Gantz

Good guy A: I'm gonna shoot it! Good guy B: Shoot it now! Alien: *kills random guy* Good guy B: Shoot it already! Good guy A: I will for sure! Alien: *kills another guy* Good guy A: Okay, I'm serious, I think I should shoot it right now... Good guy B: Yeah, sounds like a good idea... Alien: *kills nearly everyone but good guy A and B* Good guy A: *finally shoots the alien*-mission cleared- ========================================== Fun aside, but this is mostly what this anime felt like. It's not that it's bad at all (the story is quite interesting and offers great potential to make this show an awesome anime), but there's still so much that made me feel uncomfortable watching this show. But let's start with the good thing: Story: The main characters die in the very beginning and get kinda reborn in an appartment in Tokyo. They receive some super cool weapons and a suit, that offers superhuman strength, as well as the mission to use this equipment to kill some aliens, that are hiding in town, within 60 minutes. Why they got to do that remains unexplained, but I didn't mind that. That actually seemed to be a pretty cool concept to me, and I did enjoy the first episodes. Characters: The characters are cheap... like... really cheap. We got the generic loser, that fell for a beautiful girl, we got the generic beautiful girl, that fell for a tall, muscular guy, and we got the generic muscular guy, that's not interested in the girl at all. Besides that we have a lot of annoying side characters, that are mainly used to be crushed by some aliens. Also there's no bit of character development in the course of the anime, which would be necessary to make the characters even a little more interesting. So long story short: The characters aren't really bad, but they're also far from being special or at least interesting. Animation/Artstyle/etc: The anime looks alright, no more, no less, a 5 out of 10, the least you could expect but nothing better. I'm really struggling how to describe what the show looks like, but I think "alright" just describes it perfectly well. There's a lot of splatter and a lot of nudity; fans will like it, others won't. The design of the aliens is alright aswell (an onion-frakenstein's monster-hybrid and birds without wings). Nothing to get excited about, but they're okay. Sound: The soundtrack is actually pretty good. It fits the whole scenario and accompanies the action scenes as well as the not-so-action-scenes. The opening's still stuck in my head right now by the way. Enjoyment: First of all I did enjoy most parts of the show, because I like the idea and the way the story is told. BUT! Now we get to the big minus, that made some of the episodes a pain in the ass: The fighting scenes are sooo drawn out. I heard a few people comparing it to Dragonball Z, but Gantz is completely different (in a bad way). In DBZ both the hero and the villain stop fighting for hours just to talk about how much they hate each other, but at least they're as fair not to attack their enemy while he's still talking. In Gantz the "heroes" stop fighting to do nothing, while the aliens keep crushing them. It sometimes felt like they didn't even want to kill these monsters, and I personally really do hate that. It even made me fast forward some scenes because I just couldn't handle it, and eventually it's the reason I rate this anime not as good as I'd actually like to. Recommandation: Don't watch it if you can't see blood. Don't watch it if you don't like sex scenes. Don't watch it if you get worked up over characters standing on the sidelines. Watch it if you're into sci-fi/aliens/mystery/superpowers/whatsoever, and you'll be having a good time.

Skip the anime, read the manga. The pacing is awkward and the artwork pales in comparison to that in the manga. The artwork of the manga is drawn over 3d models whereas the animation is completely flat. Also the exquisitely drawn blood and gore of the manga is translated into a few seconds of short unskillfully animated blood squirting. I suppose they could not invest any money into animating most of it since they knew it would be edited out for several releases.

