| | |  | VIZ MEDIA | Home » » » Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, Vol 14 | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | Reads R to L (Japanese Style). The fate of entire worlds and peoples is at stake as teams of bizarre life-forms prepare for the barbaric Z.O.T. Tournament finals! Then Alita's friend Zazie arrives in need of a literal disarming. And who will prevail when Hitechnolat Minister and LADDER Assistant Chairman Mbadi and Alita finally have their showdown? While lovely cyborg Alita's friends and allies battle real, personal, and existential demons in a usually fatal sports tournament, she embarks on a quest to rescue her friend Lou's brain from enslavement as a component in a massive computer. On her journey, Alita discovers the secrets of both the post--apocalyptic Scrapyard and the Utopian city of Tiphares... Finally, the full story of Alita's first life is revealed! Unfortunately, it might be better not to know the truth about your past when you're the one responsible for the horror of everyone else's present! | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Yukito Kishiro | | Paperback:
| 208 pages | | Publisher:
| VIZ Media LLC | | Publication Date:
| January 11, 2011 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1421537958 | | Product Length:
| 7.5 inches | | Product Width:
| 5.11 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.73 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.4 pounds | | Package Length:
| 7.4 inches | | Package Width:
| 4.9 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.8 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.35 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 6 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Almost there...Jan 22, 2011
By shinami
For anyone who's struggled through this stretched-out, long winded, wandering series, know this: the end is almost here. This edition, Angel of Defusion, doesn't make a great leap forward in terms of the plot, it doesn't end the interminable ZOTT, but it does move you to the brink of the last chapter so that next issue, I hope, will be the end.
Why is that a good selling point? Well, it doesn't ask you to care about some random, made-for-the-day monster whose sole contribution is to drag the series in yet another direction. It doesn't ask you to care about esotoric space politics, teddy bear carrying Queens or big obelisks, it instead shows how the Scrapyard, and all the characters I've come to love, will be affected. While it does go into yet another flashback, at least this one has some bearing on Alita's future and didn't stretch to two issues. *cough* .
This issue felt like the Kishiro I knew of old. There's humour, emotional involvement by seeing past characters return, movement, precision and spirituality. There are echoes of the eve of Alita's showdown with Jashugan back from Angel of Victory; there's a return to Panzer Kunst over (yawn) Space Karate. It doesn't make Last Orders a great series, but I'm hoping more issues like this will see future issues get back on track.
5 of 6 found the following review helpful:
 In this book... not much happensFeb 02, 2011
By Kid Kyoto
It's sad to see how far the once-great Battle Angel Alita books have fallen. The first series was filled with epic battles, interesting ideas, mad visuals and facinating characters. However Last Order, now nearly twice as long as the original series, feels slow, padded and weak.
I thought things were slow when an entire 200 page book was spent on a single fight. But now we have 200 pages spent setting up for a fight. We check in on several characters (including some long-awaited news about the situation back on Earth), get another long flashback and it ends with the final round of the ZOT tournament FINALLY starting.
I still see flashes of the book's old brilliance and love Kishiro's art but this series remains disappointing.
I hope the next book will recapture some of the old magic (maybe our title character can actually do something?) but I fear we'll get another 200 pages of shouting and punching and no real story.
7 of 9 found the following review helpful:
Just okay . . . .Jan 18, 2011
By T. Paukune
"sparklyblitz"
I am really trying to remain with this series until the end. I own each and every original volume and Last Order volume. I would really hate to abandon it after pouring $220+ on it. The original series there's no question about; it's great! This is not the case for Last Order.
This particular volume has Alita in it. While that is a definite plus, it's extremely sad to have to say that about the main character in a series. The volume has a definite "middle", but no beginning and a weak ending! It starts off with Toji (of course) getting plucked out of the abyss of space to continue fighting in the sorry ZOT tournament.
The we see Sechs, ruminating and pondering about how Zekka is "supersonic while standing still". The overly simplistic answer Sechs temporarily comes up with is just stupid and pulled out of thin air, but I won't spoil it.
Then we get whisked away to the Space Angels apparent locker room(?) in an almost totally random way to see Zazie laying on a table with a mysterious Panzer Kunst attack rattling round in her brain, waiting to go off like a time bomb.
Sechs suspects Alita, sine it is a tough attack to pull off on someone, and calls her out of a ceiling vent to come and face him. Alita would never crawl around on her belly in a ceiling vent! It has nothing at ALL to do with her character development, the story, and it really wasn't funny. If it had been Sechs, the funny guy in there, it would have made sense. But for Kishiro to put the lead character crawling around in heating vents for no explained reason (other than her stupid cat tail) is just . . . sad.
Then, instead of focusing on Alita, we get to see over HALF THE VOLUME being composed of Zazie's warrior flashback, and we get a crumb-tasting of Alita's foes on Mars wrapped up in one little sentence coded into the attack on Zazie.
Mbadi and Alita do NOT have a show down, in the LEAST! Alita is just dreaming while Mbadi is discovering more about the Fata Morgana and it's counterpart, Excaliber, that was destroyed by Political turmoil before Mbadi was in power. And, of course, the FM is the "illogical, creative" female part of the key, and Excaliber is the "logical" male counterpart. Original, right? No. Alita is apparently able to hack in an "ingenious" way in her dreams. Whatever.
