Battle Angel Alita in printed form sticks pretty closely to the OVAs (from 1 to start of 3)I watched ages ago. It's over-the-top cyberpunk aesthetic that, at first glance seems nothing but aesthetic. Put out in 1990, I think it's pretty impressive. It was trying to tell a much more philosophical and nuanced tale than most of the late 80's cyberpunk media with the exception of Ghost In The Shell, published in 1989.

Luckily there's quite a bit of depth even with the typical manga fan service---at least there isn't the sexual fan service though? It's more typical gender rolls and how male/female interactions are, and it is an older manga. What is great about it is that even with all this, there is still an exploration of interesting questions and the translation has a lot of helpful extra side bars expounding on some of the sparse philosophy drops. Each villain is further contextualized beyond normal manga that is hyper violent like this one, too.

They are always the product of the terrible city they live in, and way of life that allows for them to eek out an existence. The ordinary citizens look up at a city suspended from space, where everything might just be better than the literal massive scrap yard they live in; controlled by factories that have laws that protect the corporation and not its citizens and perpetuating violence by paying people to hunt and kill anyone who breaks these laws. All of which serve their own ends as I've said.

Alita struggles with the perception of her body from outsiders dealing with the stigmatism of being a cyborg, embodiment issues (handled from a very male perspective) and a Cartesian mind/body duality when she is placed in a body of a killer and (as of halfway through vol.3) still doesn't recall her past but does cyborg martial arts, and does it well! Is it her body, or has she always been a weapon? There's some interesting stuff that undeniably makes it better than a lot of the stuff coming out around then. Especially 80's cyberpunk, in general, media wise.