Gunnm: Last Order

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 Four looking 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.

This is one of the best series I have ever read. If you love a deep thought provoking story with amazing character development and action packed fight scenes then this is exactly what you are looking for. As Battle Angel Alita deals with the question of, "who am I?" Last Order addresses, "what makes us a human?" as you are constantly bombarded with this dilemma thought out the series.

Although the story does not follow suit to the original Battle Angel Alita series it does incorporate many of the events that happened in it with flash backs to them. Because of this you are required to read the original series but when reading this you need to just take some things with a grain of salt per say. The most notable is the ending of BAA and the start of BAA:LO ( Space City Ketheres). However this is not a bad thing as the story is much more elaborate and now has the ability to spin in multiple directions.

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 <3

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.

The story 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.

The rambling story arc of the last series, with its ridiculous ending and dropped characters, was not without its flaws, but it was entertaining and well illustrated enough to hold my interest.

THE HYPE around this series is that it cleans up the mess the last one ended on- Which early on, it seems to, even if in a clunky, much less fun and much more violent and gory way than we might hope for. One has to admit- Kishiro is still a great visual artist and his gore hits as hard as ever, his line work and shading more sleek and evocative than the first series. Shame about the story, though. A big warning sign comes up with interplanetary travel being brought into the series- That setting from the first one we all came to love, its cyberpunk shantytown slum- Nope. The settings here are a desert on Mars and (worse) a space station battle arena.

Yes, what no one tells you about this series is that it is decidedly not about the titular Battle Angel, but a fighting contest between a bunch of random cyborgs in an arena floating through space. I dropped out after reading the majority of the series and seeing that this is clearly where Kishiro's head was at- Even giving elaborate and sometimes interesting backstories to one off side characters. The post apocalyptic vampire story line was actually interesting and would have made for a cool series in its own right- But it isn't Battle Angel, and ultimately inconsequential. There's nothing really Battle Angel about this, not even Gally, whose self-discovery story line takes a backseat to filler between endless chapters about karate cyborgs fighting each other. I'll give the art its due, some of these characters are interesting looking- But random cyborgs rambling for pages about their fighting techniques does not a compelling story make.

Overall, a real disappointment for fans of the first series hoping for a definitive ending, and ultimately so disconnected from the original series in theme, story and setting that I am choosing not to see it as cannon. Perhaps the biggest letdown is the waste of Kishiro's great artwork.

This is gonna be a be a pretty quick review, so I appologize if the structure of this review seems kinda neglected.

As a fan of the original Gunnm, I was extremely disapointed with Last Order. Before I continue, I need to mention that I have only read the first 4 volumes before droping it.

Now why don't I like Gunnm Last Order? Well there are a lot of reasons. First of all, the art got from great to "meh" (especially the character designs), and it started to look like it was focussing too much on the world building (the setting, by the way, was very uninterresting compared to the one of the original series) and neglecting characters. The Gally of the original series, the one that became my favorite manga/anime female character, has changed, and not in a good way. She became bland and boring in Last Order, and none of the other characters catch my interest. Philosophical themes (which used to be a strong point of the first series, with the characters), when they are present, are now pretty badly written and incoherent, and the fights have no emotion, they seem to be all about characters explaining in several pages the science behind their attacks, which I find boring after a while.

Which is why I dropped it after forcing myself to read the first 4 volumes. I find it really sad, because the original Gunnm was such a great manga, and I strongly recommand it if you like cyberpunk and post-apocaliptic stories. But I just can't recommand Last Order.

Many anime and manga follow old formulae and often wonder a predictable path, but Battle Angel refuses to fall fowl of cliches and does its best to plough its own furrow. The Last Order series of novels typifies this trend by taking the reader not just out of this world, but into the very essence of existence itself. It even turns the playing field into a character in its own right while still giving the audience a semblance of normality in the form of a useful supporting cast and overwhelming monsters to fight in a straight forward struggle of good versus evil.

What we have been left with is an ongoing story that works on a multitude of levels. The series will appeal from those into action adventures to ones intrigued by spirituallity and the human mind. This is a series that, along with the preceeding series of Battle Angel Alita novels must take pride and place in all manga collections thanks to its unique twist and portrayal of the heros journey as well as for daring to be different.

That gonna be subjective, as most of reviews of this manga but this is my first review on this site .(Why most of the people thinks that original Gunnm was a serious cyberpunk manga?It can be as goofy where it wants to be)
The story:7 is good written but suffers from shonen cliches as is mostly a tournament ark.
The art:8 Creator's style is polished compared to original .Battle scenes and architecture are just stunning(those are the main two things you'll gonna see so it very impressive).Characters looks fresh and detailed.Good coloring and lighting.
The characters:9 that's the best part in this manga.Whole chapters dedicated to the bios.You'll get attached to the new characters,old ones are not forgotten too.
The enjoyment:10 Haven't read such good battle manga for a while.
Overall 8.

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 just isn'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.

The first thing I noticed about Last Order was the change in art style. What used to be heavily stylized character designs became very boring and unoriginal. I really want to stress this because the first Battle Angel, despite some mediocre art in the beginning of the series, still managed to look freakin' awesome! The art style is kind of retained for the first volume, but it changes fast and unexpectedly. Suddenly Alita looks like she has a horse face and frog lips, and so does pretty much everyone else who looks human. They offset this by having significantly more robots and cyborgs that don't look like people at all, except these designs are messed up too. Somewhere along the line they must have ran out of ideas for robots because some of the new designs are absolutely hideous. In the roller ball arc of the original Battle Angel Alita, there is ONE character who looks stupid, and he happens to be a joke character.
Let me lay out some the new designs:

1. A huge monkey bot that shots lasers out of its even bigger penis
2. A shrimp bot (like the shellfish)
3. The Thing rip-off
4. A bot inside a bot inside a bot inside a bot

And this is only a taste of the ridiculous designs. So the only thing that really keeps the art score up is that it at least looks good, but that's about it.

Battle Angel Alita: Last Order starts by throwing the crappy ending of the original right out the window. This is a very good thing, as the original ending was rushed and didn't make any sense at all. The sequel picks up a couple chapters before the original ending. However, Last Order quickly falls prey to the "gotta explain everything" disease. Battle Angel Alita was great because it put all its focus into the characters and the action. Last Order is like reading a Wikipedia entry about the history of the Battle Angel universe. Okay, yes, there is action and poor attempts at philosophy stuff in Last Order, but it is all ruined by interruptions from boring flashbacks of people we don't care about. All the mystery to the setting was ruined as soon as they started trying to explain everything.

Then at least the characters ACT the same right? Wrong. You see, for some reason Alita forgot how much of a complete bad ass she used to be. Remember when she loved battle because it made her feel alive? That girl is dead now. So now she asks stupid cliche questions to herself like "Why am I fighting?" Umm, hello!!! Its because you LOVE to fight.

And then Alita grows a tail.

Arghhh, I feel so let down by Last Order. Battle Angel Alita was brilliant at conveying drama with little talking and little inner monologue, but Last Order is exactly the opposite: WORDS WORDS WORDS. Everyone also has a "special" attack now which they shout out like in every shonen ever (the penis monkey's is the libido cannon by the way). So what ever happened to just punching the brains out of people? I dunno, because that never happens anymore. A punch will happen, then the punched guy will take a page to talk about how this has changed him as a person. SERIOUSLY?

Fans of Battle Angel Alita, read it, because I guess its worth what little feel of the original it kept. Just don't be disappointed when Last Order turns out to be vastly inferior to the original.