Rating: 
Summary: LOVIN' IT!!! :-)
Review: The older Battle Angel series is what got me started on Manga and undoubtably it will end it. The art was fantastic, the story incredible and the various nods to actual scientific reasearch were all refreshing. Most of all, the characters were undeniably interesting. Especially Alita.And that is why I picked up Last Order. As a veteran, I have to say that Alita is back! This story does all the justice of the first series and adds quite a bit to it. But it is getting a 4 instead of a five because not only is the book printed in the rather difficult to get used to Magna form(its backwards folks) but I also felt these books focused just a little too much on the violence rather than the story. In the first series, teh violence was built into the story. Here, it seems the story is...you guessed it! Built into the violence. Not entirely a bad thing, just a little less fun overall.
Rating: 
Summary: New, different, and not quite Angel of Redemption
Review: The older Battle Angel series is what got me started on Manga and undoubtably it will end it. The art was fantastic, the story incredible and the various nods to actual scientific reasearch were all refreshing. Most of all, the characters were undeniably interesting. Especially Alita. And that is why I picked up Last Order. As a veteran, I have to say that Alita is back! This story does all the justice of the first series and adds quite a bit to it. But it is getting a 4 instead of a five because not only is the book printed in the rather difficult to get used to Magna form(its backwards folks) but I also felt these books focused just a little too much on the violence rather than the story. In the first series, teh violence was built into the story. Here, it seems the story is...you guessed it! Built into the violence. Not entirely a bad thing, just a little less fun overall.
Rating:
Summary: A tale of karma, human nature, and serious butt-kicking . .
Review: This series picks up more or less half-way through the final volume of "Battle Angel Alita" (Angel's Ascension) as released in the United States by VIZ, just after Alita has been blown to smithereens by a diabolical booby trap engineered by that demonic genius, Professor Desty Nova.
This change in the originally presented storyline is neat because in my view, at least, though some interesting issues were dealt with in the remainder of "Angel's Ascension", the ending was a bit to "pat" for my taste, particularly in comparison with the deeply philosophical and convoluted storyline that threads the rest of the story together.
In this extended storyline, Alita is re-born into a Tiphares driven mad by Professor Nova's broadcast revelation of the Secret of Tiphares. (If you don't know it, I'm not gonna tell you. Read the original series, it's fascinating!) The city has split into at least three warring factions; the adult citizens of Tiphares, the children of the city, and the automated machinery of the Tiphares M.I.B., which is trying desperately to clamp the lid back down on it's shocking secret.
Settling this mad civil war proves to be only the first of a new series of challenges awaiting Alita as she sets out on her new life, with Professor Nova and some seriously strange copies of herself as companions. Political machinations are subsequently revealed that make Machiavelli look like a pre-schooler.
Yes, there is a lot of violence, but one can easily read between the blood and gore, picking out Yukito Kishiro's nuggets of psychological, para-psychological and philosophical exploration, as the central characters continue their quest to find out what truly makes a human being human.
Rating:
Summary: Last Order
Review: Yukito Kishiro returns with fan favorite Battle Angel Alita in Last Order and the art is standard Kishiro excellence. Old villains return and we're introduced to the youth of Tiphares. This series hasn't skipped a beat where it left off.
Rating:
Summary: increased violence, decreased story content
Review: Yup - this new volume of Battle Angel is more violent than anything, and doesn't really explain all the mechanics of just how Alita came to be in Tiphares, and what is going on. But given that Alita herself only just became conscious of being on Tiphares, of the city itself being strewn into chaos, should the reader really expect all the explanations to come in one volume? The Battle Angel world is unfathomably large and complex, and I think it is appropriate that Mr. Kishiro has held off on these details until Alita & co's arrival in Ketheres in Volume 3. Readers who find this and the second volume a bit lacking in storyline will be duly rewarded for sticking in there at volume 3 - as Mr. Kishiro opens up a whole new universe full of interplanetary politics, class disparity and a bit of political commentary on current day events, if one looks hard enough.
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