I need to start off by saying Berserk is a story that delves into a lot of graphic content, be it violence or sexual assault, and really doesn’t hold anything back (sometimes to its detriment) in that regard. So with that in mind, I will be discussing some of that openly, so consider this your Content Warning both for this review and for the story in general. As an aside, the review is also mostly free of any Major spoilers, if that’s something you might be concerned about as well
Berserk by Kentaro Miura is a manga that needs no introduction, one with a legacy and impact both far reaching and timeless. Its various animated adaptations though fell far short of the heights that this story reached at its best moments. Part of that is just how impossible it is to ever truly replicate Miura’s stunning art, with each individual panel often being of higher quality than some double page spreads from other manga, and part of it is probably just because the studios involved took the many dedicated fans of this series for granted. In all fairness, those adaptations did at least succeed in exposing some people to this story for the first time – myself included, with the Golden Age trilogy that I watched years ago now actually not being so bad if you don’t mind the cgi. Of course though, it didn’t adapt the whole manga or even the entirety of the content in the specific arc it was adapting, and beyond that it’s been long enough since I watched it that I could only remember like three or four scenes in total from the whole trilogy. So when I decided to finally read the manga, I was basically going in blind aside for some preconceived notions I had held based on how I had seen other people talk about it.
Whenever I think about what it means for a story to be a bit immature or “cartoonish” in terms of my personal assessment, that term generally means there aren’t any meaningful consequences or effects that come out of the character’s actions and the story’s various arcs. Lots of really edgy stories tend to also be incredibly cartoonish in that sense, using darker aesthetics and imagery without really committing to showing any impact on the characters who live under such bleak conditions and exposed to such tense, traumatic and violent situations. My first impression of Berserk was that it would be exactly that sort of story, one that revels in blood and violence without very much substance or function. At some points it definitely felt that way, with the beginning of the Black Swordsman arc opening on a page that feels like it only exists for pure shock factor to get your attention, and this reliance on shock and the gratuitous use of sexual imagery stays with the manga for the greater part of its run. Before getting any further into discussing All That, I want to emphasise that I was pleasantly surprised to find that pure edge and graphic art were not all this manga had to offer, and if you’re willing to stay with it then you’re treated to a genuinely impactful story about living with and overcoming trauma and unironically one of the best explorations of “the power of friendship” that I’ve yet seen in any manga series.
We meet Guts as a single-minded, violent and vengeful lone swordsman, taking on monstrous and sometimes comically evil demons known as apostles, as he seeks to uncover information about the Godhand. The art in this initial phase is decently good, as is the action even though it gets somewhat repetitive, and enough elements of the story are caught up in some kind of mystery that when paired with the overwhelming hype around the manga, might all be sufficient to keep you reading beyond this stage of the story. Something I didn’t get much warning of myself though was how much of a slog this first arc can be just thanks to how insanely long each individual chapter is. If you’ve read more than one manga than you’ve probably realised and just gotten used to the fact that the first chapter is usually a fair bit longer than the rest of the chapters in the series, but getting something over a hundred pages in length by the time you’re four chapters in is pretty exceptional. Unfortunately, this is just about the worst part of the entire story so the extra long chapters just add another layer to the things that might put you off of reading further. If you do continue, you’re treated to the Golden Age which is an immediate and dramatic improvement in quality, picking up with Guts as a child and taking the reader through the journey that led to what he was in the Black Swordsman arc.
