Berserk

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Well, here I am. After looking at this majestic beast from afar for years, I have finally conquered the summit of all manga and read Berserk from beginning to end (so far). I'm gonna do my best with all my own writing prowess to convey my feelings, but I feel like whatever I say will be insufficient. Berserk is an experience to be had and what it truly entails cannot be conveyed with mere words. To put it bluntly though - is Berserk the greatest manga ever made? Yes, without question. It's a literary work that transcends the medium of manga. It's something more. Even ... if you're someone not interested in manga in general, if there's ever only one series you read, let it be this one. The world will never be the same afterwards.

Let's get the obvious out of the way - the art. Berserk is the best drawn manga ever and I don't believe that's a bold statement. While the artstyle evolves and shifts quite a bit over the years, the quality ranges from phenomenal to downright inhuman. The attention to detail is impeccable. Inspired by the woodblock prints of Gustave Dore, the texturing is dense and tangible, you can almost feel the solidity of each material. Characters and creatures are full of life and energy. The sprawling backgrounds, from beautiful mountains and forests, to castles and cobblestone streets, to dense houses, to remote villages, to nightmarish fantastical realms, everything is all enveloping and real, giving the action a real sense of location. And speaking of action, all of this detail does not detract from the flawless fluidity of the movement and unparalleled dynamism of the action scenes. And all of this together is never at the cost of visual clarity, which is among the best ever made. These are qualities that anyone knows and even the uneducated can appreciate at a glance. This is artwork that belongs in a gallery alongside fine art, it's above and beyond the expectations of manga pages.

As dense as the art is, the worldbuilding of Berserk is just as detailed. A fantasy realm ruled by realistic conflicts between rival empires serves as the backdrop in early times. If you love deep medieval fantasy lore, Berserk has you covered for days. Delving into the political intrigue and social struggles is continuously engaging and watching massive armies fight against each other in brutal warfare feels visceral and real. But if that weren't enough, this series is among the best dark fantasy works ever made and after a certain point, the human conflict is superseded by a battle of grand proportions between man and creatures of dreams and nightmares. Containing some of the most inventive creature and location designs ever, a deep magic system and a plethora of both well established and completely unique fantasy races, Berserk is a feast for the imagination, bringing forth countless creative ideas that truly capture the essence of fantasy like so few other works can. The art and writing combine into a crescendo of boundless possibilities that never ceases to amaze. The times you will just stop and stare at what lies before you will be too many to count.

But what if you're not interested in all that? Not the medieval warfare, not the fantastic beasts, not all the bleak struggles. What if you just wants some good ol' fashioned action? Well, good news, Berserk has that in spades. If you want to just enjoy the tale of a big muscular man with a colossal sword fighting giant armies and nightmarish monsters in bloody gory manner, by all means, go for it. As mentioned before, the action is flawlessly fluid, the fights are among the best in terms of choreography and the graphic violence is visceral and detailed with no brutality spared. Without a complex anime-style power system to worry about, you can just sit back and enjoy this beautiful bloodbath in all its glory.

Now, all of this is well and good, but other series can check these boxes too. So what is it that makes Berserk the greatest of all time, what sets it apart from any other manga ever? Well, the writing. For you see, the staggering detail of Miura-sensei's art is rivaled only by the incredible sophistication of his writing and phenomenal storytelling ability. At its core, Berserk is, despite every other element, a story about human struggle. Guided by one of the greatest protagonists ever and filled to the brim with a phenomenal cast of engaging characters, this is one of the most deeply human and relatable stories ever. Every single character is gifted with exceptional profoundness and intrigue, they all have unique story arcs and believable journeys that create a very lived in, real world with a strong beating heart. This world is extremely bleak and brutal, but these people keep going. Among all the unending darkness, it is love, friendship, family and camaraderie that give these people the most strength. No matter if the sun is blocked out, a ray of hope can always be found. The entire message can be summed up in these words - perseverance, steadfastness, resilience. The core theme is about the struggles of man and how, through sheer willpower, one must keep going. No matter the adversity you face, you should never stop trying to put one foot before the other and keep going. That is one of the most universal concepts ever and that's what makes this story resonate with people so well. And what really drives it home is the beautiful way through which this unfolds. Masterfully written, rich with subtext and a perfect balance between action, emotion, drama and worldbuilding, Berserk is crafted with utmost care and every word is carefully considered. The phenomenal, emotionally rich paneling and profound visual storytelling only elevates this to unfathomable heights, into an experience that words really cannot describe. The pacing is chosen deliberately and will consistently keep you invested for every next page. It's truly one of the most enveloping tales ever made.

