crystallized: what if a world ran on alchemy the way ours runs on physics? What if science and magic were the same thing, governed by iron rules, and the one rule you could never break was the attempt to create human life? That question would drive a story across nine years of serialization, 108 installments, and 27 collected volumes. By the time the final chapter reached readers on the 11th of June 2010, the manga had been translated into dozens of languages, adapted twice for television, twice for film in animation, and three times in live action. It would go on to sell over 80 million copies worldwide. Yet those numbers tell you almost nothing about why Arakawa's world gripped so many readers so completely. To understand that, you have to start with two brothers, a snow-covered village called Resembool, and a night when everything went catastrophically wrong.

• 2. A World Built on Rules

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  Arakawa set her story in a fictional country called Amestris, modeled on European society at the turn of the 20th century. She had been reading about the Industrial Revolution in England and was struck by how different its culture, architecture, and dress were from anything she had grown up with in Hokkaido, Japan. That contrast became the visual and political logic of the entire series: a steampunk world where government-employed alchemists called State Alchemists carry code names based on their area of expertise and answer to a military leader with the title Führer.

  Alchemy in Amestris is practiced through Transmutation Circles, drawn patterns that allow a skilled alchemist to reshape physical matter. The governing principle is the Law of Equivalent Exchange: nothing can be created from nothing. You must give as much as you receive. The series spends considerable time explaining why this law exists and what enforces it. Above the system stands a being called Truth, described as pantheistic and semi-cerebral, who appears as a reflection of the alchemist attempting the transmutation. Truth punishes any attempt to violate the Law of Equivalent Exchange by taking a piece of the alchemist's own body, often something symbolically tied to what the alchemist most values.

  Beyond the Transmutation Circle system, Arakawa introduced a separate alchemical tradition from a Xing, a country heavily reminiscent of China. That tradition, called alkahestry, is more medical in nature and can be used at a distance via kunai. Its existence implies that every country in the world practices some form of alchemy, each filtered through its own cultural logic.

  There is also a city called Resembool, a manufacturing town known for automail - mechanical prosthetic limbs - and the conservative region of Ishbal, whose population rejects alchemy on religious grounds. Ishbal's near-destruction in an internal conflict called the Ishbalan Civil War was not invented for drama. Arakawa's research included conversations with war veterans and refugees, and the Ishbalan genocide draws directly on real-world histories of ethnic cleansing and colonial annexation. The soldier who fired the shot that started the war was Amestrian.

• 3. The Brothers Elric

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  Edward Elric lost his left leg on the night he and his younger brother Alphonse attempted to resurrect their mother Trisha using human transmutation. Alphonse lost his entire body. Edward, in the moments that followed, gave up his right arm to anchor Alphonse's soul into a suit of armor before the opportunity closed. Both acts were spontaneous and irreversible. What had driven them to the attempt was the absence of their father, Van Hohenheim, who had left the family for reasons unknown, followed by Trisha's death from illness.

  Edward and Alphonse had trained under a teacher named Izumi Curtis, and it is she they return to later in the story - only to discover that Curtis had also performed human transmutation, attempting to revive her own stillborn child. The violation of the taboo, it turns out, is far more widespread than the brothers imagined.

  Colonel Roy Mustang recruits Edward into the military as a State Alchemist, a choice that requires Edward to undergo the automail procedure to replace his missing limbs with mechanical ones. The procedure is described as painful. Edward's childhood friend Winry Rockbell, whose family are automail mechanics in Resembool, becomes the person who fits and maintains his mechanical arm and leg throughout the story.

  The title Edward earns as a State Alchemist is "Fullmetal Alchemist" - the name that gives the series its identity. It describes both his mechanical limbs and the armor that contains his brother. Alphonse exists inside the suit for the entire main story, unable to eat, sleep, or feel physical sensation. Arakawa had decided from the beginning that the brothers should recover their bodies - at least partly. The question of how, and at what additional cost, is what the next three years of the brothers' story is built around.

• 4. Conspiracies and Homunculi

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  Maes Hughes, a friend of Mustang's, is the character who first discovers the scale of the government conspiracy buried beneath the Elrics' search for the philosopher's stone. Hughes investigates alone, continues the brothers' research after they leave Central City, and is killed by the homunculus Envy before he can share what he found. His death is one of the story's pivotal turns.

  The homunculi are artificial humans created using philosopher's stones, which are themselves made by trapping thousands of human souls through alchemy. Most homunculi possess superhuman regeneration, powered by those trapped souls, and they do not age. They can only be killed by exhausting the philosopher's stone inside them. Their creator, called Father, is revealed to be working toward a specific goal: he founded Amestris specifically to accumulate a large enough population to create a single massive philosopher's stone, then use it to absorb the superior being that lies beyond the Gate of Truth and achieve godhood.

  King Bradley, Amestris's ruler, is the homunculus Wrath. Riza Hawkeye, adjutant to Mustang, discovers that Bradley's adopted son Selim is the homunculus Pride. The Elrics' Xingese ally, Prince Lin Yao, arrives seeking a philosopher's stone to secure his position as heir to his country's throne, and eventually becomes the vessel for the homunculus Greed. Mustang himself is later forced to perform human transmutation on what Father calls the "Promised Day" and is blinded as a result.

