anime

Today I bought Volume 2 of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Apparently, of the three Best Buys in my area, only one sells enough anime to stock the show in Blu Ray.  That's kind of sad, but one store is better than none.

When I got home, I looked up the show's episode count, and did some quick math. At the rate that Funimation is going right now, they can release all of Brotherhood in exactly five volumes.  At 44 bucks each on Blu Ray, that's.... ouch.  That's a lot.

I've been going back and forth on whether I should keep buying the show on BD.  To be honest, it isn't so much the price that gets me.  13 episodes for that much dough is still cheaper than anime in the days of singles releases.  I guess what bothers me is that so far, the show hasn't proven that it's worth watching in Hi Def.  The fight scenes look gorgeous, but like with so many anime these days, there have been episodes where hardly anyone moves, and so the BD quality feels like a waste.  Meanwhile there were a few stories in volume 1 which felt slow and unnecessary, despite the fact that the first fourteen episodes are already a compression of events in the original series. I know it gets better over time, but Fullmetal is one of the only surefire money makers right now, and I figured they'd be more willing to pull out the stops.  I want to make this a "one episode per week" show, but that only seems to work with 13 episode series, where every single one has to count.