Berserk

The long awaited continuation of one of the most acclaimed animes of all time is hard to watch due to atrociously bad CGI/animation, angles, and worse editing. Luckily the story remains somewhat true to the books so it was able to hold my attention but just barely as every time a character opened their mouth you lose focus on the story as immersion is completely broken.

Just how bad is the animation? Well, it reminds me a bit of 15-20 year old kids cartoons. We also had similar quality in cut scenes back in the N64/PS2 days. Now imagine if those cut scenes were the focus of the games and you will have a good idea of what this anime is like. Its almost like sabotage. If younger folks watch this without seeing the originals they will disregard the entire franchise from here on.

Anyway, like stated above, it still follows the books as best it can so by virtue of having a good manga, this one still gets a rating of 7 from me which makes it better than average overall. Thats how good the berserk story line is. In the future, they should definitely wait until they have enough money to get a quality animator.

I decided to watch Berserk 2016, and oh my God, what did I just watch? Let me start with the elephant in the room: the visuals.

The visuals are jarring at best and flat out disgusting at worst. The use of CG didn't pay off at all. People complained about Sailor Moon Crystal's use of CG, but even that was leagues better than any of the visuals I saw in Berserk. The animation was just as bad, as the characters didn't move smoothly and felt clunky overall. But to make it worse is the direction of the camera, it was disorienting, sloppy, and caused me to lose track of what the hell was even happening. Makes me question if the director knows anything about the basic rules of film making.

Now, I do understand why they went with CG, as they wanted to try and replicate all the little details, but even so, it was clear that the people beyond the animation had little to no experience with 3D modeling/animation. I have seen better cutscenes on the PS2 than this.

The story to me wasn't that bad, but nothing that special either.

Overall, the story is okay, but the visuals were trash. The first two season of Sailor Moon Crystal were also trash, but got significantly better at season three. Hopefully the same can happen with Berserk.

This serie is nothing compared to the original one, as the original is way better.

I need to get this out there; This show IS good, but you need to get used to the animation. It is not as horrid as some people say, it's more of a hate/love thing in accepting the fact that it IS 3D with some frame rate issues. Quite frankly, once I decided to watch it no matter what, the 3D didn't really bother me too much. I was more interested in continuing Guts' adventures than nitpicking the animation apart.

Don't misunderstand me, I've no idea why they simply didn't do a good 2D animation on this and continued the 1997 story straight off the bat, and as such it is a flawed product. But definitely not flawed enough to deserve being called 'ruined'. That's childish.

This show continues the story of Berserk and is definitely for people who've seen the original 1997 animated series. It's dark, grim and surprisingly funny for such as dystopian tale. Guts slaughtering his way through mounds of enemies and facing all sorts of impossible challenges, all the while having to watch 'weaker' people die around him, is exactly what I wanted, and exactly what I got.

Looking forward to season 2! (Though seriously, whoever made this, considering improving your 3D drastically or switch over to 2D.)

I love the classic and I love the manga. I heard so much about how bad and disappointing this adaptation was but didn't start watching until recently. First, the source material is very deep and hard to mess up. Second, The storyline works as a good follow up to the old anime. Third and most importantly, The animation just sucks and you'll have to get over it to enjoy it. The main problem is they tried a form of animation that does not blend with anime. The flashback scenes are in the classic anime style and look amazing. Possibly better than the original. The computer generated stuff has its moments of glory. The problem is when they try to use this new animation while maintaining an anime feel. Spoiler! Experiment fail. This 3-D CGI effect does not work with classic anime. That's the whole issue. If you can get past the fact that the animation is going to suck most of the time, you might just enjoy this spectacular storyline.