Happy holidays, Happy Hannukah, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year! It’s getting to be that time, and I just wanted to say that I hope you all have a great holiday! I’ll be spending most of mine traveling, which I’m sure is the case for many of you.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on speculative fiction, specifically in comics, and then I got sidetracked and read Battle Angel Alita: Last Order. It is a weird nostalgia trip, and I have a lot of mixed feelings about the way Kishiro revisited his old character(s). How do you guys & gals feel about it? I’m with it for most of the way, but then it gets bogged down in that damn tournament (shounen fighting ruins everything! except occasionally when it’s fun). Also Alita has a tail now, that is silly. I’m hoping it’s more than just the author’s fetish, but I’m not holding my breath.
More Snapture news! There’s a long write-up over at Carnegie Mellon University’s website that quotes my brother. Snapture developer Samir Shah also got interviewed on the BBC News Hour. Exciting times!
This entry was posted on Friday, December 25th, 2009 at 12:01 AM and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
To be honest, Last Order kind of disappointed me. I liken it to the remastered ET with the removal of the guns, or the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. It’s pretty good – for what it is – but it just moved too far away from what made the original series so wonderful. As a result, it simply paled in comparison. The believably dynamic characters just aren’t there in Last Order, the action’s too Dragon Ball Z and not enough Street Fighter, and the gritty yet strangely idyllic dystopia of Scrap Iron City has been replaced with a cleaner but even less hopeful space community.
I think I liked the Last Order so far, though the tournament certainly seemed to slow down the pacing quite a bit. I also have to disagree with Robert’s assessment on the dynamic characters – they’re still there in Last Order. They’re just not as evident.
If you think about it, the way things are going in the Tournament, the “space city” of Ketheres is becoming another Scrapyard. In addition, you have to account for the possibility of the main character actually going to visit Mars, and uncovering more of her past as a practitioner of the Panzer Kunst.
I am of the opinion that most fans of Battle Angel Alita are too enamored with the original series to really appreciate the Last Order’s art and story direction. You’d have to try to read between the lines of dialogue and interactions in the Last Order story to really see where it is going. Typical Japanese obsession with complexity, but thankfully, Yukito doesn’t make it overcomplex to the point where it degenerates into an incoherent story. Which seems to be the case for most japanese media productions nowadays.
Star Ocean 4 being the most glaringly obvious example.
happy holidays you guys! i hope you get lots of awsome presents!! <3