Hey, I was going to ask that, too. I also use MyAnimeList on a quite regular basis, my username there being "jal90". Will try to look for you there
.
On topic, I have wanted to watch
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood for a while, but its length is a downer. I don't usually get into a series that lasts more than 26 episodes, maybe because I like to watch it in the shortest time span possible, and that with a 64 episode show can be exhausting. So probably will have to wait for it till I get the mood. Same thing goes for
Monster and
Nana.
Meanwhile, I watched
Kino's Journey and
Eden Of The East last month, first being 13 episodes and the second 11
. The first one took me by complete surprise. I mean, it was a recommendation and seemed interesting but I didn't expect to love it so much... in fact it fastly made it to my favorites list. I think what I loved the most of it was its general tone of relaxing, distracting and stress-relieving adventure. It just came in a moment of my life in which I could feel strongly attached to the emotion of travelling and knowing new places and people.
Probably the biggest criticisms it gets, like in any other show that tries to raise philosophical questions and become more or less complex, focus on the delivery of it; some finding it difficult to understand, some others too simple or silly... However for me it worked perfectly, not only because of its content, which I find eloquent enough to catch my interest alone, but as said, because of its tone. Maybe the greatest advantage of
Kino's Journey in comparison with other similarly-themed shows is that, at least to me, it's more of a story to get carried away, not expecting anything from it; in fact there is not any special objective in the show, just exploring.
I didn't love
Eden Of The East so much, but in the end it was also a very good show. An effective story about typical Internet Era conspiracies, with an endearing couple of main characters (specially the boy, Akira) and always keeping a mystery in the story, so the interest on the events happening never ceases. My main complaint would come with one of the side stories*, that as interesting as it could be, I thought was taking too much time from the main story, which I wanted to see explore more deeply; and some serious irregularity at the comedy, mainly between the first and second half of the series.
*
The one with the killer Seleçao