On a personal note, Berserk was right up my alley from the start - dark fantasy, medieval combat, visceral blood and gore, deep philosophical story. It's like it's custom made for me. I myself dream of being a writer some day and I don't think any other work has moved me or inspired me as much as Berserk. I love how unapologetically dark it is. Easily one of the most dark and gory manga out there, but it's made this way for a reason. To think that this is mere torture porn is a fundamental misunderstanding of the story. The darkness of the world is real and unforgiving, much like our own. But it's shown that this, while it might knock you down, it should never keep you down. Berserk shows you that it's worth fighting on no matter what. And it being so dark just makes me believe in myself more, because these are also the stories that I want to write. Seeing a work like this exist and knowing that it is successful inspires me even more to follow my dreams to the end. And I promise I will do so.

In conclusion, Berserk is truly an experience like no other. I firmly believe that it has gone beyond the medium of manga. Far more than just dark fantasy at its finest, Berserk is undoubtedly one of the greatest works in all of literature. Trust me, I don't say that lightly. It is written with amazing care, like a master craftsman laying brick by brick to build the most formidable fortress. No other work has ever been able to combine highly sophisticated writing, rich in subtext and immense depth, with phenomenal art that captures these moments in flawless visual form. All of this is because the legendary Kentaro Miura is someone that has easily earned the title of a genius. He is a truly gifted man and it almost feels like manga exists so he could make it. Only a man equally as brilliant in art and writing can create something like this. We can only be thankful to be blessed enough to experience it. It is the greatest tragedy that he never managed to finish his masterpiece during his life. And what really breaks my heart is how the love and care for this story can be felt in every page, every panel, every line of dialogue. This man has dedicated his life to this work and every fiber of his being has been embedded into it. This dedication and pure unfiltered love is palpable and you can feel it all throughout. With his passing, the literary world was gravely wounded and the realm of manga lost its brightest son.

However, just like Miura-sensei told us himself, "Death is not an ending" and we must keep going at all costs. The manga is now in good hands and we will get to see the ending Miura-sensei himself intended some time in the future. Until then, this masterpiece remains to be cherished. To say you are doing yourself a disservice by not reading it is a gross understatement. Experience it for yourself, I guarantee you will never be the same afterwards. I can tell you I am a changed man now.

I get why Berserk is at the top of MAL's manga section, and it's 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 like watching an epic Greek tragedy.

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 different from one another and don't get spicy angles. It gets worse: 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, but in the rapes of women they go on for way too long and are heavily angled to emphasize certain areas. Now before you say "but what about all the depictions of men brutally killed" are they all conventionally attractive and hardly look different from one another? There's this depravity that's too commonly found in men where they seem to really like drawing conventionally attractive women getting brutally raped. 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 handled, 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/both men. That's not a bad thing, but the narrative seems to paint her romance with the other man as "true love" when in reality they're replacements for someone else. 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. 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, 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. And because of that, 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.

Guts is better than many protagonists I've seen and he does go through a character arc so I'll give him that. I've seen people complain about the battle shounen-eque parts of the later story but I actually think it serves his character well, except when nothing ends up changing and he continues blindly on his clearly pointless and meaningless goal. 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.

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 complain 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.