Another deadly game is about to begin. When a school bus plunges off a bridge, a group of students awakens to find themselves in an empty room with a mysterious black sphere. Their deaths have made them the newest recruits in a hunting game. Given weapons, uniforms, a mission, and an ultimatum, the team is sent to battle waves of aliens where they must earn enough points to be resurrected before dying permanently!

Collects GANTZ:G Volumes 1–3.

GANTZ:G Omnibus is written by Hiroya Oku and Tomohito Ohsaki and drawn by Keita Iizuka. English translation by Matthew Johnson. Lettered by Studio Cutie. Published by Dark Horse, September 30, 2025.

Kevin Cormack
Rating:

Hiroya Oku's Gantz was a 37-volume behemoth of sharply-drawn violent action published over thirteen years, ending in 2013. As a pioneer of digital art, Oku's works are notable for their use of extremely detailed 3D-modelled digital backgrounds, upon which are composited his equally meticulous character art. This gives his manga an otherworldly, almost sterile appearance, despite its often ridiculously gory ultraviolence and sometimes off-putting sexualization of his female characters.

GANTZ:G is a three-volume side story set in the Gantz universe, sometime during the middle of its progenitor's story, considering the very brief cameo of a prominent side character who appears. Although Oku is credited with writing the first volume, authorial duties are assumed by novelist Tomohito Ohsaki for the second and third volumes. Keita Iizuka provides art that is almost indistinguishable from Oku's.

The setup is almost identical to Gantz, even down to lead character Kei Kurona having a surely-deliberately similar name to the original's Kei Kurono. Kurona, in this instance, however, is female – as, in fact, are most of the cast, giving ample time for Iizuka to copy Oku's fixation with tight black pleather-clad feminine buttocks and breasts. A class of high school kids all expire in a tragic bus crash, and find themselves mysteriously resurrected in a locked room with a large black sphere (Gantz) that gives them battlesuits and weapons, before transporting them elsewhere to battle bizarre alien monsters to death. Their only hope of returning to their previous lives is to play Gantz's brutal game, scoring 100 points via unclear means.

Kurona's desperate to score 100 points not to win, but to spend them on resurrecting the boy she crushes on. Sadly, he died horrifically along with most of the rest of the class in their first battle. Much like the original, GANTZ:G doesn't skip on cruel, meaningless deaths and brutal, wanton violence.

It's not only the disturbing monsters Kurona must deal with, but the cruelties of other girls from her school, some of whom have their own inner turmoil to cope with. One is a struggling idol singer stalked by a creepy fan, one is a quiet, studious girl with no self-confidence, while another is abused by their deadbeat father. Each of them grows and develops a little over the course of this short series, their stories reaching fairly satisfying conclusions.

If anything, this is “Gantz-lite”, and could have done with a bit longer to explore the characters and their interactions. There are a few wild twists regarding identity and relationships that elevated the original beyond a mere visceral splatterfest. It's still a lot of fast-moving, thrilling fun, and a very quick read, as the action scenes are compelling. I'm glad I got to read it all in one sitting, as waiting on individual volumes would have been excruciating. To fully enjoy it, the reader either must be keen to see a lot of blatant sexualization of the young female cast, or be willing to let it slide. The violent content is often very mean-spirited, too. If these aspects are likely to be a problem for you, then you may be best to skip anything Gantz-related. For Gantz fans, it's pretty much more of what you already like.

Lucas DeRuyter
Rating:

GANTZ:G (I don't know if the “G” officially stands for “Girls,” but it basically stands for “Girls”) is the first official spin-off of Hiroya Oku's provocative and transgressive Gantz manga. While widely celebrated as edgelord fodder thanks to its liberal graphic violence, excessive catering to the male gaze, and incel-coded main character, there's always been a kernel of something genuine and interesting in the original Gantz. It reads like Oku had an absolutely terrible time in high school, and the lead, Kei Kurono, captures how a cruel society and apathetic family can turn a young man into a nihilistic, self-interested asshole. Seeing Kei become a better person through facing genuine adversity and dealing with the kinds of problems unique to being a young man, figuring out his place in the world felt nearly cathartic and made me believe people in the real world could pull themselves out of the radicalization pipelines that prey upon the kinds of insecurities that Kei addresses.

GANTZ:G, however, doesn't have the heart that made me appreciate so much of the original Gantz, and I think a lot of that stems from Oku not really knowing how to write young women. Sure, the main characters deal with stereotypical high school girl problems, like bullying via rumor spreading, stalkers, and abusive male guardians, but the work's exploration of these issues is surface-level at best. In reading GANTZ:G, it's clear that Oku doesn't really understand how society beats down young women; and that's maybe best exemplified in the series protagonist, Kei Kurona, having the sole motivation of trying to revive her childhood friend and her only flaw being that she's too good at everything and despised by her peers for that. Sure, women broadly receive more flak for trying to rise above their station than their male counterparts, but with so little going on under the hood, it felt difficult to care about Kei, any of the other characters, or the mortal peril they're facing.

To offer another point of comparison, in the original Gantz manga, training with the Gantz suits is a major development in Kei Kurono's character arc as a moment where he begins to develop a sense of community, purpose, pride, and responsibility to other people. In GANTZ:G, characters training with their suits feels more like a means to pad this manga's chapter count before the next death game. GANTZ:G is going through the motions of what made the original work impactful, but doesn't build up the emotions and themes that made the original hit so hard.

Also tapering my enthusiasm for this work is the frankly amateurish assets ANN received to compose this review of the GANTZ:G omnibus. In reading this work digitally for this review, a middle white bar broke up the image of double-page spreads, like in circa-2009 fan scanlations. Additionally, some chapter titles appeared to be placed over the original Japanese text for the title rather than the original text being removed and replaced; once again, like circa-2009 fan scanlations.

That being said, some of the strong points of the original Gantz still shine through in GANTZ:G. The creature designs are both weird and terrifying in a way that feels like aliens are imitating monsters from B-horror movies. Additionally, it's still incredibly fun to have the Gantz ball neg and badmouth everyone who failed to secure any points in a given Gantz game. There were also a few moments in GANTZ:G that filled me with as much shock and surprise as the original manga.

I wanted to like this manga more than I did, which makes it more disappointing than outright bad. I'd encourage fans of the death game genre to check it out, but think that any time dedicated to this work is probably better spent on Oku's preceding Gantz series.