Berserk is a gritty medieval fantasy manga by Kentaro Miura, who may have been one of the greatest artists ever. His art will absolutely floor you time and time again.
The story of Berserk has its ups and downs, but overall I was left disappointed by it. The story feels like a vehicle that constantly thrusts Guts and his crew into contact with the Eldritch and Demonic horrors that Miura excels at drawing. That’s great but it’s usually not much more than that.
A lot of mysteries and ideas are dropped for effect or as cliffhangers and then completely forgotten as the series goes on. This is the curse of long-running serialized manga and it’s something you’ll have to deal with if you want to read Berserk.
Random thoughts below:
Oddly enough, a lot of the mercenary captain stuff reminded me of Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History.
I’m about 6/41 volumes into the story right now and I’m enjoying it much more than the One Piece chapters I read earlier this year (or last?). The art is leagues better and the story is much more interesting but we’ll see where it goes from here.
Big spoilers for Berserk to follow
What do I love about Berserk so far (20/41 volumes into)?
The art is the best art I’ve over seen in a manga. The attention to detail, the emotion, the motion. It’s all fantastic.
I also like the story generally.
What don’t I like?
Casca getting graped so hard she gets fridged and goes fully pretarded. Guts goes through a similar trauma as a child (although not to the same extent if we want compare them) but he pushes past it as best he can while Casca is completely destroyed by it. It feels a little gratuitous although Griffith being completely broken by a year of torture followed his grape of Casca makes sense if we buy into the “Griffith is gay for Guts” angle.
The Lost Children Arc feels like filler and is a little reminder that this is a serialized manga and that the artist’s art style, while being the BEST, is probably not sustainable in the long run due to the level of detail in each panel.
The Male Gaze present in the novel, Casca’s agency being taken away is made worst by panels lingering on her body and fixated on its weakness and the constant threat of her grape.
Comparing Casca’s fragility to Guts, Guts gets hurt constantly but he always gets back up again especially with the help of Puck’s fairy dust. But you can’t sprinkle fairy dust on Casca’s psychological trauma I guess.
It seems like an anti-chosen one story which suffers from similar problems to a chosen one story. Fate and prophecy (and determinism?) play a role in fueling this idea that the suffering of Guts is inevitable and nothing can be done about it. “The Current of Causality” is a constant refrain spoken by the Skeleton King that perhaps is meant to communicate both the truth of our inability to change our fate and the futility of fighting against it.
The use of Skeleton Knight Ex Machina a bunch of times gets a little old. Considering the forces Guts is fighting against, it makes sense that he would need a powerful ally in that fight if we want to see him survive. But the Skeleton Knight’s motives are unclear and his actions feel unearned at times.