Gantz

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Alternative Titles

Synonyms: Gantz/Osaka

Japanese: GANTZ

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Information

Type: Manga

Volumes: 37

Chapters: 383

Status: Finished

Published: Jul 13, 2000 to Jun 20, 2013

Genres: Action, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Supernatural

Themes: Gore, Psychological, Survival

Demographic: Seinen

Serialization: Young Jump

Authors: Oku, Hiroya (Story & Art)

Statistics

Score: 8.10¹ (scored by 113,292 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #587²

² based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #30

Members: 233,766

Favorites: 18,360

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8.10

Ranked #587Popularity #30Members 233,766

MangaYoung JumpOku, Hiroya (Story & Art)

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Volumes: /37

Chapters: /383

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Synopsis

Lonely high school student Kei Kurono isolates himself out of a growing cynicism toward his fellow man and the cruelty they are capable of enacting. One day, while waiting to take the subway to school, Kei's classmate Masaru Katou leaps onto the tracks in an effort to save a drunk man. Driven by an uncharacteristic desire to rescue someone else, Kei follows Katou down into danger. While successful in saving him, the two boys are killed by the train.

Kei wakes up beside Katou in an apartment full of strangers and furnished by a giant black orb with a glass-like outer surface. After finding out that everyone in the room has recently died, words appear on the black ball tasking them with killing a strange creature. The ball equips Kei and the others with power suits and mysterious guns before sending them off to collect this bizarre bounty.

Although Kei discovers the mission to be far more deadly than originally suspected, he manages to survive. He is teleported back to the apartment where he and the other survivors are rewarded point values according to their actions in battle by the black sphere, which a fellow survivor says is called "Gantz." Despite his death earlier that day, Kei is granted the ability to return to his daily life with one condition: he can be uprooted from his day at any time and summoned back to the apartment, where Gantz will task him and other recently deceased with the assassination of another target.

While Katou dreads the inevitable return to Gantz, Kei finds himself living for the sole purpose of carrying out these missions. Thriving in the heat of battle and learning to care about himself and his comrades, Kei faces escalating monstrous threats that begin to bleed out into his normal life outside of Gantz.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

Gantz was published in English by Dark Horse Manga from June 25, 2008 to November 17, 2015. It has also been published in Czech by CREW since 2013.

The series has been adapted into two live-action movies which released in Japan on January 29, 2011 and April 23, 2011 respectively. A TV movie titled Another Gantz was aired before the second film was released and is an alternate telling of the first film.

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Related Manga

Prequel:	Gantz/Minus, Gantz/Nishi
Other:	Gantz no Moto: Oku Hiroya to SF Eiga Monogatari
Spin-off:	Gantz:G, GANTZ/EXA
Alternative setting:	Gantz:E
Adaptation:	Gantz 2nd Stage, Gantz:O, Gantz

More characters
Characters

Kurono, Kei

Main

Nishi, Jouichirou

Main

Katou, Masaru

Main

Shimohira, Reika

Main

Kaze, Daizaemon

Main

Sakurai, Hiroto

Main

Izumi, Shion

Main

Kojima, Tae

Main

Kishimoto, Kei

Main

Sakuraoka, Sei

Supporting

Reviews

Mar 2, 2024

AJ2814

Recommended

Gantz may be one of my favorite train wrecks. It's trashy, deep as a puddle, and ends terribly. From its nihilistic character writing, open disdain for women and impactless violence the whole thing reads like an incel's wet dream. And it's all the better for it.

Story: it's a death game where the characters are saved from their original deaths to fight aliens hiding throughout Japan. This continues for 280ish chapters until the author decided he needed an actual ongoing plot to help wrap up the series.
At this point the audience is informed that an alien invasion is coming. Is it it related to the ... aliens Kei and his.... friends..... have been fighting for the whole manga? No of course not, that would be stupid, these are totally different giant horse looking aliens. They conquer the world, the plucky humans fight back, have a brief conversation with "not god" who sent the Gantz balls, and then beat the aliens.
The last arc is awful, but it can't really ruin a series that was already pretty gloriously shit.

Art: I'm pretty split on Gantz's art. On the positive side a lot of the alien designs are pretty damn cool. But unfortunately, they used a lot of 3D cgi to make human characters and a lot of aliens and tech in the final arc.the cgi is atrocious, the characters are stiff with odd proportions and a lot of the cgi in the final arc are just unfinished grey blobs, making it difficult to tell what's happening in the cramped frames they're featured in.
The pinup covers are also a mixed bag. About 40% of the time, they're pretty good and the rest of the time they're some Rob Liefeld level shit, with twisted inhuman proportions that make me question if the artist has ever actually seen a woman naked before. Somebody should've told him he could've just typed "boobs" into Google to get some reference before he started drawing.

