Battle Angel Alita

Just finished the two OVAs, thought they were pretty good. I really liked older portrayal of the future look of the setting.

Is the manga worth picking up? Apparently it's been going on for a while now.

if you are a fan of resolved plots and actual endings dont pick it up
that said its good and the journeys worth it

the first three volumes are actually quite fun. The manga its old fashion but fun indeed. The ending its sort of rushed but the author later on decided to make it a new because he didnt like it and he spawned a fucking Looooong ass manga with all the kind of shit that you could possibly imagined.
He finished that one and now he is doing a sequel of that one, revolving Alita/Gally in Mars.

It's on its 3rd or 4th cycle.

A lot of people hated how drawn out the tourney arc was since it introduced way too many new characters that didn't matter and the ones that did got near no
page time.

The current arc of her back story on Mars is going alright though. Needs more panzer but they're sticking with how fucked up growing up on Mars is atm

Not OP but was interested in picking up the manga and am interested in Sup Forums's opinion. From what I understand, Last Order was a re-telling of the end of the first manga series. Should I read the entire first manga series before Last Order or just read until they diverge and then skip to Last Order?

The manga is 100x better than the anime and probably a top 10 for me

Everything looks great and the world has this great cyberpunkish hopeless feel to it

Definitely pick it up.

>onymous 09/07/16(Wed)00:46:49 No.146859311▶
> Not OP but was interested in picking up the manga and am interested in Sup Forums's opinion. From what I understand, Last Order was a re-telling of the end of the first manga series. Should I read the entire first manga series before Last Order or just read until they diverge and then skip to Last Order?

Last Order is pretty much a straight up sequel with a few retcons

Reading the first bit is a requirement.

The original ending was suppose to be the "happy" ending.

Last order does pick up on a lot of new stuff but the general anchor of Gally is to save her friends which you wouldn't understand too much who they were. Nothing is critical though but Last Order does a small recap on most of the characters as far as what they've been doing since you last saw them to get them where they are.

To be honest, I didn't really mind the original ending. It was a little abrupt, but it meshed with the overall tone and feel of the setting.

The reboot on the other hand kinda went off the deep end for me, and feels like it has nothing in common with the original run except for Gally and Desty, especially in terms of setting. The moment it really lost me during the 20-volume post-apocalyptic vampire flashback arc. Why the fuck couldn't that have been a side manga?

Read the whole original run, it's gr8.

Dropped after the insulting conclusion to Last Order.

What the fuck Kishiro. It was a lazy copout that completely shit on the themes the manga had previously established.

He was changing publishers so had to work with what he had while luring people to the new series

I thought last order was a little too cliché filled and gave up on it how did it end?

Had to establish where humanity went wrong and decided to add best girl to the story.

>20-volume post-apocalyptic vampire flashback arc

Maybe I'm alone here, but I prefer the whole "fit everything into 45 minutes" OVA format to that sort of thing. Sure, its usually incoherent, but if you have a functioning brain, you can make sense of it.

So, Last Order dealt with the themes of identity.

Gally struggled with the fact that she had effectively died, and was now chip based. Her brain existed somewhere else. Eventually, she determined that it doesn't matter and that she was still herself. Self determination.


BUT NO

The end of Last Order has her being cloned from the brain, so now there are two of them. And tthe Flesh one is the "real" one. The flesh one gets to fuck off back to earth with Figure Four and all her family with no memory of the entirety of Last order, while the character that we've been watching develop basically chooses to abandon them entirely, despite promises she made to herself in the first goddamn volume.

The author basically just dumped every character from the original series and Last Order.

has anyone even translated chapters of the new manga? It's gotten so bizarre I really just want to see where the ride goes at this point

The bit where they're doing the interviews with the Barjack fighters and the disembodied head cyborg guys are enthusiastically talking about being living missile guidance systems for the revolution was the moment that cemented it as one of my favourite cyberpunk works of all time. The fact that those guys exist in the first place is fucked up and brilliant as is, but that bit took it to the next level.

