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.