  Hohenheim, the brothers' absent father, turns out to have been rendered immortal against his will when Father arranged the fall of his original country four centuries earlier. He has spent those centuries working toward a way to stop Father, carrying within himself a counterplan that he activates on the Promised Day alongside a reformed Scar.

• 5. Arakawa's Creative Choices

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  Arakawa has named manga authors Suihō Tagawa and Hiroyuki Eto as her primary inspirations for character design, describing her artwork as a blend of both their styles. She found that the easiest characters to draw were Alex Louis Armstrong and the small animals that appear throughout the series. She liked dogs, which is why dogs appear so frequently in the story.

  The concept of equivalent exchange - the philosophical engine of the entire narrative - was inspired by watching her parents work a farm in Hokkaido. They labored to earn what they ate. The idea that obtaining something always requires giving something of equal worth came directly from that observation.

  When the series began, Arakawa was managing more story than the magazine's page count could accommodate. Monthly Shōnen Gangan gave her limited pages per installment, and she cut what she called "unnecessary details" from each chapter to protect the pacing of the climax. Some characters appeared less frequently than she intended. She had initially projected the series would fill 21 volumes. It reached 27.

  For the original 2003 anime adaptation, Arakawa made an unusual request: she asked the production staff at Bones to work independently from her and to invent a different ending than the manga's. She did not want to duplicate the ending across both media, and she also wanted the manga to run longer so its characters could develop further. When she saw how the anime staff reimagined the origins of the homunculi, she said she found it genuinely surprising and enjoyed their speculation.

  The social themes running through the series - discrimination, political corruption, war, the ethics of scientific advancement - were built in from the start. Arakawa sought out refugees, war veterans, and former yakuza to inform specific plot threads. Scar's backstory and his use of alchemy - a practice forbidden by his religion - to kill State Alchemists is a deliberate echo of communities whose land was taken by outside powers, including ironically some individuals who were originally members of those same communities.

• 6. Publication and Reach

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  The 108th and final chapter of Fullmetal Alchemist appeared in the July 2010 issue of Monthly Shōnen Gangan, published on the 11th of June 2010. A side story followed in the same magazine on the 11th of September 2010. Square Enix collected the chapters into 27 tankōbon volumes, the first released on the 22nd of January 2002 and the last on the 22nd of November 2010. A kanzenban edition in 18 volumes appeared from the 22nd of June 2011 to the 22nd of September 2012.

  In North America, Viz Media published the 27 volumes in English between the 3rd of May 2005 and the 20th of December 2011. From 2011 to 2014, the company also released an omnibus format combining three volumes into one. Yen Press acquired the digital rights in April 2014 and released the series on the ComiXology platform on the 12th of December 2016. Viz Media's 18-volume Fullmetal Edition ran from the 8th of May 2018 to the 23rd of August 2022. English localizations also appeared from Madman Entertainment in Australasia and Chuang Yi in Singapore. The series has been published in Polish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Korean as well.

  The first volume's English release was the top-selling graphic novel in the United States in 2005. Initial print run for that first volume in Japan was 150,000 copies; after the original anime aired, that figure climbed to 1.5 million copies for the same volume. By January 2010, every single volume had individually crossed the one-million-copy threshold in Japan. Producer Kouji Taguchi of Square Enix noted that before the premiere of Brotherhood, each volume was selling roughly 1.9 million copies; that figure rose to 2.1 million copies after the second series launched.

  The live-action film directed by Fumihiko Sori was released on the 19th of November 2017, with Ryosuke Yamada as Edward Elric, Tsubasa Honda as Winry Rockbell, and Dean Fujioka as Roy Mustang. Two sequels followed on the 20th of May and the 24th of June 2022, both becoming available on Netflix in August and September of that year. A full-color Webtoon version reformatted for vertical scrolling launched on the 7th of May 2025, releasing new chapters twice a week.

• 7. Awards and Legacy

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  Fullmetal Alchemist won the 49th Shogakukan Manga Award for the shōnen category in 2004, sharing the prize with Yakitate!! Japan. The same year, the Japan Media Arts Festival included it among the Manga Division's jury-recommended works at its 8th installment; it appeared again in the recommended works at the 11th installment in 2007.

  The UK's Eagle Award for favorite manga went to Fullmetal Alchemist in both 2010 and 2011. The 42nd Seiun Award for best science fiction comic followed in 2011, the same year Arakawa received the New Artist Prize at the fifteenth Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize. The series ranked third in the inaugural Tsutaya Comic Awards' All-Time Best Section in 2017.

  Critic Jason Thompson, reviewing for a manga reference work, called Arakawa one of the best creators of action scenes working in the medium and specifically noted the series's strong female characters - unusual for a magazine aimed at boys. Thompson predicted it would be remembered as one of the classic shōnen manga series of the 2000s. Sales figures lend weight to that prediction: by July 2021, the series had 80 million copies in circulation worldwide, placing it among the best-selling manga of all time.

  On TV Asahi's Manga Sōsenkyo 2021 poll, in which 150,000 people cast votes for their top 100 manga series, Fullmetal Alchemist ranked ninth. In Japan's Super Comic City fan market, readers have produced over 1,100 original doujinshi based on the series. A franchise that began with contradictory library books about a medieval myth had, across fewer than a decade of monthly chapters, become one of Square Enix's best-selling properties alongside Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.