Who else is hoping for another season in 2018?

InsaneLeader13 said:
considering that it's well known that the manga goes through massive hiatuses and likely won't be completed

Badu said:
the manga is going strong so I'm sure they will keep animating the millenium falcon empire arc but 2018 seems so distant I'm hoping it'd be released this winter

GangsterCat said:
i already skipped season 2 like crazy for the latest 4 episode or something, i dont thinki can go on. the only good thing about berserk manga is its drawing, and there is none here. + the author is sick or just lazy bastard who doesnt care about fans just like hxh. it belongs in garbage bin.

otakucat said:

Its why I always shake my head at people who get pissed off that their favorite series got a successful sequel released just because they didn't like it. I mean, if you don't like the new story, don't watch it? It doesn't invalidate the original release at all or your connection to the previous story. :O

Arashi89 said:
It's not "salt", or "butthurt", or any other retarded terms you made up, or even the fact that they are sequels. The latest seasons of Berserk are objectively bad and you are part of the problem for supporting them even tangentially.

zodd0 said:

How can you not understand that people want good adaptations of their favorite manga and not shitty ones? If they get a shitty adaptation, people will get dissapointed if not pissed. How would you feel if you were waiting to get a Lamborghini but instead just got a rusty old bicycle with no wheels? Or if you were waiting for the pizza you ordered at a restaurant but instead the waiter shows up with dogfood that has maggots in it?

otakucat said:

As I previously said, getting ANY adaptation is better than none. Especially if it is popular enough to justify companies to SPEND MORE ON A BETTER ADAPTATION as the existing one proved there is a lucrative audience for such. Think of it as a company/author testing the waters or estimating market demand. If they know they can make money with a lesser product, they know demand for a better one will likely exist.

otakucat said:
Well, in the world of your analogy, wouldn't you feel better getting SOME food rather than never seeing another day after you have starved to death from a complete lack of ANY sustenance? Wouldn't you feel better getting a bicycle rather than being forced to walk everywhere for the rest of your life?

otakucat said:

As I previously said, getting ANY adaptation is better than none. Especially if it is popular enough to justify companies to SPEND MORE ON A BETTER ADAPTATION as the existing one proved there is a lucrative audience for such. Think of it as a company/author testing the waters or estimating market demand. If they know they can make money with a lesser product, they know demand for a better one will likely exist.

otakucat said:

Nice job on refuting the major point of the above post. Ya know, the one about how the "problem" fans are the ones increasing the chances that better (less "objectively bad") adaptations might be made in the future - as they prove the franchise is still marketable. ;O Oh, wait... ;)

otakucat said:


Nice job on refuting the major point of the above post. Ya know, the one about how the "problem" fans are the ones increasing the chances that better (less "objectively bad") adaptations might be made in the future - as they prove the franchise is still marketable. ;O Oh, wait... ;)




As I previously said, getting ANY adaptation is better than none. Especially if it is popular enough to justify companies to SPEND MORE ON A BETTER ADAPTATION as the existing one proved there is a lucrative audience for such. Think of it as a company/author testing the waters or estimating market demand. If they know they can make money with a lesser product, they know demand for a better one will likely exist.

Well, in the world of your analogy, wouldn't you feel better getting SOME food rather than never seeing another day after you have starved to death from a complete lack of ANY sustenance? Wouldn't you feel better getting a bicycle rather than being forced to walk everywhere for the rest of your life?

otakucat said:
I honestly don't think the animation is that big of a problem. So it isn't grade A, I can look past that easily for an awesome story and action!

otakucat said:
As I previously said, getting ANY adaptation is better than none. Especially if it is popular enough to justify companies to SPEND MORE ON A BETTER ADAPTATION as the existing one proved there is a lucrative audience for such. Think of it as a company/author testing the waters or estimating market demand. If they know they can make money with a lesser product, they know demand for a better one will likely exist.

moozooh said:

This argument doesn't work. At all. You evidently don't have a clue what you're talking about, and just because I really dislike ignorance being disseminated I would like to take the time and explain this very thoroughly.

First and foremost, the "anything is better than nothing" mantra simply isn't true. The main reason is opportunity cost. If something costs a given amount of money to produce, you have to think whether that would be a good investment of the money and whether something else wouldn't be a better investment. So if you decide to proceed with an adaptation, you better make sure it garners enough mass appeal to at least make the investment back, and ideally increase the brand's value by attracting new fans and expanding the potential audience. A good adaptation is both successful on its own and helps the other parts of the IP grow as well. If your adaptation is panned by critics and general audience alike—and deservedly so—you've just shot yourself in the foot. Not only you have failed at expanding your market because the newcomers wouldn't have guessed that the original material was that much better (who would?)—you have also succeeded at dropping the brand value beyond the cost of production. Why? Because alongside the loss of prospective newcomers you've also alienated a percentage of your initial fans which constitute your core financial support. By making an inherently inferior product, you double-down on your losses. It's NEVER profitable in the long term to make bad things. If somebody says or does otherwise, it betrays their critical lack of business foresight, and just because that person or company hasn't failed yet doesn't mean they won't. Even relatively large companies fail all the time, and they only have their management to blame.