NOTE: This review is intended to cover Gantz in its entirety. Gantz is about as close as you�ll ever get to a love it or hate it anime. It�s littered with so much gore, profanity, nudity, and sex that it�ll either immediately turn you off or immediately glue your eyes to the screen. Being a person from the latter group I have to say I absolutely loved Gantz right from the start. Well, okay, not exactly right from the start. Gantz starts out in the life of Kei Kurono, an angst ridden teenager who has nothing better to do but think negatively to himself and getboners in class. He�s always worrying about something, and doesn�t care about anyone else except for himself. To put it simply, he�s like an emo kid on acid. He complains about everything, but mostly dwells on the fact that he�s never gotten laid. Hmm�wonder why. Ten minutes of listening to this punk whine and cry while so eloquently squeezing in the occasional F-word and I dare anyone to not want to turn this anime off and forget all about it. Thankfully things pick up from there, albeit with all the whining and crying still intact. After we get acquainted with our main protagonist we get to meet Katou. Katou is an old time friend of Kei�s who used to look up to him. You see, before Kei was a whinny little punk he was actually a really cool and adventurous kid. Lack of character development doesn�t exactly show why Kei went from hero to zero, but Katou tries to emulate the Kei he once knew throughout the series, starting with attempting to save a homeless guy who fell on the subway tracks, with the help of Kei of course. Here is where the feces (and blood, guts, and various other nasty things) really hits the fan. Kei and Katou successfully aid the drunk homeless guy to safety, but soon realize that a subway is coming their way. Their plan of avoiding it? Run up the tracks passed where the subway should stop. Bad plan? You bet. I don�t know about you, but I�d much rather try my luck at climbing back onto the platform rather than outrunning a damn subway train. But that�s just me. It turns out that Subway isn�t going to stop at the station after all, and both Kei and Katou are royally screwed. They get hit, and heads go flying. Welcome to the true start of Gantz. Here is where things go beyond the boundaries of typical anime. Here is where things get fun. Kei and Katou wake up in this room with a number of random people who all seem to have died. They can�t leave the room, and trying to make sense out of it all is only a waste of time. Introduced into the story next is who I like to call the third wheel. Her name is also Kei, but like everyone else in the series I�ll just call her Kishimoto. Kishimoto serves little to no purpose other than for Kei to obsess and angst over, and as fan service, but with her flakey and often times clueless personality I don�t think she�s doing anyone a service. Luckily Gantz isn�t about character depth; it�s all about violence, nudity, and all that juicy stuff. That�s where the true main character of the anime comes in: Gantz. Gantz is probably one of the coolest anime characters to come around in years, and he doesn�t even have to say a word. He�s psychotic, yet fully in control. He�s evil, yet lovable. He�s the gears in the machine. Gantz is a game of survival that you can�t help but love. Everyone in the room is soon transported to an area of town and can�t leave until they have eliminated the targets selected by Gantz. These targets are as wacky as they are terrifying, and while many of them look harmless or relatively easy to dispatch of that is rarely the case. Part of the excitement of watching Gantz comes from not knowing what everyone will have to go up against next. It�s also worth mentioning that this isn�t your typical �bad guy of the week� series. Each time our reluctant cast is forced into battle it usually lasts for a lot more than just a single episode. This is good, because Gantz is one anime that will probably have you thinking �So many characters, so little time to kill them all.� Gantz sets its characters up like dominos. Very few of them are ever developed, and very few survive long enough to see the last episode. There is a lot of death in Gantz and plenty of gory scenes to cringe at and watch over and over again, trust me. Gantz does suffer from one major flaw, or at least I thought it was major: the ending. For an anime that is so straight forward and brutal right from the start it sure did have a weak and vague ending. Maybe the writers just didn�t know of a good way to end it. The movie The Cube had a very similar ending and plot, so I must wonder if that is what inspired Gantz in the first place. I would have liked to get a little background info on Gantz before it ended. Like where did he come from, and what was the purpose of these �games�. Either way, there is a lot to love (and hate) in Gantz. It�s lack of character development, almost completely unlikable protagonist, and strict R rating is sure to turn many viewers off, but if you�re a fan of the brutal and nasty stuff I see no reason why you won�t like the fun little rollercoaster that is Gantz. My Score: 9.0 Version Watched: English Dub

This is a review of both Gantz and Gantz 2nd Stage. Why are the two seasons even split up in the first place? The first season very clearly does not end the show and the second season picks up right where the first leaves off, so what's the point of even writing two reviews? If you have fundamental problems with this decision, blow me. Moving on. Gantz is a show that a lot of people don't get. This surprises me because, in the grand scheme of things, Gantz is amazingly simple and straightforward. It's brutal in a different way than anime fans are used to becauseit pulls absolutely no punches in its delivery. This is an anime that isn't really suited for today's anime climate, where shit that uses gore for filler gets passed off as "tough to watch" (Elfen Lied), and Epic Movie style reference jokes get passed off as funny because moe girls are the ones telling them (Lucky Star). Its supernatural plot sets people up for something that ends up being the polar opposite of what they're given. At its core, Gantz is all about keeping it real, and that attitude is what fucks up a lot of the people that try to watch it. Really, it's the very definition of a love-it-or-hate-it anime. Essentially, what Gantz does is take familiar stereotypes (the teenager, the helpless titty girl, the self righteous big dude, the serial killers, the gangsters, the bikers, grandma and her spoiled grandson, etc.) and shows you how they would react in a life or death, kill or be killed situation. It's a textbook deconstruction that takes character types out of their usual element and throws them dick first into all sorts of trials and tribulations that they aren't usually written into. It's an anime that makes no judgements on others' character; "morally pure" losers will