High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Fullmetal Alchemist anime and manga series feature an extensive cast of fictional characters created by Hiromu Arakawa. The story is set in a fictional universe within the 20th Century in which alchemy is one of the most advanced scientific techniques known to man. Although the story in the first anime and the manga basically start the same, the first anime, midway through its run, begins to differ greatly from the manga; characters that are killed early on in the manga survive to the end of the first anime and vice versa. The second anime`s (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood) events, however, follow the ones from the manga.