Gantz Review | Shocking Scenes Only for the Shocking Factor

Hi guys and welcome to my place! 🙂

So I was able to finish Gantz this week! To be honest I just ended it yesterday 😀 This way, it’s time for me to review it. Only some words of caution first:

The Anime is supposed to be horror, psychological, so discretion is advised, I will try not to include pictures/gifs with nudity or too much gore (Arthifis from the future here, there will be gore, sorry), however I will address that, Gantz is an Anime for over 18 without a doubt, so if you still don’t know where babies come from, please go talk with your parents and stop right here 😀 Don’t want to destroy anyone’s purity!

So, let’s start shall we?

The Story:

The story is really straight forward actually… The story starts with our main character, Kei in a subway station. A homeless guy, drunk, falls from the platform and another guy who was waiting for the subway (who ends up to be Kei’s childhood friend) jumps out the platform and tries to help the guy. He proceeds to recognize Kei and askes him for help. Kei, feeling peer pressure from everyone in the platform (although no one tries to help) also jumps into the platform. They are able to save the homeless guy but end up to be run over a train and die.

Now, let me just start bashing the Anime from the start… It does not make sense that his happened… They had more than time to save the homeless guy and with the help of the people in the platform to come back up… Everything is done in a really slow pace, I mean… You are in the train rail, you should try to be the fastest you can… Not so damn slow -.-‘ And you say… “Oh Arthifis, you know, it’s an old Anime, so the animation is not so good as today”… Well, In 2004 I was seeing Naruto, so please don’t tell me it’s an old Anime, because that will not be able to change this… They deliberately made all things slower so you would sit in the edge of your chair screaming “save yourselves”… However, the execution is so bad, that you just think “Really? They could have save themselves easy”.

But ok! Let’s continue…. They die and end up in a room with a bunch of people who have also died in a moment ago and were transported there. Here they introduce you the third main character who also has the name Kei, but I’ll call her Kishimoto. Kishimoto appears completely naked, which makes sense because she killed herself in the bathtub, so it’s only natural that she is not dressed.

And now it starts, the shocking scenes only for the shocking factor, no more. There are 2 men from the Yakuza (Mafia) also there. without any kind of explanation, they pick Kishimoto, go to the back room and proceed to start raping her (because, why not?). Kato goes there and saves her (while Kei just watches). The dog who also makes part of one of the “people” who died, comes running and proceeds to put his face in the middle of her legs and licking her vagina… The dog will do this every time he sees Kishimoto, so you end up to get used to it… But I’ll talk about these shocking scenes later, let me just end the story.

They discover that they were summoned by Gantz and now they need to kill Aliens to be able to come back to the real world. Gantz (which is like a ball in the middle of the room, not a character) gives them weapons and a suit that gives them super strength. The majority of the people there are not really practical… So, they end up to take the weapons but they don’t dress the suit in time before they are teleported to the local where they need to find and kill the Alien. Nope, not even the girl who is completely naked decides that it would be a nice thought to dress the suit (well, they need to get those views am I right?).

And that’s particularly it… The first season has 2 missions and the second one another 2. The story also shows the backgrounds of the main characters. Kato lives with his aunt who beats the crap of his little brother making Kato feel that he needs to be there for him to help him, Kishimoto has a mother that prefers her older sister in a million years because she has higher marks while being almost ashamed of Kishimoto and then you have Kei, a guy who parents think that giving money is enough to educate someone. Although not really that good, you only have a really small reference about Kei’s life and really seems to be way too superficial comparing with the other characters backgrounds.

When they show these backgrounds you start to see a plot to emerge, but they don’t pick it up or complete it… It’s just there and that’s it.

Now, about the shocking scenes… Being the gore, the raping, the beating… Every scene you see that is a little shocking it’s just there for you to feel shocked, no more no less… Don’t take me wrong, I love gore, I love psychological, I love the kind of entertainment that rises my heartbeat or that makes me to look away of disgust, but if the scenes make sense… Now, just putting shocking scenes or deliberately making the events to go to that specific scene… Well it doesn’t work… You just feel that they are throwing that things to you to catch your attention no more, like throwing bananas to a monkey.

They do get better in this part towards the end of the first season (probably thinking they already got their viewers to watch until the end), however in the second season they decide to go backwards and come again with the nudity and shocking scenes (Yes there is a second rape attempt towards Kishimoto, because one is not enough).

