A gripping if somewhat gory drama

Tweekums

This infamously gory series opens with teenagers Kei Kurono and Masaru Kato being struck by a train while rescuing a homeless man who had fallen from the platform. Rather than dying they find themselves in a room along with other people who have just 'died' also present is a strange black sphere. Suddenly the sphere opens and an array of weapons appears and when they look inside they see a strange man. One of the people already there explains that this is 'Gantz' and he will send them on a variety of missions. It turns out that they will all be sent out to hunt down a variety of aliens using futuristic weapons. At the end of each hunt the survivors return to the room, any injury they sustained healed. They are then free to get on with their lives… until Gantz summons them for the next hunt along was new players. When they aren't hunting aliens we see Kurono, Kato and a girl named Kei Kishimoto who stays with Kurono but has obvious feelings for Kato.

'Gantz' has a reputation for fairly extreme violence and for quite a lot of nudity. It doesn't have as much violence as show like 'Elfen Lied' but the violence here feels far more real. This is largely due to the character design which is more realistic than many shows and plenty of time is given to their development. For the most part the 3D CGI backgrounds looked great most of the time although occasionally it doesn't quite come up to scratch. There is quite a bit of nudity although it felt deliberately uncomfortable rather than the usual fan service.

The episodes featuring missions are nicely action packed with plenty of exciting moments… even if characters have a habit of talking when they should be shooting at times! These missions take place in real time so a one hour mission takes two and a bit episodes. The between mission episodes show us the characters normal lives so we grow to care about them… or possibly get annoyed by them! If you are the sort of person who wants everything explained by the end you may be disappointed but if you don't mind some major points remaining a mystery you are likely to enjoy this; I certainly did. Overall I'd certainly recommend this but only to older viewers; it is certainly not a show for children.

score 9/10

Tweekums 26 February 2014

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2970067/