Gantz: G vol. 3

If nothing else, I have to give “Gantz:  G” this: It has managed to crawl its way up from the creative bankruptcy of vol. 1 to display something resembling competence in its third and final volume.  We lose no time picking up from vol. 2 and the death of Fujimoto at the hands of the volume’s alien-du-jour, a white-haired-and-skinned humanoid with a creepy laugh and some shape-shifting abilities.  Most of the volume’s first half has the girls fighting the alien’s “spawn” and making short work of them in the process. The second half has them fighting against the being proper and suffering loss of life and limb as they try to figure out its weakness.

Who dies in the second half?  Abiko does. That’s not a spoiler because I’m pretty sure you have no idea who this character is based on their name.  Ditto for most of the characters in this series save for its ostensible protagonist, Kei. “Gantz” was always focused on style and slick action, but it still remembered to provide interesting characters for us to root for along the way.  Even at their most basic, these characters at least had one memorable trait to them. That’s less true here and the passable execution of the action doesn’t really make up for this deficiency.

Ultimately, “Gantz:  G” comes off like it could’ve been a filler arc for its parent series.  Not every arc in “Gantz” was an absolute winner, but they all moved the story forward in some way.  This just feels like an exercise to see if there was an appetite for more “Gantz” from its fanbase. That this series lasted three volumes in Japan suggests that there was.  That it only lasted three volumes suggests that the fanbase in question found it to be only slightly more entertaining than I did.