And why do I say they are shocking scenes for the sake of shocking factor, well because the characters don’t seem to really think about it in the future… I mean a teenager girl is almost raped and in the next second is perfectly fine? No psychological effects what so ever? Not likely…

The second season does have a good plot twist that I wasn’t expecting in a bit… However, they are not able to solve the story around. Basically they made me question “How the hell are they going forward with the story after this?” It seems they also didn’t know and just finished with an ending that was bad, to say the least… Basically the ending is a cliff hanger, I don’t know if they were thinking on doing a season 3, but basically everything is let to be answered, they didn’t even explain what Gantz actually is, LOL!

Characters:

Do you know that kind of Animes where you don’t like any of the characters? Yeah, it was a first for me too.

Kei

Starts as a horrible person that only thinks about himself. In the first episode an old woman comes to him and asks him if she is in the right platform to go somewhere… Since it’s a huge bother to explain the kind woman what shee needs to do, he just lies and tells her she is in the right place (what? People really do this?). Next, we have that Kishimoto starts liking Kato (I mean he saved her of being raped) while Kei starts liking Kishimoto (well, she has huge breasts and that’s enough for him) and he’s completely jealous the way she treats Kato and the way she talks about him, thinking that she should talk about him in the same way. Are you for real? What did you do to save her? Nothing! LOL the only thing you did was to see her as an object, so why the hell would she like you? I just… Don’t get it! Probably they needed a love triangle because that’s on the formula for success or something like that. He gets better during the first season, then proceeds to be a douchebag again in the beginning of the second season and only at the end of the Anime starts to be at least a normal person. Why does he go from being better to a douchebag again? Don’t really know, there is no explanation… Probably they wanted to catch the people again with the same trick they did in the first season.

Kato

He’s that kind of guy that wants to help everyone and can’t even kill a fly, even if that fly is trying to eat him… His character doesn’t really make sense… He passes all the missions crying because people are dying or because they need to shoot aliens… Now, remember his background? He has a little brother that needs his help, so basically he wants to get out of there alive, but then he doesn’t want to kill any alien when it is to kill or be killed? I’m sorry, but I’m a really practical guy and Kato just doesn’t make sense to me.

Kishimoto

Now, she is the only that is faced with a huge problem. What Gantz makes is to make an exact copy of the people who died… The problem is… She didn’t really die, so basically she can’t go back to her house because the real one is still alive and living her life. She proceeds to go to Kei’s house and staying there. Of course Kei only lets her be the there because he wants to have sex with her, nothing more. Now, you WOULD think she tries to get her life together right? No! After Kei getting really upset because she doesn’t let him to have sex with her and always putting Kato in a pedestal she decides it’s time to go away and basically not having a place to stay. She had time to get a job, but she didn’t… Something that it’s completely stupid is (again for the shocking factor) in the same night she goes away (which is after dinner) she is sitting in a McDonalds thinking in her life. A couple sitting next to her leaves letting their food wastes in the table… She proceeds to get the remaining fries and eat them… Only to make you feel bad because she is now homeless… But let’s think about it for a minute… She had dinner only a few hours ago, she doesn’t really need to eat other people’s food yet… I end up cracking on this scene because of how stupid it was.

The rest of the characters, well they end up dying in the first mission they do, so I don’t really have nothing to say, only that they always try to make them the most stupid, or dumb, or annoying, or evil they possible can… Again, shocking factor…

Animation:

The animation is way too slow and in the second season they went to the point of using static images making me to think if the dub version and the sub version were different in some way LOL (because I ended up watching some of the episodes in dub by mistake).

The rest… Well, It’s not bad. At least the gore is well made as you can see from the GIF above and the aliens are well, interesting! 😀

Sound:

The voice acting is also bad… I do feel that the english dub is better than the japanese (which for me is a first). At least in the english dub they seem to be angry when their body language shows that. More than that in the japanese dub there is just way too much of “hmmm….” and “aaah….” which makes the conversions not really that fluid.

So, yeah, I ended up watching the second season because I though the Anime was finally to get at least bearable… But it ended up to be more of the same. Even if you are a huge fan of the genre I don’t really think this one is a good pick… Sorry Raistlin :/

After watching one of the worst endings I ever seen, I went to the comments and it seems that the manga is way better, but I’m not going to waste anymore time with this one.

I give Gantz 2 Dismembered Heads out of 5 Shocking Scenes

That’s all everyone! Have you already watched Gantz? What are your thoughts about it? If you didn’t, after this are you still thinking on watching it? Comment down below! 😀

The Anime that come out in the Random Anime and therefore the one I’m going to watch next is:

RE:Creators

See You Soon! 😀