「攻殻機動隊」Ghost in the Shell A futuristic, police/noir thriller, set around the mid-21st Century, dealing with the reality of corporate power structures, and cyber terrorism, against a backdrop of technological advancement, and transhumanist cyberisation, in a Neo-Japanese state.
Sort by:
New
Open comment sort options
Best
Top
New
Controversial
Old
Q&A
Arise is actually the worst GitS adaptation.
The plot is mostly nonsense excuses for action scenes, similar to 2045, but it actually goes basically nowhere with it by the end of the story. 2045, for better or worse, actually had a throughline in regards to its literary inspiration and its villains, even if both were criminally underdeveloped. The Arise cast, from the budding Section 9 itself, to the antagonists, all feel like ideas of the characters they are supposed to represent, than actual characters. The overall short runtime of Arise doesn't do it any favors in this department. It's hard to believe that any of these people would want to work together, especially with how violently antagonistic a chunk of our heroes are towards one another during certain episodes.
It's important to emphasize that Border 5 came out AFTER The New Movie, as a way to try to better tie the OVAs/TV series better to the film, and it really will show by the time you get around to seeing it for yourself.
Since I watched them in release order because Border 5, in addition to being released with weird timing, also never got a proper dub here in the US (mostly because of licensing issues coupled with probably underwhelming sales of the series as a whole), I went into TNM without knowing ANYTHING revealed by Border 5, and it was a very confusing jump in both escalation, action, and plot. And when I watched Border 5... I felt like I still wasn't given reason to understand why anything that happened in TNM the way it did, much less why anything prior to TNM was at all meaningfully connected.
Arise is honestly the biggest disappointment I've had with the franchise, bar none. It says a lot to that a manga written and drawn by a different artist to serve as a continuation of the original work by Masamune Shirow feels like a more carefully considered and constructed story in the franchise than this series ever did.
I agree with your analysis completely.
For Japanese viewers though, Border 5 broadcast on TV a week or two before The New Movie was released theatrically, as the concluding episodes 9 and 10 of Alternative Architecture. So there was a chance there for Japanese viewers to see the thing in the "correct" order. Whereas in the West, it took ages to get Border 5, long after we got the movie. I didn't think it added very much, to be honest. It wasn't even written by the same guy who wrote Borders 1-4 and the movie, which suggests it was something of an afterthought.
I'm gradually making my way through the entirety of the Ghost in the Shell franchise. I watched all of Arise recently, and although it looked pretty good, it left me kind of... underwhelmed. I'll write about the The New Movie next, as it concludes Arise's storyline.
Imo, it’s perfectly centered in between the overtly sexual and philosophically deep tone of GitS SAC and the sexually toned down, philosophically shallow procedural drama of 2045.
The first two seasons of SAC are without a doubt my favourite GitS things, though I did still enjoy SAC_2045 (except the ending - what the hell was that?)
Arise just felt confusingly written, though I quite like The New Movie. It has some really interesting ideas, and great action.