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I’m really enjoying Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I haven’t read the manga, but I loved the first anime, even when it diverged from the source material, so I’m not someone that demands an adaptation be a frame-for-frame duplicate, it just has to be good!
Anime is a totally different medium of entertainment to manga and as such, the dream of a ‘perfect adaptation’ is impossible to realise, because what works in a comic won’t always work for animation. The transition between the two effects everything, from the way the dialogue flows to the selection of a certain scene at the expense of another; an anime series will always have a limited number of episodes to fill and when the source material is particularly long-running, not every single panel can be included. This is a limitation of anime and one should approach an adaptation with that in mind.
The problem is that hardcore fans are often unwilling to compromise, and, in the case of FMA: Brotherhood, this really seems to be effecting the reception of the series, as if the fandom is literally expecting to watch a slideshow of the manga, and when it doesn’t materialise, they feel betrayed, despite the fact it was never going to be like that anyway.
It’s frustrating because depending on which reviews you read, FMA: Brotherhood is either a great, exciting series or just a terrible waste of time. I think it has been fine so far, but all the whining seems to be obscuring its true quality.
A great adaptation should always be true to the spirit of the original, but it should also have its own personality. An extreme, yet perfect example is Gankutsuou, which retains the decadent, rich corruption of Parisian society in Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, whilst transporting his story thousands of years into the future. Mahiro Maeda got away with it because the majority of anime fans aren’t as well-versed in 19th century French literature and as such, saw Gankutsuou as a stand alone work of anime, and as difficult as it may be, I think people should try to view FMA: Brotherhood in the same way too; wanting it, or any adaptation, to be a perfect duplicate of the original will always end in bitter disappointment.
qwertypoiuy 
Kim 
bateszi 
Xerox 
Lance 
Nick 
William
“wanting it, or any adaptation, to be a perfect duplicate of the original will always end in bitter disappointment.”
I couldn’t agree more. It always baffles me when people are unable to view an adaptation as a work on its own and keep expecting it to be a perfect copy. That just defeats the purpose of an adaptation, IMO. That said, I don’t like FMA:Brotherhood, simply because I don’t like the manga. I’d read some of it before the first anime was announced, but it failed to impress me me to the extent that I forgot I’d read it. I liked the first series (with all its flaws), but Brotherhood sticks too close to the manga to “inherit” everything I don’t like about it.
To be off-topic: I don’t know about ‘Gankutsuou’ though. I’d read and loved the novel several times, way before the anime was made, and I was still willing and able to view the anime as a stand-alone – after all, when one sees “anime adaptation,” “24 episodes” and “Gonzo” one should know better than to expect a faithful adaptation. In my eyes Maeda succeeded because even though he went his own way with the plot and the characters (case in point: Eugénie), and the character development of the Count was the complete opposite than that of its novel counterpart (which I loved because anime!Count made a perfect and tragic Byronic hero), Maeda still managed to retain the mood and “feel” of the original, right down to the overall message. To me, this is the key to the success of an adaptation. (In fact, I consider ‘Gankutsuou’ the best adaptation of ‘Monte Cristo’ that I’ve seen so far, and I’ve seen quite a few… and with the exception of ‘Gankutsuou’ I hate all of them.) (By the way, a sci-fi version of ‘Monte Cristo’ is not anything new, after all – see ‘Tiger! Tiger’ which was one of the inspirations for “Gankutsuou’).
Of course there’s a limit to everything, and while I love ‘Gankutsou,’ ‘RomeoxJuliet’ made me roll my eyes. There’s paraphrase/loose adaptation and there’s “what the hell is this?” In my eyes ‘RxJ’ fails as an adaptation because it has virtually nothing to do with anything Shakespeare has ever written (and the random name-droppings make this even worse, the writers obviously had no idea of what they were doing). Nobody could’ve told it was supposed to be ‘Romeo and Juliet’ if not for the title and the characters’ names.