Golden Age recontextualises a lot of moments from the previous arc. With the added perspective it provides, it’s clear that Guts had largely shut himself off from people from a young age because of the violence he grew up around as a child among a group of mercenaries, and the trauma he experienced after being raped by Donovan. That moment is something that influences how Guts interacts with people for much of the rest of his life, understandably so, it plagues his sleep and every time someone else even tries to touch him it brings his mind back to the powerlessness and repulsion he felt as that was done to him. This is where it comes back to what I said before about things having a lasting effect on the characters in a story. There are very many instances of rape and sexual assault in Berserk that aren’t handled well at all, including in this same arc, but this particular instance isn’t just some cheap one off thing to show you that Donovan is a Bad Guy or that this world is Dark or Edgy, it serves a purpose in the greater narrative of the story at large and Guts’ character arc in particular. He can be a victim of this vile thing that happened to him and not be defined by it, he’s still allowed to be whatever he chooses to be (even if it takes him a while to realise it), and through his developing relationship with Casca the story puts forward the idea that he and her both are still worthy and capable of affection, emotional intimacy and tenderness in spite of the trauma they have endured and still struggle with. The bleak, depressing violence depicted in Berserk isn’t just balanced out by but actively builds towards this narrative optimism which this arc introduces and later arcs do a lot to build on.
Any psychological healing and emotional growth that our protagonist may have experienced over the course of the Golden Age pretty much gets halted if not entirely undone by the events of the Eclipse, which completely redefines the landscape and tone of the story. Of course, demons were shown to exist literally from the first page of the story, and significant foreshadowing had been done in terms of an event like the eclipse occurring – it’s delivered almost as a prophecy by Nosferatu Zodd – but nothing can prepare you for it in any way. The Eclipse features unquestionably some of the most instantly iconic and amazing imagery you will ever see in your life, and when put together with the sense of dread that was a constant presence thanks to what you already know Griffith will choose, it creates a level of payoff and impact that’s unmatched by anything else I’ve personally read so far. I would turn the page and genuinely gasp at some moments from how tense and bleak everything felt, waiting for the inevitable moment when complete chaos and slaughter would be unleashed on the cast of characters we had spent most of the story with up to this point. Almost every single member of the Band of the Hawk were living on a knife’s edge during these chapters and it was legitimately terrifying. I even found myself scared for Griffith in spite of the knowledge that the prologue provides pertaining to where his character ended up. After the Eclipse, Guts morphs into the character we saw in the Black Swordsman arc and sets off on his quest for revenge, becoming entirely consumed by hatred and fear. Particularly a fear of human attachment, because the only time in his life he had opened his heart to other people it ended up in the nightmare that was the Eclipse.
The manga then goes into the Lost Children arc, and yes I said arc rather than chapter, it just doesn’t feel like it belongs with the Conviction arc. While reading through Lost Children, I thought I had found what would definitely be my favourite part of this entire story. It retained the level of mystery that had made the prior arcs so appealing even though the object of that mystery had changed, and it added two characters that were much easier to relate to than any of Guts, Casca or Griffith who had all been at the centre of things previously. I found myself genuinely invested in Rosine and Jill’s story and relationship with each other and hoping against hope that they would find an ending as happy as this world could provide. It’s easy to understand why someone who grew up in shall we say a difficult home environment would want those hardships and the people responsible for them to just disappear, so they can live free and unfettered lives. It manages to be as sad a story as it is terrifying because of how that desire ends up perverted into these children acting on all the worst impulses a human could be capable of and dismissing it as simply “playing.” The end of Lost Children has Guts confronted by Farnese and a detachment of knights from whatever passes for a church in the world of Berserk, heralding the proper start of the Conviction Arc. You get the idea by this point though,there’s a lot to appreciate about the story in arc after arc and I haven’t even really gotten to discussing any of the thematic content and symbolism yet, which I feel really take off in the latter half of the story, but we really should be moving on to
Characters
From the Conviction Arc onwards I really appreciated the expanded cast of characters, particularly Farnese as a fellow absolute failure of a human being. Berserk always had strong character writing, with some notable exceptions like Wyald who I would rather not acknowledge, and I would love to talk about them all in more detail one day but this post has been delayed enough. I cannot though completely overlook the characters that made up the main cast for the greater part of the story. From Puck and his fourth wall breaking comments to the very late addition of Isma during the Fantasia arc, each addition not only helps to balance out the darker parts of the story but also generally have an arc of their own that’s just as vital as the one that Guts has, though understandably not explored to the same extent. I’ve already mentioned Casca in passing and how her arc is somewhat similar to Guts in that she spends almost the entire manga dealing with the effects of something horribly traumatic. In the latter chapters it did still feel a bit like her journey was only just beginning, as she obviously would not be able to return to who and what she was before, which is something Guts had already realised and started to accept about himself at the same stage of the story. Her entire dream sequence in Elfheim, while having somewhat questionable imagery at points, was one of the best sequences in the entire manga due to how cathartic it was and how long everyone around her had been trying to get her to reach that point, and once again she had the chance to show that she’s more than what was done to her.
