Plot/Story: The only redeeming factor of Gantz is it's concept. Keep in mind too I'm only reviewing the first season. It hints toward a possible escape/redemption scenario in the final episode. Basically the way it works is randomly selected people are transported the moment after death into a room. Their bodies are copies, and the originals just disappear from the scene of their deaths. Inside that room is a giant grey ball, or sphere, as the characters like to call it, that holds strange weapons, armor, and a bald guy with chords going into his head. This bald guy we quickly learn is Gantz. He doesn't speak, and instead makes snarky comments on the front of the sphere which is also a computer apparently. The reason our protagonists have been summoned into this room is to hunt aliens. That's pretty much it. With an hour time limit they are given a certain radius in which the aliens are hiding. Failure to capture, kill, or leaving the perimeter results in certain death. Success guarantees them to be placed back in the room and allowed to leave until they are again summoned. That is all I will say in this review but you start to learn things in the last two episodes.
Characters: This will be brief. Never in my life have I seen an anime with more pathetic characters than Gantz. Even after thirteen episodes I could care less if any of them lived or died. They are painfully dumb, perverted, heartless, and selfish. The three main protagonist Kei, Katou, and Kishimoto change slightly as the story progresses but continue to stay true to their original shitty nature all the same. There is also Nishi, who you will hate more than anybody the anime/manga world has ever spawned. Everybody else is unrelated to the main plot or just a throw in during the alien hunts during the first season. I assume some of them will make a return.
Sound: Honestly, I'm not one to care much about OPs or EDs. I skip them 99% of the time. However for the sake of this review I decided to watch them all the way through. I didn't think they were anything special, but not outright dreadful either. Throughout the show nothing from the sound track really caught my interest too much. But there were a few times in matched up with the atmosphere well.
Art: Gantz has a weird approach to blend CGI with a traditional anime style. This will be very apparent in the opening scene of the first episode. It plays a lot like a weird click and point game from the 90s and to be entirely honest I almost picked a different show after seeing it. Fortunately, they begin to use it less and less as the show goes on. Keeping in mind Gantz was release in '04, I tried not to keep my expectations too high. But even for an anime released over a decade ago it still felt sub par. And I'm not even talking about the CGI parts.
Overall enjoyment: As I stated in the first part of this review most everything about Gantz feels half-assed. Yet it does have a certain charm that kept me watching. Overall I would say it deserves a 4/10 but I went against my better judgement and gave it a 6/10. If you like good anime, and only good anime, don't watch this. But if you can turn you're brain down to 50% and enjoy a lot of head explosions, some pretty creative aliens, or maybe you like survival scenarios, then I'd say give Gantz a watch if you're in need of a quick binge.
