Episode 63 (2009 Anime)

Ed hammers Father with bare fists, baffling the homunculus that a mere human could beat one who holds God's power. As the god-energy tries to slip loose, Father swallows it back and lunges to drain Greed's Philosopher's Stone. Ling clings to Greed from within their shared body, but Greed knocks the prince clear to spare his soul, revealing his one and only lie: Ling can still take the throne because Lan Fan carries the stone taken from Wrath. As Father absorbs Greed's carbon ability, Lan Fan severs his arm with a flick of her kunai. From inside, Greed explains he has quietly remade Father's body into the frailest form of carbon imaginable, and the homunculus begins to crumble under his own weight. Enraged, Father rips out Greed's soul and casts it away, and the avaricious homunculus fades with a fond goodbye to the friends his soul had come to treasure.

Ed punches a hole clean through the brittle Father, and the last Xerxesian souls stream out into the sky. His stone spent, Father is seized by the Gate's black hands and dragged back to the flask-bound shadow he was four centuries ago, standing before his own Gate. Truth, mirroring his form in white, tells him he failed because he never believed in himself, stealing others' power and chasing the idea of God without ever growing as a person. Begging to know what he should have done, Father is answered only that he ought to have seen the answer with his own eyes before the doors close on him forever.

In the ruins, Ling offers Ed the stone to recover Al, but Ed keeps his vow never to use it and refuses Hohenheim's offer to trade his fading life as well. Realizing the solution himself, Ed draws a Human Transmutation circle like the one from inside Gluttony, promises his friends he will be right back, and performs his final transmutation. At the Gate he offers his own Gate as the toll, accepting that he will lose alchemy and live as an ordinary person, having learned that his faith in solving everything through alchemy was mere conceit. Truth declares him the victor and lets him take Alphonse, whole once more, back home. Al opens human eyes to sunlight for the first time in five years, embraced by his brother, father and friends.

As night falls, Ed returns the shrunken Pride to Mrs. Bradley, and Radio Capital reports the nationwide collapse as a Central Command experiment stopped by a force led by Mustang and Olivier, with Klemin and Edison stripped of power and Bradley and Selim declared lost. Hohenheim makes his way to Resembool and kneels at Trisha's grave, reflecting that his overlong life turned happy once he found her and their sons, then quietly passes with a peaceful smile, which Pinako discovers at daybreak.

The episode adapts the manga's "Journey's End" chapter, and its title card shows the Sephirothic engraving from Edward's Gate. It plays without a musical opening and closes with the theme "Rain" over scenes of Van Hohenheim's life. Because it was built from storyboards before the final chapter was published, some scenes and settings differ from the manga, such as the mostly intact building when Al is restored rather than the manga's rubble, which also explains the changes of clothing. In the English version Truth's approving reply blends Ed and Al's voices, and where the manga has Greed's attack cost Father only an arm and a leg, the anime turns his whole body to graphite so a human punching through him seems plausible.