Battle Angel Alita: Last Order

Sequels are a very tricky business in general. When following up an excellent work, it becomes very difficult to top, with a further instalment. Following up a master work like Battle Angel Alita, one of the greatest sci fi stories ever told, would require an insurmountable amount of talent. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, that level of talent was not present, in Last Order, the follow up. Last Order retcons the ending of BAA, and renders the events of the last 130 pages, redundant. Many would argue that the original ending was weak, and we needed more closure. I am not one of them, but I digress. Thestory begins with Alita waking up in a lab, in the floating city of Tiphares. Much time had passed, since she had seemingly died. Events have changed, and Alita is once again trust into battles of survival, and the protection of others. Her main goal throughout the series, is to search for her missing friend, Lou. But while this forms the crux of the plot, events spiral out in all directions, and the story goes off on a heap of tangents. While the original story kept things restrained, and featured a far more down to Earth setting(mostly literally), the sequel takes Alita on a trip deep into space, where a whole host of OTT craziness occurs. Events start off very compelling, and some interesting new characters are introduced, that Alita both befriends and makes enemies of. Often both. It’s clear early on, that there’s more of a focus on battles this time around, and exposition heavy ones at that. Battles have always played a big part in the series, but here, they take centre stage. This isn’t so problematic at first. The battles are entertaining, and the characters are more than enough to carry events for a while. After about the halfway point, however, events start to lose focus, and the tight pacing and compact storyline of the original, is pretty much abandoned. It’s around this point that we are presented with a backstory involving one of the newly introduced characters. It’s a story involving vampires. While some supernatural elements did previously feature, the introduction of vampires is a very big stretch. The backstory does nevertheless manage to be quite compelling, and the protagonist of it is one of the best in the manga. It does however, break the momentum of the plot and feels out of place. The mangaka clearly wanted to take a break from the main story, but it would have been best if he released these chapters as a separate manga entirely. After this the focus is shifted back to Alita once more. Except…. that’s not entirely true. Alita is in fact, relegated to a supporting character for most of the manga, while others steal the limelight. It does help that most of the characters are very engaging, including her male bodied clone. In fact I’d go as to say that there’s not a single wasted character in the story. They are multidimensional and complex. Little has changed here, since its predecessor. But this doesn’t excuse the very poor story structure and terrible pacing. It saves the manga, but it doesn’t excuse the problems. Most of the entire second half, is devoted to a fighting tournament. The manga pretty much becomes a battle shounen, with drawn out fights and copious amounts of exposition. The excellent themes that the original explored, are occasionally still present, but mostly drowned out by battles, and long winded speeches about “sci fi karate” and more uninteresting philosophies. Another problem is that there is more of an element of “magic” to the battles. I mean that in the sense that characters manage to get out of dire situation too easily and too frequently. They may return to life or produce really overpowered attacks, seemingly out of nowhere. There is some explanations given for this, but they are not particularly good ones, and it doesn’t change the fact that death is being cheapened. This was never a problem in Battle Angel Alita. Battles would always remain very tense, and Alita herself felt much more vulnerable. She’s very OP for a lot of Last Order. While Alita, remains one of my favourite characters in all manga and anime, she didn’t really grow through the events of Last Order at all. She suffers several identify crises. This was stuff was already explored in the original, and she had supposedly moved past it. Things pick up again in the last few chapters, as events become more grounded again, and we are introduced to some old characters. There is no conclusive ending however, and the story continues in *another* follow up manga, called Mars Chronicle. The fact that all these chapters continue to be produced, because fans weren’t happy with the original ending, is quite amusing in a sense. In spite of its problems, Last Order is still a solid manga and certainly not any worse than most battle shounen manga. But the original was so much more.

I did really enjoy it while reading the manga. It was fantastic despite what other people say about how it grew different from the original series. Which is actually true. But personally i enjoyed every scene. The art was good, they bested how characters have different behaviors and mentalities. One thing that actually bothered me was when the manga starts i couldn't tell if the 2nd series was actually the sequel of the first one, in my opinion it kind of lacked context of what really happened afterwards. Otherwise i think it was one of the best i have ever read thanks to datfootdive

Hopefully you've read the original series before you read my review! As far as a sequel goes, this wasn't my favorite. It's good, but I enjoyed Gunnm a lot only to be somewhat let down by this. A lot of those characters that you enjoyed in Gunnm are really no where to be found, replaced by characters that just didn't grab me as much. The story kind of drags in my opinion and that's probably why my enjoyment isn't as high with Last Order. Alita doesn't occupy as much as the spotlight, instead we have volumes dedicated to the past and other supporting character which justisn't as interesting to me. Also, Kodansha if you read this, please publish this as a Hardcover with all the volumes included! The original series looked great in Hardcover, it was disappointing going from that to the omnibus paperback format.

