Gantz is the story of Kei Kurono, a crass Japanese teenager who lives a thoroughly self-centered existence until one day, when an old childhood friend named Kato drags him into a situation where he’s socially forced into performing a selfish heroic act, and it quite literally kills both of them. When saving the life of a drunk old bum, they get run over by a train, but at the moment of their deaths, they get transported to a barren apartment where they learn that their souls have been claimed by Gantz, a mysterious being who will grant them one more chance at life, if they’re willing to suit up and go fight aliens that are secretly living right under the noses of the population. Through Gantz they meet several similarly ill-fated people, including Kei Kishimoto, a high school girl who actually fucked up killing herself so badly that she now exists both as Gantz’s cloned soldier, AND in her original form. Together, these three Ks(which feels less and less like a coincidence as the story progresses) have to fight to survive and hopefully one day earn their freedom.

Of course you probably already knew all that, because I already reviewed the first season last year, and there really isn’t much difference between the two seasons at all. In fact, it’s almost like they didn’t need to be split up at all! Okay, I guess I’ll stop burying the lead, there is a very strange circumstance surrounding this anime, and as a result, this is going to be a slightly different kind of review. To those who don’t know, it is true that Gantz is officially split into two separate seasons. That’s not the fault of Anilist, MAL or any other website, it is the official state of the release. This is in spite of the fact that both seasons were released the same year, and if you’re just bingeing it all the way through, it can actually be kind of hard to pick out where the seasons are split, as the story just keeps going. This situation isn’t unique in the anime medium, take Girls Bravo for example, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a seasonal split handled this poorly before.

Episode 13, the season 1 finale, does KIND OF end on a satisfying cliffhanger, I guess, but episode 14, the second season premier? It’s an abrupt continuation that makes no attempt to catch you up on what happened previously. There’s no cold open recap, there are no flashbacks or expository explanations, we're just dropped in the middle of several ongoing sub plots with no clarification of context, and while I don’t love recap episodes at the best of times, it wouldn’t have been unwelcome here. True, most people are just going to binge both seasons at once, so none of this would bother most viewers, but the seasonal split is supposed to mean that you CAN take a break between seasons if you want to, and no, that option is not accommodated here. There are plenty of side effects to this choice, and I’ll be going over some of them, but first of all and probably the most important one to this review is that a lot of the things I said in my previous review haven’t changed, and since I don’t like to cover the same ground twice, I would like to implore you to check out my previous review before goinq any further into this one, link below.

Also, spoilers ahead for the first season and early events of this season, obviously.

Because this is basically the same show as the previous season, here’s a quick blow by blow of some of the elements that I have already covered and don’t want to spend too much time revisiting; One, the visuals are shit. This is one of the ugliest anime I’ve ever seen, as the combination of Studio Gonzo and director Ichiro Itano was a recipe for disaster. The animation is extremely cheap, and the 2D and 3D assets are jarringly at odds with one another. Two, the voice acting is still mixed. Ilich Gaurdiola is still doing a fine job as Kato, Shannon Emmerick is still just as ear-bleedingly terrible as Kishimoto, and the late Chris Ayres... Has gotten a little better, maybe because the character also gets better? This leads me to three, the characters are still mostly the same. There are two useless tagalongs from last season whose only purpose seems to be teaching us that it's okay to be a stalker if you'e pretty enough. The dog is still here.

Kishimoto is still the worst, completely useless on the battlefield and still aggravating outside of it. I felt some sympathy for her last season, but hearing the things she says about Kato, right in front of the dude she's freeloading off of? She’s a bigger simp for Kato than Kurono is for her. Kato is still likeable, though, and while his story outside of Gantz has reached a sort of bittersweet conclusion, having finally escaped from the cruel hand of his abusive aunt and acquiring a shitty little apartment to raise his brother in, he’s still Kato. By which I mean that ON the battlefield, he’s still frustratingly inactive, but let’s be real, most of these characters are. My biggest surprise is probably Kurono, who does become a better character this season, kind of? He takes a few definitive steps towards actual character development, just to have Gantz... Both the series and the entity itself... Cut his growth off at the knees. Honestly, what little growth he gets is one of the main reasons I like this season slightly better than the last one, as he takes a few steps towards becoming stronger and more capable, and while it still feels weird that he got that far by finally losing his virginity... Oh, we’ll get to that... It is nice to see.

One of the major ways that this season benefits from the split is that a lot of the worst, most offensive and cringiest moments in the series happened in the first season, and season 2 gets to wash its hands of them. “Oh, racism? Homophobia? Attempted rape? You must be talking about my evil twin brother! He came out first so he’s slightly older, but more importantly, we don’t talk very often anymore.” Probably the most problematic moment from this season is when seventeen year old Kurono loses his virginity to a twenty-four year old woman. That happens, and early. On the one hand, I know most cultures around the world(including more than half the United States) do not consider it a crime for an adult to sleep with a seventeen year old, but on the other hand, I also know that if the genders were reversed, this show would have spent the last 20 years being dragged for glorifying pedophilia, so I’m still calling it out, for the sake of gender equality. The groomer is also VERY quick to fall in love ith him and try to survive just to earn his affection and be with him, which, okay, make of that what you will.

