Reviews

I have not seen a show like this in a long while. That's not to say it's good, mind you. I came away from [i]Gantz[/i] with mixed feelings that ultimately ended in dislike. The show follows a perverted, angry-at-the-world teenager who sees an old friend at a train station. They both witness a homeless man fall onto the tracks, and the friend jumps onto the tracks to save him, then yelling for his friend to help. For no good reason that I can figure out (unless it's peer-pressure), the cynic jumps onto the track to help. They save the old man, but are killed by a train, and transported to an apartment, where others who have just died seem to be gathered.

I don't want to say more about the plot, but I do like the ideas behind it. The story told in [i]Gantz[/i] is interesting enough that it kept me watching it all the way through. I wanted to know what was going to happen next, especially in the latter four episodes or so. However, the ending left me very unsatisfied, and made no sense at all. I came away from the story ultimately with a sense of pointlessness.

Of course, it doesn't help the show's case that the main character is utterly unlikeable, for me at least. He almost comes off as believable, but is taken too far to really be a believable character.

The same rings true for most of the characters. They're presented as these people in this alternate Earth, but then taken just a little too far in their archetypes to be believable. This isn't necessarily a problem for most of the characters, except the one or two that just become annoying.

This problem is compounded by the art design for [i]Gantz[/i]. Everything is drawn quasi-realistically, but retains enough of the fact that it's an anime that, again, it just becomes a little annoying, rather than giving the impression that I'm sure the people behind this show wanted it to.

Voice acting for the series is, overall, decent. My only real problem with the voices was casting for certain characters, especially a major character, who ended up sounding weird at times. The VA work wasn't bad, but it wasn't great, either.

My biggest problem with the show has to be the pacing. For the first few episodes, things go along somewhat slowly, but any time it comes to a scene where the characters disagree about something, they stand around for twenty minutes talking in circles about it. Everything seems like it's taking way too long, to the point where it became a game to guess what would happen episodes in advance, which isn't a fun game, because the answer is always, "They're gonna talk about it for two episodes, and then they'll actually do [spoiler]."

But not only does it move really slowly, but any time stuff does start to happen, the viewer is constantly assaulted by the gory deaths of characters that I guess we're supposed to care about, but I didn't, and by scenes that almost make this show hentai, if not for the rest of the plot.

That's pretty much [i]Gantz[/i] in a nutshell; nothing happens, then gore, then sexual scene, then nothing for a while, then a lot of talking in circles, more gore, and more nothing. I wouldn't recommend this show to anyone. [i]Gantz[/i] is not worth spending the ten or so hours to watch the entire series. I give it a one out of five, because the only redeeming quality for the show was the interesting premise.