Berserk

Feb 2, 2021

Not Recommended

Funny

Preliminary (363/? chp)

hi, I know nobody is going to read this but I just want to shout my controversial feelings about Berserk into the void so here I go.

More than anything else, I find that Berserk is horrifically overrated. People act like Kentaro Miura is the second coming of Jesus, but to me his work doesn't live up to the hype, and here's why:

I was initially drawn in by the admittedly very good art style in the first few chapters, especially considering they're from the late 1980's. The unusually dark themes and haunting medieval setting made it an interesting and enticing read. Because of those first few ... chapters, I thought that Berserk was brimming with potential, Unfortunately, I quickly came to the conclusion that Miura completely failed to utilize it.

It begins with the characters. As much as I want to like Guts, he's barely more than a two-dimensional trope of the "strong and silent type who ends up unwillingly collecting a rag-tag group of people who follow him". While I'm usually a big fan of these types of characters, he becomes stale very fast. He has likeable attributes, and his backstory and the Golden Age Arc make him at least somewhat interesting, but it doesn't cancel out the fact that he has next to no character development or meaningful dialogue.

The antagonist Griffith..... annoys me very much, to put it politely. He is ugly and a bad character. Griffith is given absolutely no reason for doing any of the horrible deeds that he does over the course of the story, except that ""he wants to rule his own country"". But why? I guess it doesn't really matter to Miura. He's a bad and boring antagonist and I want to punch him in the face.

In addition to being flat like Griffith, every female is barely more than a glorified sex toy, which leads me to my next point: Miura's apparent rape fetish.

Initially, the series' gore and rape was striking, because it actually seemed to serve a purpose, e.g. to show how gritty and cruel the reality of Guts' world and life is, and to illustrate how horrible the people (and monsters) inhabiting this horrific world really are, even if they hide under a pleasant facade. But as the series progresses, it becomes apparent that Miura simply likes drawing dicks very much, and enjoys seeing every female character he creates being sexually assaulted in increasingly perverse and weird scenarios (horse). As the saying goes, there can be too much of a good thing, which is the case here. Miura completely desensitizes the readers to the violence and gore and makes it lose its impact.

The action scenes also lose their appeal as the series progresses; in fact, they become downright ridiculous. Guts' sword alone is so comically large and heavy that it makes every feat he performs with it seem hilarious. The battles themselves are very rinse and repeat: Guts encounters incredibly OP enemy, Guts gets beaten within an inch of his life and injured so horrifically that it's almost funny he never seems to carry any lasting consequences, and somehow recovers to near perfect health every time. The gore and battles become boring in their predictability. Add to this the fact that some arcs are badly paced and drag painfully at times, and one has the perfect formula for underwhelming.

In conclusion, Berserk had potential, but decided to waste it on essentially becoming the boring embodiment of Kentaro Miura's rape fetish. I can't understand why it is as highly regarded as it is.

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Aug 28, 2023

chicthicko

Not Recommended

Funny

Preliminary (382/? chp)

Let's get straight to the bone with the negatives as the positives have already been done to death. I don't like at all how mangaka Kentaro Miura handles female characters which is only a complaint to some if you make it one. However, there's much more to that. There are major problems with Casca. She — like most female characters of Berserk — has been heavily sexualized (for reference, Wyald chapters, post-Eclipse Casca under waterfall) and sexually assaulted and then chucked aside. What should have propelled development of her character makes her a human cabbage. And I do mean the Eclipse. A Band of Hawking ... Readers go: "One can't imagine what Casca must have gone through and anyone with such trauma will be rendered insane" et cetera. Well, neither can you or Miura. And yet, he chose to put Casca through the Eclipse and was not willing to follow through with her character. It may be so that Eclipse was written during pre-internet era and Miura was out of ways to research the nuances regarding such topics. Yet again — I stress — he chose to depict the act. If all he came up with was sidelining Casca's character agency for almost entirety of the remaining narrative scaling twentysomething volumes, it's not very good writing, is it? Especially when the central concerns revolve around her. You call it bold and visceral and transgressive. I say thoughtless and obtuse and a missed opportunity. Even Schierke wasn't spared in the fetish department and she's thirteen. Tell me we can't use modern lenses for something authored thirty years ago. Except we can. Except dated artistic decisions are to be acknowledged in all kinds of art for us to appreciate the rest of it.