We get to see, in the final part of the volume, the Scrapyard and long-lost characters from the past. But don't get your hopes up. It's actually quite lame, and so many people were wanting to original characters to make a return! But all we get is a mere scrap of story, no real dialogue from any of the characters except Kaos, Kyomi and Vecter, and recycled artwork of Alita in her Rollerball days.
I have had just about enough of this series! I remember When I first bought LO vol. 1. It was so boring I couldn't get myself to read it for a month. I remember vol. 6 of LO; I bought it because the cover was neat, but the fascination stopped there, it was just boring once again.
And the same goes for this volume. There's no climax at all, and no real point of interest to keep one reading. The whole volume and series is just plain boring, flat, emotionless.
LO is all about ideologies and philosophies (like the first series), but with no real, relatable, emotional impact to make anyone care (which is what made the first series remarkable). Like with vol. 10, people were so hungry for actual story development in the series as a whole that it was a real, RELATIVE star in the series. But how is any person supposed to relate to (spoilers) "OMG! My brain is a chip and I have no organic parts in me, BUT I'M STILL HUMAN!!!" My point in bringing this up is that the biggest story development "punch" in the series is culturally and socially irrelevant, so it's really hard to care at all. And the fact that Kishiro keeps forcing lame characters down his audiences throats (Toji, Vilma the Vampire, every new personality from 13, the Stellar Nursery Society) make this series painful and irritating to read. And the fact that, say, vol. 12, which is Alita's "triumphant return", is almost taken up halfway by "Karate Wars" is so terrible!
The story is bland, and so is the art. It's technically precise, but there is no passion or creativity, and hardly even that many backgrounds! And the fact that Alita's proportions are changing with every volume and almost every page doesn't help. Her bust now looks like a double-D, and any cuteness she once had is destroyed by broad shoulders and hips that don't fit her personality or her height! And the fact that all the unique-looking style Kishiro once had is now in a vacuum of typical anime-ish crud doesn't help either.
And Viz Media did a bad, boring job with the translations once again. The dialogue is completely flat, almost all of the cussing and "spice" is taken out, and they even left a speech bubble blank in a double page scene where Sechs is challenging Alita. It's at the bottom of the page layout, Sechs' mechanic says it, but it's still just left blank. How pathetic on the english-language publisher's part.
The Last Order series isn't worth reading. I gave it such a long time to get interesting, but it's hardly worth even collecting anymore. And if anyone is considering starting the series, DON'T!!! At $50+ per out of print, used volume (which comprise of over half the series now), just don't do it.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
The story finally returns to Last Order.Jan 21, 2011
By mcsidious
*Minor spoilers ahead*
After the arsefest that was Volume 13, I wasn't looking forward to Volume 14 of Battle Angel Alita: Last Order. Like many readers, I was first interested by the Z.O.T.T. tournament but grew quickly weary of it. The entire *volume* about characters not named Alita and not even relevant to the story (unless you're a Zekka fan) was a little much. So needless to say, when I opened Vol. 14 and see Toji, my first thought was "Great. What Giger-reject creation is he going to be fighting for the next 30 pages?"
Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised. For whatever reason, Kishiro has returned to the story and the titular character. He's still soliciting ideas for NEW CHARACTERS! in the back of the book, which may not augur well for the future, but for now the main personalities of Last Order are all back. And includes not only Alita, but Zazie, Sechs, Nova, and others who last made appearances what seemed like four tankobon ago. Mbadi, the primary antagonist of the series, finally drags his butt back into the picture as well.
This particular volume is mostly about Zazie, but that shouldn't be a surprise as Last Order has increasingly been about an ensemble cast instead of just Alita. I'm not talking about the throwaway Z.O.T.T. contestants of late, but the recurring characters. Kishiro seems to prefer to develop them more. Developing recurring characters is a bit of a novel concept for Kishiro, as many of them ended up with their brains bashed in back in the original BAA.
Although he is far from my favorite character, Sechs has slowly become more and more three-dimensional as the story has progressed and even Toji has had his share of attention. I don't like any of these characters as much as Alita, but as long as Kishiro fleshes them out as he does here for Zazie, I can more than live with them.
Another Panzer Kunstler is briefly introduced here that is connected to Alita back when she was known as Yoko (and presumably spending every day on killing sprees). This suggests that the story will eventually focus on our heroine's background an ominous past again. This time around she is mostly limited to arguing with Sechs and helping Zazie recover from a "unique" illness, though she does get to punch Mbadi in the face (sort of) while projecting herself into cyberspace in a dream state - and I will admit to laughing out loud when she wakes up from her dream.
Mostly I'm happy to see the story back. It was refreshing to be reacquainted with all the personalities in the series and getting a few pages of scenes in the Scrapyard was a nice bonus. This is like being thrown overcooked steak after several volumes of tournament tripe, but when Kishiro is at his best he is among the best mangaka out there. His art style and attention to detail are still big winners for me and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. As long as he ends the freakin' Z.O.T.T. in the next volume, anyway...
 Another Exciting Look Into Alita's PastDec 11, 2011
By Philosoma
In Last Order 14 Kishiro-san gives us a quick but important look into Alita's past and her relation to Zazie. As readers have come to expect from Kishiro-san's sci-fi martial arts epic, this manga is full of wild (sometimes a bit silly, but charming) combat and intense violence. Some older Battle Angel Alita characters make an appearance (fans will be happy to see them drawn in a style true to their original looks) and the manga has some great reference for artists that want to step up their ink technique.
Definitely a must buy for Battle Angel Alita and Kishiro-san fans!
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