Gantz: Beauty in chaos.

Have you ever seen something so tragic and terrible that you can stop looking at it? As humans, we tend to be very curious and we want to know things, even if that knowledge could bring us pain. Gantz is just like that; a lot of horrible things happen in its story, but you can't stop reading. 

Gantz tells the story of Kei Kurono and Masaru Kato, two school students who accidentally die trying to save a kid from falling into the subway tracks. However, after dying, Kurono and Kato find themselves in a room filled with strangers and a black sphere. This strange sphere forces all of the people in the room to participate in a game, but beware that this game can either be a second chance to live or your demise. The outcome of the game will solely depend on your performance. You might be wondering, what is the objective of the game or what's the game about? Well, the game is pretty simple and straightforward; each night, the participants will have to hunt a target that the sphere will determine. In order to kill the objective, the sphere will give the participants some basic equipment, and it will teleport the participants to a destination close to the target. Based on the performance of the participants, the sphere will assign them a score. The first participant to reach 100 points will be granted the opportunity to get out of the game and get their memories erased, just as if anything related to the game never happened. That is Gantz. Pretty crazy, huh? 

As I said at the beginning, Gantz is like a terrible accident and that is simply because of the nature of the story and the writing it has. His author, Hiroya Oku, is not afraid of rendering life to his liking, making explicit violence or sex, topics that he often embraces in his stories. Gantz is no exception to this rule and it is filled with some of these elements, being violence the one that stands at the core of what the manga is. However, violence is not really an element that stains the writing, in fact, Oku really knows how to use violence to convey emotions. In Gantz, most of the times there is a consequence to the violence, either in how characters will evolve or in how they will perceive the world. Hiroya Oku doesn't use gore just for the sake of entertainment...well, he probably does, but he also uses this element to convey fear and to show how precious can life be. Using violence just for the sake of violence is a practice that Hiroya Oku tends to avoid for the most part, because he probably understands how empty and shallow it can be. He often delivers the violence but with a certain weight behind it, and that weight are the emotional moments that Gantz has. This is one of the best elements in the manga, because of how closely tied it is to the character development. For instance, Kei Kurono is an apathetic character and he doesn't really care about others, but seeing him slowly change and become a leader is interesting and it only happens because he is sharing the same fear, adrenaline and pain as the other participants of this violent game. All of those emotions are a consequence to the violence presented, and how gruesome it is portrayed. This is where Gantz shines and where Oku's writing is at its best. 

Violence is only one of the many elements that Gantz offers as its storytelling devices. The use of mystery and randomness are also pretty strong throughout the entire manga, most of the time working harmonically and well tied to the story, but also being one of its biggest flaws. The main reason for this problem is Hiroya Oku's inconsistent writing, which often leads to certain plot points being randomly dropped or taking unexpected turns in the story. I know you might be thinking "but unexpected turns are something good", and I can completely understand your point. A lot of mangas do this and it often works well, but in Gantz there are no hints dropped or anything that will suggest a shift in its story, so when the unexpected happens, it feels off, out of place and, ultimately, like a disruption. For example, Shingeki no Kyojin takes several turns in its story, but they are well justified for the most part. When those turns actually happen, you can pretty much understand the logic behind and rather than an unexpected turn, it feels like the unveiling of a well kept secret. Nonetheless, this is not the case in Gantz and the same randomness that sometimes benefits the story, ends up hurting it in pretty bad ways. Hiroya Oku is a great mangaka, but he often becomes victim of his own writing, and when this happens Gantz is at its lowest. 

Gantz at its best moments can be a really touching story, but when is at its worst, Gantz can be pretty controversial. One of these controversies appears in an arc where there's a massive shooting with a Japanese student doing blackface as the author. For some people this is probably something very cool because it includes a very controversial topic, portrayed it in a graphic and "real" way. I can totally understand that perspective, but to me, it's simply distasteful. The idea of political correctness is something that I have always been against off, as long as you have a valuable message to deliver. In the case of Gantz, I feel that moments like the one I previously mentioned are only used for shock value, but not even in a good way. I get that racism is a thing and we can't just look away and pretend to ignore that reality, but replicating practices such as blackface will not help to raise awareness about the matter. The controversies not only end there, but they are also present in the portrayal of women in the story. If we were to talk about percentages, pretty much a 90% of the young women shown in the manga have a voluptuous figure similar to a hentai character, and they have little to no personality. These are the elements that I really dislike about the story, and that is mostly because they are simply there. These elements are mundane, they don't add anything of value to the plot, and they are what actually stain the writing of this manga.

Gantz is grotesque, but that's what also makes it very unique. Maybe you will regret reading the manga or you will absolutely love it, but I would be lying if I say that there are other mangas like that out there, because no other manga is as chaotic and raw as Gantz is. You can probably apply that to either the story or the writing itself. Nevertheless, I can assure you that you will get invested in the story, which actually speaks wonders about how interesting is the initial scenario that his author sets. The manga has a lot to offer, but beware that not because it has a lot, it means that it will nail all of those aspects. Gantz, just like the game it presents, is a gamble.