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"THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS"

This review/analysis may contain some degree of “SPOILER”

“Killing is mostly wrong and saving lives is almost always right”. Moral conscience is the issue that any society try to melt the common concept into its member. While in a normal everyday life, this concept is not tested so every often. This anime use power to intensify the test in viewer.

The story in this anime is simple. Two main characters suddenly acquire the power and they use it to find the meaning of their ... life and also left us with some questions. Inuyashiki Ichirou (The old man) portrayed as an unnoticeable person in the society especially his family and eventually face with inevitable death. Shishigami Hiro (The high schooler) portrayed as a child with dysfunctional family background. The plot run its course through several incidents to point out the core concepts each of the two-character focus on.

The animation is acceptable with somewhat good CGI. The action is quite stunning when they have to. The sound is OK. The opening is there to prepare the audience for some action. The ending is surprisingly meaningful correlating with the struggle of the main characters.

The character development is not focused on. A little background is showed here and their but not enough to fully explain the core personality and value of the character. We just have to accept that they became to be just because.

The focus of this series lies in moral challenge. It may seem weak to some because killing is almost always bad, but with the creator who has created Gantz in mind, it should be the main issue discussed. Sociopath is labeled when a person can do things morally unacceptable in the society and not recognize it as wrong. The problem is the common moral can be understood with a person with “common life” but if the person with “uncommon life” lead to different mindset and no one can understand them. It is quite a tragic to alienate them because all they want might be someone to understand them. I am not arguing that they are not dysfunction as a person because the majority is always win in this normal/abnormal fight, but it is the question to ponder about.

For Inuyashiki Ichirou, this series try to tell us that he finds content in saving lives to the extent of physically punish those who causes harm to others. From other perspective, he can not make his life meaningful in another way which he also tries all his life up to the age of 58 including family and workplace relationship. For my own opinion, this character exists as a mainstream moral answer and contrast to the main moral challenge in Shishigami Hiro.

For Shishigami Hiro, unlike Inuyashiki, he is young and not interested in the meaning of life as the same manner as Inuyashiki but love instead. We can see that the love in his family is complicated. The broken family is a common factor in many series made to label some character with disturbing background and it is no different here. His broken family situation is not the worst, he may live with his mother with relatively low-end quality of life but he also has a healthy relationship with his father who already has a new happy family. With so little background, we cannot know how he become to be “selfish”. By “selfish” I mean he understand the value of human life differently. He cares only those matter to him. This is why I concluded that he lacks the understanding of the concept of love. All the incident portrayed such as family situation, the love confession of Watanabe Shion and his friend Andou Naoyuki. He hungers for love but those whom he loves always betray him because they cannot accept him as he is. The things he does is logically sound but unfortunately not morally.

I enjoy this series to a degree. The questions and issues I sensed from the anime is interesting but the character and plot development need some improvement.

Thank you for reading my first review/analysis. Looking forward to more discussion.
Everything is only as it is.