Adding on, violence seems to go hand-in-hand with such assaults on many fronts. Wyald was thoroughly unnecessary, especially after the Bakiraka chase. We had been already introduced to an apostle, and him coming right before the Eclipse as a clunky foreboding lessens the impact. We get it. Apostles are evil, rapey, and hideous. The point was made in prologue. What's that, you say? It was to show Guts is now more powerful and can hold his own against an apostle? Well, obviously, he's been splitting logs coming down a waterfall's mouth so I think we would have been okay following that. Let's leave the trolls out of it too. We get it, dammit. Violence desensitized me to the extent that it was no longer shocking and I didn't care for the hack-and-slash, apostle-of-the-week cool factor. To help sum up the paragraph, Japanese composer Susume Hirasawa is willing, quoted by Miura in Tezuka Osamu Prize (2002): "I think Guts' sword represents a penis and the monsters destroyed by it represent women's genitalia." Poetry, my man. Big-dick poetry.

I find myself indifferent following the ensemble of RPG-like cast gathering around Guts while he wanders in search for Griffith — a trope as old as the novel Journey to the West. Need not talk about tonal inconsistencies because it is partly the fault of manga's length. Berserk could use a fat trim which I doubt will hurt manga's credibility. It's so repetitively heavy, the entire thing, an almost Sisyphean undertaking — stitching cults, causality, existentialism, divine caprice, dynamic morality, and like. So heavy you get tired reading it, no wonder it struggles to carry itself, for hammered-in complexity doesn't equate to quality. If the meatier themes need the ceaseless bluntness, the structuring and handling needs to be subtle and sure. I don't see it beyond Golden Age arc. Miura even admits to writing the manga as it progresses, and also regrets overdoing the sexual assaults of the manga looking back, a case of inexperience. At least knowing this, it's understandable how things came together to be as they are.

Berserk isn't bad, by any means. It's just so damn uneven, carried by momentary sparks in later two-third of the manga. We know there is an obvious raging passion here. It's a lifetime work hence the collective and eclectic fantasy esthetic — a world populated with spirits, centaurs, elves, dragon, demons, trolls, witches, fauns, goblins, golems, ogres, unicorns, you name it. Miura's guiding vision, however bloated and overstuffed, is there. It takes time but emerges. Birth of Fantasia is one of the most beautiful unfolding in animanga medium. The art style morphs the mythopoeic sections with awe and you want the panels framed and tucked away. At the same time, there are more volumes on the other end of the spectrum as well where the art seems to be window-dressing, drudgery, indulgence. Not a unifying element.

It's a mess, maybe at times a beautiful one. This isn't to say only polished and structured works are worth it because we know manga, by very nature of the industry, is a spontaneous medium, living and dying by its ad-libbed frenzy. I'm actually a hardcore believer in Steve Erickson's "I don't find perfection especially interesting. Art is not all about refinement and formal accomplishment. It is about passion and imagination and courage and these things that I didn't understand when I was kid being taught the rules. I realized that . . . art could be . . . what I wanted to make it if I could pull it off.” So while I see what people value in Berserk and where the strugglers come from, it isn't pulled off well.

It remains what it is. Manga community doesn't openly talk about the issues enough. Berserk's praised to heavens and back here. It is being read by underage people and I hope to put out there what's absolutely not cool. Think through your favorites. That's enough from me.

(Gave it a six. Regardless I wouldn't recommend it to anybody therefore the "not recommended."

Edit, copied from my reply elsewhere: People got confused when I mentioned the rape and sexualization in the same sentence. I don't have problems with use of rape in a work. I have problems with Casca's character being ultimately denied any impacting action further in the story just after the assault in Eclipse. Users here think I have problems with rape but really actually I have problems with how the aftermath is handled. We have seen Guts dealing with his trauma but we hardly see Casca have the same arc for so, so long. It's like Miura was out of ideas what to do with her.

I don't care for censorship of triggering topics. Write/draw whatever and take responsibility. It's a free world. When Casca gets portrayed in a sexualized light and tossed aside with little agency, just after what she went through in Eclipse, I can't really take it seriously anymore.

Conclusion, no, I don't think rape = sexualization. However, sexualization is a problem. Not fan of the loli shit.)

Another edit, tired now, very much hoping the last one to come. Berserk is a fantasy, y'all. It's not an accurate account of Mediaeval Ages, and it has no intention of being one. Pure artistic expression. I don't see it putting rape in any meaningful context other than just for the sake of being edgy. Add to that the above edit's text, you know where I stand.

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Apr 25, 2017

MortalMelancholy

Not Recommended

Funny

Preliminary (9/? chp)

Please note: this review is a warning, and is focused primarily upon the start of the manga. The manga is, of an overwhelming proportion, garbage, would be the warning. Don't take this lightly. And don't think I'm being unfair to the manga; this is merely the objective truth.