Farnese is a character of noble birth and fanatical religious devotion who is just about insufferable when she is first introduced in the Lost Children arc – and yeah, I don’t consider that to be part of the Conviction arc. She goes through a radical transformation process that’s as engaging as it is relatable, as she sets out on a path of self discovery after having suppressed herself and living the life placed before her by other people. She doesn’t know what she really wants at first, but she ultimately finds herself through learning how to live for and with other people, something she has in common with Guts and Schierke. It’s an incredibly fulfilling character arc to read, and it flows very naturally into The Power of Friendship that the latter part of the manga brings forward. Taking things back a little bit to the campfire of dreams in the Golden Age arc, Guts found himself changed by his relationship with Griffith, it made him aspire for more and achieve more, and Griffith found himself changed as well, with his heart and resolve being softened by the time he spent with the only person who had ever made him even momentarily forget the dream he had cherished for so long. True friendship can grow and propel you to new heights, but to open yourself up to other people also means giving them a measure of power over, power they could just as easily use to tear down everything you took for granted, and everything you held dear. That double-sidedness to it is something that a few of the main cast struggled with. Serpico didn’t know how to handle it when Farnese started changing, Schierke felt her new companions might lead her astray, Guts felt terrified that relinquishing any amount of control to anyone else would lead him right back to the hell he experienced during the Eclipse, and all of them had those fears broken down over the course of their shared journey in a brilliantly done way.
After the countless nights of struggle and bloodshed that ensued from the eclipse, Guts is able to find companionship again and to find it within his heart to lean on other people, because even if you can cut a mutated demon elephant in half with a single swing of your sword, nobody is strong enough to face life entirely on their own. I think that’s a message as powerful as it is important, and even more surprising considering what I originally expected from the story. The good times in life are all the sweeter when put against the backdrop of what you’ve overcome, of all the lows that seemed impossible to get through, and I appreciate that even though Berserk may never get a true ending, that the protagonist did reach this point where he could reflect on his life in that way, and no longer be overwhelmed by the ghosts of his past. Yet life isn’t a linear path with a straightforward, upward trajectory, and the journey to that point – to Elfheim and all it represented within this story – was itself something that contained various new highs and lows for the characters, and of course in terms of the actual writing writing of the story, and this makes a decent branching off point to discuss some of the issues I had with the story.
Stuff That Kind Sucked
Starting off with a fairly light one, but parts of this manga did start to feel a bit tedious and repetitive at points, largely relating to the action. Very often I found myself getting a little impatient with the very many fight scenes especially in the latter half of the story just because they would mess with the flow and pacing of everything else without really delivering any strategic or interesting individual fights or battles (with a handful of exceptions.) The Conviction arc, for example, has a really drawn out battle at its climax that I really just could not care any less about than I did, because of how long it took but also because none of the characters involved were even remotely interesting to me. And this is something other parts of the story suffer from as well, the endless horde of (admittedly very beautifully drawn and designed) monsters when the main cast encountered the Sea God got very tiring very quickly. Something else about the action that I felt was really overdone was more prominent later in the story, when Miura tried to introduce certain consequences for Guts fighting these demons and monsters without restraint. At first, I bought into it because once again the prospect of something happening and having real consequences for a character will always be great, but it just never went in that direction. I understand he struggled more psychologically after that point, but it still felt pretty cheap because of what Skull Knight had said prior and what seemed to be occurring against the Sea God that just didn’t go anywhere.
