The first Ghost In The Shell manga compilation was one of my favourite reads in the last few years, even though it was a bit wordy I loved the procedural aspect of it and how it tried to paint a cyberpunk world where everything is gray with a pretty credible "technology system". Shirow made that bunch of stories pretty science and military accurate (or at least made me believe they were) and it all felt pretty grounded. Now comes GITS 2.0, which happens after the events of the previous stories as far as I'm concerned, where Motoko lost her body and was a fugitive for hanging around with a rouge AI. With that said, there was not moment were I felt I was reading something set in the same universe or that it was a continuation of Motoko's story.
Have to admit, I barely understood what the hell the story was about, there some stuff about a terrorist group trying to steal a bunch of pigs from a corporation that used said pigs to harvest human organs to be later used in transplants, and Motoko is working for said company but under a different last name, and she faked her whole documents but somehow this wasn't an issue until the story starts. Also Motoko has a bunch of secret bases around the world were she stores bodies she can switch her consciousness into, but these secret bases are not some rundownd buildings, were talking submarines, secret rooms in high tech buildings and stuff.
So Motoko starts tracking the terrorists aparently, it's not clear what she starts doing, but she starts going around the net making her IA pets throw viruses here and there to weaken firewalls (apparently to Shirow a virus is something you can just inyect to a system remotely withouth any user input), then she starts having military vehicles, public facilites, people that have cybernetic brains dnd finally fricking satellites. It all gets really goofy and she always has some insanely broken ability to escape detecting like hacking people's eyes to making them believe they're not seeing her.
Not sure what happend at the end either, I can't spoil the story because I genuinely never understood what was the goal behind the whole "Pig snatch" thing, but Motoko meets some AIs that tell her some stuff about her, generic "You don't know what you're capable of" stuff, and then there's an epilogue were the people from her old united are doing some spirt sesion and then it ends.
I would love to say the pencils are the saving grace of this volume, but half of this is done with 2D characters super imposed over really bad 3D art backgrounds that looked bad then and looks FAR worse now (Think about old shows like Reboot or Zentrix) and only the other half is full 2D art with hand drawn backgrounds. The story is also so convoluted that it's hard to enjoy the art since it does not translated exactly to a fluid sequential narrative, it's similar to a poorly edited movie were you see shooting coming from the left side of the screen and the it cuts to characters shooting from the right side, but it's in comic art form.
Stick to the movies, there isn't even fan-service to justify the existence of this.
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