Gantz Review

The premise still has teeth. People die, wake in an apartment with a black sphere, and are sent to kill aliens with equipment nobody explains, and the show is unusually willing to let panic, cowardice, and self-interest decide who survives, which is why the Buddhist temple mission still lands as hard as it does. Kurono is written as an actively unpleasant protagonist and the series takes a long time to soften him, which is rarer than it sounds.

The problems are production and structure. Gonzo's 2004 CG for the alien designs and the sphere sits badly against the drawn characters, animation quality drops sharply in the second half, and the gore is more often static and murky than horrifying. Having caught up with the manga, the series invents its own ending, an abrupt and thematically confused sequence that discards the game entirely. The industrial rock cues are effective and the tension inside the missions is real, but the finished object is a strong idea half-executed and then abandoned.