at times act like fucking psychos, and complete assholes will touch your heart, or at least make you laugh. It's an anime that serves as both an indictment and an exoneration of humanity; it will con you into rooting for kill-first-ask-questions-later types over those genuinely concerned about their fellow player, but in the same way it'll coax you into rooting against the kill-because-I-like-it types who knowingly and purposefully fuck over everyone else for their own selfish reasons. It's an anime that preaches balance as the solution and then kills the balanced ones anyway. It's paradoxical, contradictory, cold, and eccentric, because that's the way a fantasy-land situation like this would be in the real world. Even though I basically just gave Itchiro Itano a textual handjob up there, Gantz is certainly not without its flaws. If you are not emotionally invested, or at least interested, in the fates of any of the characters (the majority of which are horrible douches), this anime will rape you with how slow its pace is. Battles have a tendency to run for 3 or more episodes and they can be the most frustrating things to have to sit through for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it feels like writers don't know how to end a battle so they just keep throwing more shit at us (the 3rd fight ends with Katou fighting a giant green turd because they literally ran out of ideas), some battles are plagued by having a cast of pussies who ruin perfectly good opportunities because none of them will act first, sometimes the characters launch into the Communist Manifesto during the middle of a fight scene, etc. There's much more dialogue than action, so if you're just watching this to see dead guys cash checks and break necks, then I'm sorry but you're going to be disappointed. The writers have a tendency to let the plot dictate the character's actions, even if it means making otherwise logical characters act dumb as hell, just to further the show along. Above all that though, Gantz's most pervasive flaw is that the cynicism is often left unchecked. Half the shit in this show could be something out of Youngblood or Bloodpain or Assblood or any other generic, "dark" 90s comic book. Every child is beaten, every woman is nearly raped, the one black guy is a gay thug, the bully rips the Karate instructor's teeth out of his gums, the guy who loves guns also loves torturing things, the goody-two-shoes old man tries to "save" a kid serial killer by talking sternly to him, that same serial killer tries to validate killing and raping homeless people (!!!) with a long-winded speech about war, and so on and so forth. It just gets really really over the top at times and, I mean, I don't have a problem with that (I loved Death Note and its intense notebook writing action), but it shits all over the "realistic and gritty" atmosphere the anime tries to present. The art? Um, it's ok. That's about the best I can say. It incorporates some CGI, and it runs the gauntlet from good to "what the fuck is that?" The monster designs are pretty creative and they make up for how generic the character designs are. The backgrounds are nicely done as well, so no complaints there. Animation wise, the show is plagued by stiff computer animation and an assortment of cheap tricks that actually made me do a few double takes while I was watching. Nothing to write home about. Sound in-show is barely even noticeable. The OP is pretty cool but I skipped it a lot. I imagine it would've gotten pretty fucking annoying quick if I had to hear it on a regular basis. The ED? Uhhhhh yea its ok. Generic, relaxing, melancholy Jpop. I expected much more in both of these departments from GONZO than what we were given---oh wait, no I didn't. The English dub was middle of the road as well, not shit-tier but not god-tier either. Some of the voice actors were better than others but for the most part my only complaints are subjective, so we'll move on. Out of everything it seems the characters are what piss most people off about this show. For starters, there's a rotating assortment of cast members because they're constantly killed off. Because of the wide array of assholes that regularly appear on this fine cartoon, the very few people you can sympathize with (aside from Katou) are minor roles, which sucks because again, in this show being a member of the supporting cast is an instant death sentence. There's a lot of varying personalities, some you'll like, some you'll hate; I think this is probably one of Gantz's strongest points because it allows the show to stay fresh, even if it is at the expense of a lot of character development. The 3 people of biggest importance to the plot are: Kurono, the whiny, horny, selfish, impressionable teenager. Probably one of the least likable characters on the show. His development is really haphazard because the second he starts to change in a certain direction, the show waves its floppy dick and fucks the whole playing field up. On the spectrum, he's more or less centered between I'm-a-fucking-psychopath and I-fucking-care-about-everyone, and as such, he can be cool one moment and then act like a flailing dumbshit the next. Really, he's whatever the writers need him to be for that specific episode. Personality wise, the most flexible member of the cast. Katou, the big dude with everyone's best interests at heart. One of the only glimpses of genuine goodness on the show. Can get really, really fucking annoying when he hinders the progress of the group with his nobility, but at other times he's a welcome break from the sea of dickheads this show throws at us. Sometimes loses control and legitimately hurts people (physically). His only reason to really continue on living is to raise his little brother. Kishimoto, ahhh fuck this bitch. IMO the least likable member of the cast, even worse than that fucking serial killer kid or that whiny businessman. This bitch is the worst. Killed herself because her bad grades lead to a strained relationship with her mother or something like that. I don't know, it was basically just an excuse for us to see her naked (which is stupid because we saw her naked like 30 other times afterwards). Depends on others for 98% of the show and is always yelling at other people for not doing anything when she herself does the equivalent of masturbating during a house fire. Kept around primarily for fanservice and to create sexual tension. Not exactly emotionally stable but that's to be expected considering the circumstances of her death. Did I enjoy this anime? It depends on what you mean by enjoy. Its hard to "enjoy" an anime like Gantz in the typical sense, but it was well executed and at times pretty fun to watch, so I'll say yeah. Plus it made me laugh multiple times (both intentionally and unintentionally), and in an anime this bleak, I think that counts for something. Overall I give it a 7. Watch it for the black guy, he's hilarious.