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 113,218 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: 233,609

Favorites: 18,358

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8.10

Ranked #587Popularity #30Members 233,609

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

Oct 29, 2007

Master10K

Recommended

Here we have a manga that I cannot help but loathe and love all the same. Gantz being a thrilling Seinen, Sci-fi, Action manga that would take the reader on a gory rollercoaster ride, featuring amazing battles for survival. Yet it also happens to be riddled with poor dialogue and spontaneous plot developments that may stem one's enjoyment.

It all begins as two young Japanese high school boys, meet their end by a homicidal underground locomotive. And that would have been the end for them, if this wasn't a manga. So having been semi-posthumously transported to an apartment, along with others in the same situation; they ... are now forced by some giant black ball, to partake in missions and kill random aliens, in what seems to be some kind of sick game.

And that is Gantz in a nutshell... a manga that can be both straight-forward and random. The plot, revolving around people forced into these high mortality mission, is simple at its core and honestly it is a bit too simple that those who yearn for more substance in their reading material, may initially be turned off by Gantz. I know I was and it wasn't until a particular mission that I got completely hooked; onto the graphic, gory, intense, vulgar manga that is Gantz. And since Gantz is so good at grabbing the readers by the balls and never letting go, it can easily get away with having some glaring issues with its story. Like how so often it seems there's little to no direction in the storyline and how readers had to journey through over 30 Volumes, to understand and get some sort of explanation regarding the overall plot of Gantz. Unfortunately the basic reasoning given, simply could not fill up all the plot-holes that were left unattended.

Yet even when littered with the kind of issues that could greatly lower the score of some lesser manga, Gantz still remains as one of my all-time favourites. Kei Kurono is a large factor in all this, which is somewhat remarkable given how much of an annoying prick he is at the start. As the story progresses, so does Kei Kurono, along with a lot of the other characters that aren't basically cannon-fodder. And that is where the mangaka does a good job. In creating perilous situations for these characters to develop and also knowing how important it is to utilize the downtime for some more character development. However even though the mangaka tries to provides us readers with an interesting collection of characters, I can only give him an A-. Simply because a lot of the dialogue he had these characters spew could be mind-numbingly stupid at times.

At least it doesn’t completely affect the overall enjoyment of the manga and it is the artwork that contributes a lot to this. The artwork can be described as a technical masterpiece, since Hiroya Oku does a fantastic job of utilizing 3D renders to create a uniform look to the world. So that both the real life & sci-fi elements look like it's all part of the same manga. Not to forget the attention detail, where even the odd blemish or decapitation looks as though at lot has been put into it. However artwork is largely a subjective matter, so what I like may not be the same as what you like.

In the end Gantz is a violent, gory, lewd but overall an enjoyable manga. However in order to enjoy it, the reader must do one simple thing, turn off their brain and accept Gantz for what it truly is... some lengthy piece of mindless entertainment. Kind of like a Michael Bay movie. If you cannot do that then you simply won't be able to ignore the numerous plot holes and the various plot elements that were shoved in, because Hiroya Oku must have watched some Western Movie/Show, which inspired him at the time (Buffy: The Vampire Slayer & 2012 comes to mind).

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Aug 5, 2013

Polyphemus

Mixed Feelings

Gantz is kind of awesome, but in a weird way. A really weird way. Not "weird" because of any kind of originality, but because of how it manages to be awesome.The plot is extremely lazy with blatant holes throughout. It's mostly about the overblown/unrealistic action, and holy mother of god, is it overblown/unrealistic. Ammo clips are infinite, when actual guns are used. The masses are weak, brainless, and easily influenced cannon fodder, to an absurdly exaggerated degree. "The masses," of course, including just about all side characters. In the world of Gantz, gangsters hang out in toilet stalls and collect people's teeth like baseball cards. ...

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Jul 10, 2014

Merxamers

Not Recommended

If you are looking for a series that is 'good' in any way, i urge you to avoid Gantz like the plague.

I should clarify that i'm not necessarily offended by violence or sex; i'm a huge fan of other violent seinen such as Berserk and Vinland Saga. However, the author's main goal seems to have been to shock the audience as much as possible in order to give the illusion of quality.

In Gantz, people who die are faxed into a room by a black ball that hands out weapons, talks in 'leetspeak', and tells them to kill aliens. That is literally all the ... story you need to know or will be told.

The first 100 or so chapters of Gantz are nothing less than loathsome, and this begins with the characters. The main character Kurano is an unlikable douchenozzle, and that's his only character trait (besides his misogyny, which we'll get to); his friend Masaru is equally shallow but is instead a 'white knight' to contrast with Kurano. The worst example is Kei, whose appearance is as a naked suicide victim and is shamelessly exploited by both the author and by the other characters. Kei is seems more like the author's blow up-doll than an actual character; she is constantly being molested or threatened with rape, and each of the early chapters is preceded by an official drawing of her in an explicit pose.

Characters don't have to be deep for a series to be good, but Gantz goes out of its way to make each character as shallow and unlikable as possible. Most of the minor characters that come to the Gantz room are gang rapists, and the main characters aren't much better. Somewhere around chapter 120 the main cast becomes somewhat interesting and likable, but at that point the series is caught in a vicious cycle between being really dumb and really offensive. The only character with a real arc is Kurano, and it can be summarized by 'got a girlfriend and became slightly less despicable'.

By far the worst part of this series for me was the way the female characters are treated. Even after the 100 chapters of exploiting Kei have ended, each female character introduced after that is completely defined by their crushes or codependency on one of the male characters, who treat them like garbage. This trend only gets worse as the series goes on.

Almost as bad is the relentless, naive cynicism at play. Every person who isn't a main character is portrayed as mean, stupid, and pointlessly cruel, especially the teachers (gives some insight into the author's life, possibly). Horrible things happen in this series for no reason other than to shock the reader. When a mass shooting occurs, it's because the author wanted to draw a bunch of people being machine gunned to death, not for any narrative reason (it is barely mentioned later on). In short, the world of Gantz is one that is frankly not worth saving, and this becomes tiresome to read.

The sole high point of Gantz are some of the intriguingly weird alien designs, especially early on, and the level that the art gets to later on. I personally found the art to be uninteresting, but you can't complain about its overall quality.

Against all of these criticisms, the other nitpicks i have seem irrelevant. The lack of any narrative flow, the poor pacing of each chapter, and the out=of-place story elements (there are vampires and psychics introduced that have nothing to do with the aliens, without any explanation at all).

If you want to read violent schlock, go read Hellsing (which is REALLY GOOD violent schlock). If what i just described sounds like your cup of tea, then god help you. If you like story, character, or investment on the part of the author, then find something else to read.

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