There were other things about the story besides for the action that got a bit stale, things happening for no reason other than The Plot Needs It To Happen like what caused Nina and Casca to end up where they did during the Conviction arc, and a couple of things that happened with the Skull Knight in Golden Age and shortly before the start of Fantasia. The humour would sometimes just fail completely a lot of times as well, with Puck in particular being the worst offender in that regard, but Isidro played his part as well. Sometimes I laughed a little bit in spite of myself, but other times these attempts at injecting some levity into the story just broke the momentum of an otherwise great chapter or moment. The very end of the manga, or at least the end of the manga’s run under Miura until he passed on, was exceptionally good, and then you have chapter 263 thrown in there, half of which annoyed me more than anything else. These are really just nitpicks in the grand scheme of things though, and didn’t take too much away from the overall enjoyment or quality of the other events in those parts of the story. What did take away from the story substantially was the excessive use of sexual violence, and the lack of care when it came to the framing of it the vast majority of the time.
There were points where it felt like every other scene Casca was in, someone or some thing was trying to rape her, or actively doing so as with a couple of moments in Golden Age that were just overdone. Miura is capable of portraying this kind of content in a way not as gratuitous as it often was, I already mentioned what happened to Guts and that was ultimately one page, that got across the powerlessness, despair and trauma of the situation. It was absolutely disgusting and upsetting to say the least, but that’s just the nature of the content rather than a flaw in its portrayal in this instance. Casca on the other hand has what felt like a hundred pages of almost pornographic panels depicting her rape and assault. I tried looking up some other opinions on what happened there and I came across some people addressing the idea that she “enjoyed” it which feels disgusting to even type out here, because of course we know that she just rejected it all to the extent that her state of mind became what it was for most of the remainder of the manga, but the fact that the framing of the event itself could even cause a question like that is a sign that something probably went wrong. In flashbacks later on that moment is handled a bit better, just as an aside.
Moving on somewhat, Miura also seemed to lean on rape as just the default way to show that someone was Not Good for a sizable chunk of the manga. A new monster or set of monsters would be introduced, or humans in the case of the cultists in the Conviction arc, and literally the first thing they would do at the sight of a woman was rape or try to rape them regardless of any other context or whether it added anything at all to their characterisation other than just that we’re probably not supposed to like them. I said before that the Lost Children arc was my favourite one, and part of that was that the gratuitous sexual violence was substantially toned down, and the Fantasia/Elfheim arc which very quickly became my new favourite was a similar case where we didn’t get anything as egregious as previous parts of the story even as late on as the Falcon of the Millennium Empire arc. I don’t feel like this warrants a paragraph on its own but as a passing statement I did also find how Miura chose to draw women in this story a bit strange a lot of times. We get very many panels and spreads of Guts just bare-chested with no nipples somehow, but just about every time I can remember with the women, they would have the perkiest nipples you’ve ever seen in your life regardless of context, even if they were just disembodied boobs on a bloody spike which happened more than once. So yeah, in general this story probably sexualises certain characters enough that it gets a bit concerning.
GENERAL STUFF AND FINAL SCORE
When Berserk is great, it’s absolutely at the top of its class, and when it does something poorly it goes all out in that as well, which makes it a bit hard to sum up in a neat, convenient way. I expected to hate it completely, and I did find a couple of things to hate, between the sometimes drawn out fight scenes, the hit or miss humour and the over-reliance on less than ideal depictions of sexual violence. However, this is more than just another edgy and violent manga, it’s more than a story about one man hunting demons and seeking revenge. It’s a story about living with and overcoming trauma, and how a group of people found happiness in each other’s company in spite of all the darkness and hopelessness they’d encountered. It’s a story that could and did resonate very deeply with a lot of people, and one that urges you to fight on no matter what life throws at you, and to not abandon the things and people you cherish just because your pain may have blinded you to what’s most important. I understand now why so many people rate this manga so highly, even if my preconceptions of it were validated to an extent, and while it doesn’t hold as much value to me personally as it might to people who can tell you how many hairs Zodd has on his scrotum, I can acknowledge that overall it deserves a lot of the recognition it has received and my final score for it is therefore an 84 out of 100.
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