This manga is thoroughly terrible in nearly every possible way; art (ugly and disgusting), story (there is none), and characters (stock characters with no depth, ego, or even self-awareness).

The art: Comparing the artwork in chapter 318 with that in chapter 3, Guts somehow managed to get uglier (ever so slightly), and the thought of seeing his ugly ...

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Oct 22, 2016

hardcase

Not Recommended

Preliminary (256/? chp)

I don't consider myself to be much of a contrarian, so it is with little pleasure that I add this score to one of the highest rated series on this website.

I think Berserk is GROTESQUELY overrated, pointless misery porn with some very nice illustrations. The violence is hideously over the top, the worst of which is reserved specifically for its female characters, the sheer darkness of the setting mutes any of the story's supposed triumphs, and as far as I'm concerned you lose any potential allegorical worth to the brutality of the real world when you have demon rapist horses and giant rape machines ...

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Jul 2, 2025

tabbycatcircus

Not Recommended

Funny

Preliminary (367/? chp)

I get why Berserk is at the top of MAL's manga section, but it's really only because of the Golden Age arc. It's in the character development and outstanding writing. We get to see how the characters react to different developments in their lives (especially Griffith) and how their relationships and motivations change. Characters like Griffith are detestable, but they are completely understandable and even relatable. All the events that come to pass to culminate in the Eclipse make sense. It's legendary.

My biggest problem is with the portrayal of the female characters.
To start off, there's an evil group called the "God Hand," consisting of ... 5 members. And the only woman just happens to also be the weird sexual sexy one while all the males look very ugly and different from one another and aren't meant to be sexy like she is. And of course, how this series handles depictions of rape. In one character's backstory we see that his childhood rape gets handled tastefully with no unsavory camera angling, another pimps himself out and all we focus on is his trauma and regret and feeling of being dirty, but the rapes of women go on for way too long and are heavily angled to emphasize certain areas; the women are all perfect looking with no saggy tits or anything. You can argue that "b-but it portrays the brutality of the world!!" ok so why aren't all the male soldiers bishonen? Not to mention how, you know, men DO get off to the rape of women. You can't honestly argue it's meant to horrify you.
And I didn't even get to how the female characters are actually handled. If you look at them without their contexts they do seem very decently written, with carefully thought out motivations and dialogue, but in the context of the story as a whole they are sidelined and used as plot devices. For example, the main female character's motivations center around one man, and later another man (whose character is primarily influenced by that other man). That's not a bad thing in a vacuum, but the narrative seems to paint her romance with the latter man as "true love" when in reality they're both acting as replacements for someone else (if you really analyze the scenes they're in, scenes that would remind them both of that male character they idolize, it's clear why they would think that way about each other). None of these issues are resolved or addressed, especially since that female character is "absent" for a large portion of the narrative so we never get to see her thoughts on anything until a small portion where afterwards she is rendered a damsel in distress again.

I also can't wrap my head around how fantasy creatures only ever seem to want to rape women and incorporeal beings also want to do the same. But this concept is as old as Genesis where male angels apparently find human women desirable enough to rape and impregnate, so you know these concepts are so clearly written by men who can't conceive of a perspective outside of their own sexuality.

And the female side characters are handled no different (female children aren't spared and are also given strange naked camera angles). A prominent female side character's story is overly sexual, is almost raped by an animal and also sexualized, and her "character arc" turns her from the weird sexual one in a leadership position to the meek, demure one following the team. I get that there's nuance in the other bits of that narrative but in the wider context of the story it's just so coincidental that she has to have those traits, especially when a certain male character's attitudes towards sexuality are handled with much more taste.

Due to all of this, this work feels homoerotic, not in the sense that it's yaoi, but that there is a clear love for and preference towards men and the deep, transcendent relationships they form; women are simply middlemen or vessels of lust for the viewer (and often also the male characters).

Guts is a well written protagonist, as likeable as someone who follows the same tired formula of "man regards other man as the most important thing in his life more than his female romance interest who regards him/both of them as her most important people." He becomes more stable as a person later on but he's really just a trauma magnet. Nothing ends up changing about his situation and he continues blindly on his clearly pointless and meaningless goal of defeating villain man. But that's not his fault, that's the fault of the writers for padding out the main conflict; Guts wants revenge on the main antagonist, who the writers have no idea what to do with. He's way too powerful and every arc ends in some kind of horrorfest where everything keeps going wrong, so they move to another area, and villain man keeps getting powerup after powerup while the few powerups Guts gets are killing him whenever he uses them. It gets tiring after a while, seeing this predictable parade pan out, because you cant tell there's no clear goal. There's never going to be an end to this godforsaken story.