On the plus side, though, all of that happens during what is easily my favorite extended action sequence in the entire series, the battle against the statue aliens. And if you’re asking “What’s so intimidating about a bunch of statue aliens?” Well, remember when I said in my last review how fucking creative this show is, and how it doesn’t leave a single possibility unturned? Well, the survivors of the last game(minus the now deceased biker dude) are sent with a new crew of losers into a temple full of deity-like statues that MAY be Buddhist? Yeah, I’m out of my element when it comes to theology, I have no idea what belief system these things fall into, I'm just gonna call them statues. The only ones I recognize are the red and green oni from Japanese mythology. Anyway, the gang fights their way through about four different waves of enemies, all diverse in their abilities and in how they’re fought, and I'm not gonna lie, it’s pretty awesome. Well, once they get started, anyway. Of course, we start off with the usual uncertainty, everybody hesitating to fucking do anything, but in comparison, it takes up a smaller percent of the battle than it did in either of the previous two outings.

There are also a lot of smaller moments here that I really like. I liked hearing one of the statues vocalize the fact that Gantz and its conscripted soldiers are fucking with peaceful aliens who weren’t hurting anybody and were just trying to mind their own business, because yeah, that's absolutely the case. I liked seeing just a split second of two of the new recruits becoming friends and making plans to meet up IRL. That reminds me, I don’t think I mentioned this previously, but I like how all of the souls that Gantz claims feel like real people, and like you’re experiencing an isolated fraction of a real person’s life that they just happened to get ripped away from. Speaking of realizations, though, the one drawback to this particular battle is that it clued me into a comparison that I don’t think I’ve ever made before... With the cold and callous way the Gantz collects characters and sends them off on missions, the Game of Thrones level lack of plot armor, the sad way their backstories play out, the relentless waves of powerful bosses and the way a single player can be singled out and fucked with... I sometimes feel like Gantz, as a character, is just a really shitty dungeon master. Or Glados. Maybe Glados as a DM.

But then all the good will from the first half kinda dwindles through the second half... The fourth big battle in this series is nowhere near as exciting or compelling as the three previous ones, as it just kind of pisses all over the progression of the story up to that point. It’s not based on a bad idea or anything, but personally I did feel kind of let down by it. Kurono was at a very important transitional stage in his development, and I’m not going to tell you exactly what happens, but it’s a pretty sizable middle finger to anyone who actually wants to see Kurono step up and stop being a whiny little shit stain. And yeah, I know, the manga was ongoing at the time and the director of the anime kind of had to figure out an ending of his own, but it might be one of the worst anime endings I’ve ever seen. Fucking Oreimo ends on a better note than this, final OVA and all.

It was also on this rewatch, with this particular season, that I finally nailed down what this anime’s biggest problem, on the whole, actually is: Pacing. One thing I really enjoyed about the statue battle is that after it gets through the usual bullshit at the start, the bulk of it is actually paced really well, even if that was probably by accident. With this standing as one of very few exceptions, it’s hard to pick out a moment from this entire series that isn’t either too fast to care about anything, or dragging on so long that it might actually piss you off. Characters debating over whether or not to fire their guns at the aliens is never fun. Sure, there’s some nuance to it with Kato, as he is a pacifist struggling with the need to survive, but even when Kurono yells at him for it and takes action himself, he ALSO takes way too long actually pulling the trigger. This sort of thing sometimes makes me wonder if these scenes might be getting padded out to reach a certain episode count.

Here’s a fun little anecdote for you. The first time I watched this anime all the way through, I genuinely don’t remember when this was, I made a pretty stupid mistake; I accidentally skipped an episode in the final story arc. There’s an episode that ends with a pretty shocking twist regarding the identity of the alien target of that round, and the next episode, there was a time skip to everything having broken down and we’re already in the middle of the action. I liked this, I thought it was really clever. Yeah it skipped some context, but I thought it still worked. Nothing was really lost in translation or anything, it was pretty obvious what happened between points A and C. But then on a later rewatch I realized that no, I skipped an entire episode of characters yelling at each other over the twist, trading accusations, forming teams and just talking, talking, talking, it was so fucking boring. You can tell an anime’s pacing is bad when you skip an episode at random and it actually makes the show better.

Add to that some pretty cringey Bush-era political commentary that made its way into the dub, and I honestly have to say that while I do prefer this season over the first season, that doesn’t mean it’s all that much better. My personal preferences aside, it’s not really a net positive or a net negative, as the negative aspects of the season just seem to neutralize whatever positives it brought to the table. Like I said last season, if you’re just looking for bloody gory action and bare boobs, you could do a lot worse than Gantz, but I do kind of struggle to think of anything else it brings to the table, much less what kinds of people I would recommend it to. I’ve never read the manga, but maybe start there? And once again, the feature film Gantz Zero is pretty good. As for this, if you liked the first season, you’ll like the second season. If not, steer clear.

I give Gantz: Second Stage a 3/10