Ironically, I think the Vampire arc was the best written part of LO, aside from wacky Sechs shenanigans. It felt more like the original series, which is good.

why does she turn me on so much?

Alita is a better name than Gally, fucking deal with it nerds

Shouldn't you be busy working on those Avatar sequels Jim?

BAA is great outside of like half the last volume
LO is good/great for the first 3-4 volumes then starts to recline when Alita's personality takes a nosedive that never recovers but is still a fun read because of the new characters and top notch world building

Mars Chronicles is still fairly early, but the only thing I can definitely say is I hate the new art direction.

Yes, it's been out for a looooong time

Last Order would be considered good if it wasn't a sequel to the original.

All the characters are great, as is the setting. It has AMAZING action.

But the original is just so good and doesn't work tonally with the sequel.

I don't know exactly when it happened. But it fucking sucks.

Just a heads up but the tone of the manga is significantly different to that of the OVAs. IIRC the author hated the OVAs.
It took a while for me to get into as a result because I went from the OVAs to the manga expecting a dark and gritty cyberpunk tragedy to something that seemed almost comedic and I remember bitching about it on Sup Forums for that reason. But when I went back into it with an open mind I came to see it as one of the best written and illustrated battle mangas I've ever read that can be both clever and surprisingly emotional at times.

Strength and ruthlessness without losing her femininity.

Also skintight bodysuits and dem lips

Octo lips were her biggest draw

And it wasn't an immediate switch. The art was still good like halfway into Zott.

I like how his boot always have heavy metal lyrics on them.

I know. This is an exception for me.

Truth

>IIRC the author hated the OVAs.
Kishiro hates fucking everything.

He's a legendary cunt. He literally got thrown off his magazine because he refused to change a single goddamn word. It's also why his work was never touched after the OVAs.

Hard to notice a art decline when you are cringing at shitty backstories and characters. I almost legit dropped the series forever on the Vampire backstory. Why the fuck does that bitch exist. Like, in BAA there is a werewolf but its genetically done and shit. She is just an actual vampire.

I actually liked the Vampire backstory. Nice and tragic, something that Last Order had been lacking.

But it seriously should have been a companion piece, not in the main story.

Why does he even keep paying to renew them.

He's never going to make it.

I've been watching and re-watching 80s-90s OVAs recently and this was one of them. I love the sort of nihilistic tone from the era.

If the Vampire didn't do it, spending so much time on the Beauty and the Beast shitty fight and backstories doesn't help either. ZOTT was just a clusterfuck.
Then you had A LITERAL GOD or kinda. Every fight just was too long or drawn out, lasting several chapters or a whole volumeS for the final match.

Alita's getting revived twice was fucking dumb too, and her entire character being trivialized after the first to being xd she acts like a act xd octopus lips was annoying

I mean, technically Gally's arc is completely resolved by last order. The weird robot with her memories is still fucking around, but she's a terrible character.

Best parts of zott were when gally wasn't around and it was just Sechs doing fun shounen stuff.

>The moment it really lost me during the 20-volume post-apocalyptic vampire flashback arc.
I agree, actually I fucking lost it as soon as they entered "the tournament" which was boring and obnoxious as fuck, also the flashback of the vampires.

Jezz... if author wanted to write vampires maybe he should had just done that someplace else, but not in Alita, it felt so out of place.

it had NOTHING to do with Alita, it should had been a different manga.
No it didnt need to, it was fine as it was.
Leave it with ravages of man just like mad max and it works. Leave the imagination of people at work here.

I like that it showed the Scrapyard before it was the Scrapyard

Mbadi did nothing wrong.

They did leave it to the ravages of man without copy pasting mad max

Every time I feel like continuing Mars Chronicels, I find that I'd much rather re-read the original manga instead.
Everything from Last Order onwards was such a mess that it's so difficult to care about the direction the story took.