But when themes are handled excellently, they do hit hard, especially coupled with lovely, unparalled art, which was what allowed me to read 300+ chapters. But I'm not keeping up with this manga any longer. I do not find value in works that regard women as lesser creatures.

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Jul 26, 2020

rectified_rascal

Not Recommended

Funny

Preliminary (320/? chp)

Berserk is what happens to a series when it tries to one-up itself in each passing page and when the writer promises so much that he can't possibly keep his promises.

It starts of strong, with a bang. Guts, our scarred hero, battles monsters and creatures from some other dimension with n sword almost as large as him. He alienates the people around him, hurts them but we soon learn that it is he who is being hurt more than anyone else. Like a Byronic hero, he is menacing but simultaneously compelling. The first two volumes itself are a testament to great storytelling. And then, the ... flashback that reveals Guts's past and his relationship with Griffith is epic storytelling at its finest. Until volume 13 (or so), Berserk keep building up the tension, raising the stakes and which finally results in a (horrific) climax that makes the reader shower Berserk with the hype and praise that it receives. And then... And then, we get a slow downward spiral into mediocrity.

The trouble with Berserk is one that plagues most fantasy series in which the author simply doesn't know his own limits, his plot's limits and his character's limits. There comes a point after which it becomes impossible to raise the stakes any further and so the author to make up for his lack of ideas, instead introduces new villains (satanic priest anyone?), new side-kicks (loli witch anyone?), new sub-plots (psycho-elf valley detour anyone?), makes the action scenes even grander, more gruesome, more violent but devoid of the same emotional stakes that made the first third of the series so great. The result is a series that while amazing to behold in its scale and scope is no different from a hack-and-slash RPG game in which the main character levels up, dons a new armor only to face a larger and more powerful monster. Guts, Griffith, Casca - all the characters the reader comes to love/hate by volume 13 (released in 1997) are exactly the same in volume 40 (released in 2018). Guts, while much stronger, is still hacking at monsters and villains with no clear sense of direction. Mysteries introduced in 1995 continue to remain unanswered in 2020.

During this time, the manga-ka (Kentaro Miura) at the age of 54 has burnt himself out. He takes long hiatuses, designs mascots for vocaloid software, plays Idol-Master videos games and puts out 3-4 chapters a year. Only 40 chapters have released in the last ten years and in those chapters, the plot has advanced less than what it did in a single year when the manga was in its peak during the mid-1990s.

To be sure, the art is magnificent. Each panel of each chapter is a sight to behold. But here's the thing - if I was truly interested in art, I visit the Louvre in Paris or purchase an artbook by Akemi Takada. What I need from a manga is both art and plot. Berserk has the former but by volume 35, it has become clear there is not a morsel of plot here. And given how slow Berserk's production is, I don't think Berserk will ever finish or deliver upon the promises that it made when it started in 1990.

Would I recommend this? If you like something with great potential to devolve into brainless hack-and-slash and side characters that include a prepubescent elf and a loli-witch, go ahead. Otherwise, don't believe the hype and give this a pass.

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Apr 18, 2025

JinMori07_

Not Recommended

Funny

Preliminary (20/? chp)

We all know and love Berserk, but there's just one reason why I can't recommend this show.

The reason I don't recommend this manga, despite its popularity and widespread praise, is because of how it handles the topic of rape. While it's true that these plot points add weight to the story and attempt to portray real-world issues, the way they are depicted feels off. The victims are often shown in overly sexualized positions and appear unrealistically clean for the given scenario, which doesn't align with the gravity of the situation. To me, it feels like the manga is glorifying rape rather than treating it with ...

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Sep 24, 2016

tuant

Not Recommended

Funny

Preliminary (Unknown/? chp)

First of all, keep in mind that I'm a bit older than average manga readers.

Art: It's bad. Character models and drawings are nowhere near good enough. When in action, it's very difficult to see what's going on, especially in early volumes. It's slowly improved but at the end it's still just at an acceptable level.

Story: Good for the most part. It's terrible at the first 3 volumes but then the story goes back to the beginning and things are well explained. This is the best part of the story (golden age). After that, when Guts found new companions, story got illogical and boring. At times, ...