Characters: I have to be honest, when I started this manga, I really didn't expect there to be multiple main characters who are mass shooters. Subverting my expectations is something I applaud.
Kei: kei is a standard collection of incel tropes. He's misanthropic, almost constantly considering raping whatever woman he's around and generally incredibly boring. I did not miss him during the arc that happened when he was dead (This was the best arc in the series).
The guy who Daisuke Ono played in the CGI movie: standard good guy anime character, but significantly less cringe then Kei.
The sex dolls: there's 3-ish main female character. The suicidal one who is sexually assaulted immediately when she's introduced. Kei's plain but devoted gf who somehow manages to spend the entire finale arc naked and pissing herself. And the model who makes herself a sex doll replicant of Kei.... for some reason. All three are basic blank slates who exist to have occasionally good pinups drawn of them. I have no notes 10/10.
The mass shooters: there's two mass shooters, one who shoots up a school, and one who dresses up in black face to go postal in Shibuya. They're both incredibly edgy, obessed with playing the death game and fancy themselves as rivals of Kei, despite Kei being basically a slice of white bread. They're both incredibly cringy and add nothing to the plot.
The cast introduced after the first mass die off:
The psychics are there to introduce superpowers into the narrative. This will never be expanded upon.
The old man is around to introduce a modicum of humanity into the plot. He's great, 3rd best character.
Lone wolf and cub are the only two characters who I was legitimately invested in. Cub's back story is legitimately sad, and lone wolf finding some actual purpose in life protecting the kid is actually pleasant to read.

Themes: Humanity sucks, aliens also suck,maybe open yourself up to the people in your life sometimes. And of course give long winded monologues about humanities purpose and incel shit. It's a true masterpiece of stuff I would've thought was deep philosophical shit when I was 13-14.
Finally, the most important theme introduced in the last arc, and the creator would continue to explore in Inuyashiki, that liking "One Piece" makes you a little bitch who deserves to die violently.

Pacing: arcs are wildly inconsistent. Some of the death game arcs fly by and then you hit an arc where the alien has anime regeneration powers and the fights drag on forever.
Plot points and characters are added and removed from the story at a break neck pace. I had almost completely forgotten that Kei's brother is a vampire, or that there's a whole society of vampires that seem to know about the Gantz balls and the aliens. But they vanish from the plot 2 arcs after being introduced, and have no bearing on story afterwards.
But the absolute best bit of pacing is when they decided to end the series. The whole Gantz death games all wrap up in one battle arc in Rome that's only two or three chapters long, and then there's a couple chapters with a random reporter who has the whole big secret of the death games explained to him (& us the audience) in one exposition dump. And then the horse aliens invade and Kei spends most of the next 40ish chapters chasing down his shivering piss stained sex doll. It's a hilariously abrupt shift in the story, and devalues the arcs that came before it.

To wrap it up, is Gantz good? Fuck no, it's written with the thematic and emotional complexity of a school shooters manifesto. It's completely unconcerned with having any sense of cohesive world building. It's characters are designed to be as unlikable as possible, and the author has a fetishistic obsession with rape that makes me hope that there are no women in his life.
But the series does have some of the mid 2000's edgy sci-fi juice that makes it occasionally cool to look at, even if your eyes are constantly rolling into the back of your skull every five minutes while reading it. Or you can be a little bitch and read One Piece instead.

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Feb 8, 2023

breycw

Mixed Feelings

Gantz.. okay I’m reticent to go full-rant mode and give too much away but if I can help someone mitigate their expectations, then fine.

This Manga is amazing. It is also infuriating with its usage of the same.. damn.. trope.. over and over Ad infinitum. Kei is excellent as far as a MC that you can experience development with, then at some point, the writer watched season 8 of Game of Thrones and thought “NAILED IT!” And then went out to replicate. The departure from any semblance of a coherent story or logical anything begins upon the final arc. It’s like he hired his ...

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Jun 16, 2023

Kinglink

Not Recommended

Informative

Gantz is manga's equivalent to the Lost TV show. That's the short version.

If you don't know, Lost was heavily talked about show with a lot of attention and focus on it for five years, many mysteries surrounding it include "Wtf is going on" and at the final season ended, people stopped talking about it, and most people seem to generally dislike the show after that ending. That is the fastest way to describe Gantz...

You're still here, so I guess you want to know more. Well, let's go for the long version... I'm going to avoid as many spoilers as I ...

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