I was genuinely interested in BAA:LO after the....interesting read-through of its predecessor. This was mainly because I heard that LO was better in terms of story, character, art, action, etc. etc. However, does it /really/ live up to the hype I was fed? Read on to find out. [Story - 3] I should probably begin by touching on That Retcon: Yeah, this story basically edits out like the last chapter or so of the original story because it wouldn't exist otherwise. While I am still critical of how rushed the original ending was, I was glad that some of the concepts (Ketheres the Space City, Figure Fourlooking for Alita) carried over into Last Order. However, I'm not sure if I feel good about such elements carrying over into a story like this. To be more specific, I don't know if this should have been a Battle Angel Alita story because it just.....does not read like it. Between the painfully-stereotypical shonen tropes seeping in (tournament arc, Powah Of Friendship, hyperfocus on martial arts) and extremely poor pacing (the tournament arc literally makes up 2/3 of the 124 chapters), I'm curious as to why the story shifted into this tone. Whether it was done to attract new readers or the mangaka genuinely thought this was good is unknown, but I sure as hell don't like it. I know I was a bit prude regarding the original's story, but compared to this, it's the freaking Iliad. I don't really remember any Actual Themes being a thing besides stuff about 'destiny' and 'space karate', so that's not even worth commenting on. There are way too many characters as well, to the point that I genuinely enjoyed a side character's backstory arc way more than the main story. The focus shifts around a lot as a result; While I don't necessarily mind huge casts, I DO mind huge casts being present without proper handling. [Art - 7] The art's pretty solid, thankfully. For one, it's a lot cleaner and fluid than its predecessor. Even in large-scale action pieces (which are abundant this time around), you can tell exactly how so-and-so is striking so-and-so with a charged-up limb and whatnot. This is especially helpful when the team battles start up, since there are so many people involved naturally. Another aspect worth commenting on is character design. While I'm miffed about how many characters there are, and how poorly they're written, at least they all have distinctive designs. Whether it's the various robot combatants in the tournament, their 'pit crew', the space council, or whoever else, you can tell exactly who is who. This pairs up nicely with the art being cleaner than before, since you get to truly appreciate their looks. But of course, not everything is perfect (perhaps even less so). The background/setting art isn't abysmal in its quality, but it's not exactly up to the task in terms of being interesting to look at + giving proper context. I don’t mind ‘sketchy’ artstyles, but the way it’s used here doesn’t help: there are a few scenes where it works and gives a more ‘cerebral’ feeling to the manga (namely the ‘cyberspace’ region a select few can access). However, it’s mostly just really confusing to look at, ESPECIALLY during action. [Character - 6] Since the plotting and pacing are messy at best, I was hoping that the characterization would pick up some of the slack left by those two. Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite the case - there are a few stand-out characters + arcs, but it’s mostly just the mangaka trying to inject character into what amounts to rejects for Ultraman action figure rejects. However, I feel like it says a lot about the writing when I like the side characters more than the actual main cast. Caerula Sanguis isn’t even in ⅓ of the actual story, but the few chapters dedicated to her backstory + her interactions with Alita were far more captivating than the brutally drawn-out tournament arc. There is a genuine anguish and melancholy to it, unlike the rather bland But-Muh-Karate antics from most of the other characters. Aga Mbadi/Trinidad is a compelling antagonist, and follows a (debatable) rule of solid writing: ‘a good villain believes that they’re the hero.’ His heart is truly one borne from the purity of his upstanding morality of the past, but it is ultimately aimed in the wrong direction because Plot. Jim Roscoe is a minor antagonist at best, but god DAMN was he a tragic villain. This amount of gushing cannot be said for the main cast, as hinted at before. Alita has certainly grown a bit since the preceding manga, but she’s mostly the same bratty ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ character for no legitimate reason. Her counterparts aren’t any better: Sechs is at the forefront of most of the good action, but his personality is just too ‘tsundere’ for his own good. The twins aren’t even worth discussing, so let’s move on to the rest; Nova never changes in his characterization, so the whole ‘mad scientist’ schtick gets old after a while if it hasn’t already, Zazie’s a stereotypical Good Soldier, Toji is a karate-chopping waste of panel space because of how much of a broken record he sounds like, and Zekka is trying way too hard to be cool but just looks like a complete prick. I could go on, but it would be a waste of our time. [Enjoyment/Overall - 5] I’m frankly a bit disappointed with LO, but this isn’t the absolute worst thing I’ve read. There are worse titles out there for sure, and it’s not like the bad completely outweighs the good. It just hurts to see something with a lot of potential get squandered like this. I would recommend this if you liked the action and artwork in BAA, but not if you either liked or disliked the characterization, plot, and pacing; It just drops off from here, and will hopefully be beaten out by BAA: Mars Chronicle.