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Mar 14, 2021

Turkot123

Not Recommended

Preliminary (380/? chp)

Berserk is a manga that is extremely good at the beginning, but after a certain arc it goes really bad. It completely loses the atmosphere that has been created at the beginning.

Guts is... or rather was a mind-broken man who had lost everything. He was merciless and brutal, but then he became a member of some annoying JRPG team. I don't want to spoil anything or say the names of the members of that team, but they are really annoying and every one of them should be locked up in a chinese work camp, so they won't poison the life of readers anymore. I ...

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Oct 26, 2017

SiGow

Not Recommended

Preliminary (351/? chp)

look i tried very hard and forced my to like it. but boy oh boy, it does loves to prove me wrong.
i'm not gonna talk about the characters or art. because those are something you should experience while reading. but i'll say this , the art looks fantastic.
it's not a bad manga by any means, i have seen worse than this.
the first arc (golden age arc) was really good and has enormous potential to hook the readers. it's also the reason the series right now feels like shit. the first arc was soo powerful that even the mangaka doesn't know to maintain the ...

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Feb 3, 2025

Valinor23

Not Recommended

Preliminary (380/? chp)

Berserk: a masterpiece at creating ever more problems without resolving anything.

Following a 30-year publication run encompassing nearly 400 chapters, this manga exhibits significant inconsistencies in quality. It seems that the author occasionally included plot points without fully considering their impact on the narrative, resulting in some forced extensions. That's quite disappointing for a manga with a monthly release schedule.

I guess you often hear that Guts, the main character, is one of the best manga characters of all time, but the truth is that he is mid. His trauma writing is mid. It is as if he is afraid of fire and only has his moments ... when he sees fire. From such a broken mind, I expect more than just reacting to things. Give me a scene where he is alone and gets a panic attack, or he suddenly bursts into tears because he cannot do this anymore, resulting in suicidal thoughts...
He is the same idiot as all these battle shonen main characters that charge into the battle without thinking.
Furthermore, he remains unconcerned with his objective, assuming his protagonist status will ensure a self-resolving outcome.
He has some good concepts, but most have fallen short because the next fight is more important.

The main cast is underwhelming. They receive their "sad" backstory, and afterward, they feel like they are just there. No interesting dialogue, nothing interesting that they do.
Also funny that they travel through a land like Mordor (Lord of the Rings), and it's like they are playing Mario Party. They don't even get into any verbal arguments. They are like NPCs forced by a game master to travel together.
How can a high fantasy like lotr portray a dangerous adventure better than this "dark" fantasy...?

Villains are not even worth talking about. It is the same thing all over again. When the main character struggles to defeat a villain, he is either saved by a specific character or, in the middle of the fight, the villain forgets the main character exists and then he is randomly one-shotted.
After that, they are no longer relevant to the story. Amazing.

The drawings are godly detailed but often result in losing impact in fight scenes because you can't see anything. The paneling is also random. Over the course of 30 years, the paneling doesn't improve, and when it does, it is stolen from other manga like "Devilman." Most of the time, it's just artwork assembled together instead of creating a good reading flow.

The worldbuilding is a mixed bag. The locations are quite well done, but their history is nonexistent. For example, there are two countries at war, and you know nothing about one of them despite its presence in the main story. The world is basic Norse mythology, and the magic system is reminiscent of a 1960s fantasy book.

It is beyond glazing that this manga has a rating of 9.4.
If you only want to read this manga because it is number one, then don't.
Just read what you want to read.

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Sep 5, 2024

MontanaWeise

Not Recommended

Preliminary (341/? chp)

Overrated, absolutely.

It started out really strong, as the story of Guts, the tragic hero drawn into a a web of deceit, betrayal and eldritch horror, and now sworn revenge against his former ally and friend.

Later on, it had descended all the way to just a somewhat more brutal version of the worst cliches of shounen action, with Guts and his merry band of quirky misfits traveling the land, encountering new and ever more ridiculous enemies, struggling initially, but then prevailing through the power of friendship and a last minute power-up, at which point the next set of even more ridiculous enemies is introduced, rinse and ...

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Nov 7, 2024

Lixey98

Not Recommended

Funny

Preliminary (150/? chp)

Can't believe this community gaslighted people into thinking that this is the best manga.

It's often praised for it's storytelling. What storytelling?

The story is just the MC vs your average goofy villain.
You can skip so many villains and the story wouldn't even change. They don't even interact with the main cast.
When they are defeated they are not relevant anymore.

The MC has more fights than most battle shonen MC's and they are so boring, generic and unnecessary.

...

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