Then there's this thing called marketing, something many (most?) Japanese publishers are just laughably bad with. Most of them only care about the domestic market even though there are tons of money available abroad, and they often don't care if the adaptation does well on its own as long as it boosts the sales of the manga or LN source material. To provide a counterexample of this, Joker Game, a woefully mediocre anime with no previously established fanbase to speak of, has done consistently well on sales figures because of its aggressive marketing campaign (I was in Japan at the time, and Akihabara had tons of huge posters and other POS promo materials for JG on almost every corner). Kabaneri, a bloody action late-night flick that aired the same season as JG, has also been commercially successful despite the much higher budget poured into it, despite having literally no fanbase prior to the announcement, and despite actually being dumb as fuck unlike Berserk. And that's considering the similar parental control restrictions being applicable to it. The production committee made profit there despite much larger expenses, because the show was marketed better and released with an international audience in mind—and I assure you, Amazon being on the board from day 1 had a lot to do with both, because it's a company with decent amount of business sense. This goes to show that as long as you are being smart about marketing something, you can sell a steaming turd and make a profit. Whereas the Berserk adaptation production committee seems very content with making a quick buck from the increase in manga sales instead of making the adaptation itself profitable and otherwise successful on its own. Instead of adding to the value of Berserk, it actually detracts from it.

Let me reiterate so that this is very clear to you: in the business world, you don't start small and hope for eventual popularity—you create the popularity by investing into it. For a title like Berserk that has already had international fame and more accolades than most of the published manga series combined this should've been piss-easy. And they've flushed it down the fucking drain because they didn't want to take a small risk (probability-wise) to reap a huge reward like the other publishers did with inferior works. The only way for something to become popular without major investments is if it's quality is so far above the average it starts speaking for itself—unfortunately, this works the opposite way when the product is notably bad. And because this is all recent history and the internet is merciless in disseminating unwanted opinions, every next blunder becomes progressively harder to cover up and pretend it didn't happen. Consider also that this is the second season of the third TV adaptation of Berserk, so "testing waters" (for 20 years, lmao) isn't just inapplicable to it, but also quite ridiculous considering most written works don't even receive a second season of whatever initial adaptation they go with. Besides, tests like these are only going to show inconclusive results because it's too hard to sort and pin down the reasons for overwhelmingly negative press. If you're producing an inferior adaptation, you're running the risk of it being hated for reasons that have nothing to do with the original work—which is exactly what we're seeing here. When you're doing this repeatedly, you also tend to use up your credibility—if you've made a blunder twice and learned nothing from it, who's going to believe you the third time?

Now to the next part, the most important one in my opinion. Unconditionally defensive "fans" like you are the problem of any commercial industry—which anime definitely belongs to. Miura draws his manga and does it so well not because he's driven by the profit—far from it—but because, above everything else, he has (or at least had) a passion for the world and the story he created, and the fact that it brings him profit allows him to continue working on it at a comfortable pace. For him, Berserk is not a business venture. But publishers are different: where there is no profit for them, there is no passion. Which is why they look at the bottom line as a measure of success, and will jump on any opportunity to increase it—such as by cutting their expenses. And the amount and the quality of opportunities they see depend entirely on their business sense which isn't always good. Now if you compare the 2017 adaptation to the 2016 one, what lessons do you see learned? Has anything become drastically better, can the adaptation stand on its own legs without relying on the source material and its fanbase as a necessary crutch? If your honest answer is no, then you've been had, plain and simple. And no, I don't have to hear the answer because it's obvious enough, and I have enough sense and education to prove it. The 2017 adaptation is just as bad, and for all the same reasons as the previous one. (To save myself some time, I will direct everyone interested to Super Eyepatch Wolf's videos that provide a good and well-illustrated summary: 1, 2, and also this talk by Digibro and his brother where they directly compare the 1997 and 2016 adaptations of the same manga scene.)

This brings us back to the opportunity cost, but this time from the consumer's perspective. If an adaptation doesn't add anything of value to the original (which this one certainly doesn't), it's not "better" nor "needed"—because the original is still there and is great, so no-one has to bother with an inherently inferior version. I reread the original manga several times because it works and is consistently great in execution, so every time I read it I think, man, this is so fucking good. Conversely, when I watched the 2016 adaptation, the only thought I had is that of suffering through it in the vain hope of something becoming better. I seriously considered dropping the show after episode 4, but decided to continue for completion's sake more than anything else. I would never consider rewatching it, and this new season I dropped by the end of episode 1, seeing as nothing has changed for the better. I mean, I already know the story by heart in any case, so why would I possibly subject myself to something that is so much worse than the manga I already have, let alone pay extra for my own displeasure? I'm not an idiot; I have standards—and I encourage you and everyone else adopt them as well. The fact that the adaptation was evidently made to make a quick buck is a slap in the self-respecting fans' faces more than anything else. Failed experiments and honest blunders are unfortunate but forgivable; this isn't. Adaptations should at least try to elevate the original. Vote for the good adaptations with your wallet, help the promising ones, and let the incompetent and lazy ones drown. The open market has built-in self-correction mechanisms like this for your own benefit, but they only work if you allow them to in the first place.

Another thing that bothers me, perhaps the most of all, is that your argument seems to suggest that merely raising the budget would actually solve all the problems with the new shows. While this is partly true—the Blurays do have more hand-animated 2D frames that actually look better (which is, again, mind-boggling because essentially the same work is being done twice—again, great business sense right there)—you cannot magically make the director more competent even if you shower them in gold. There are so many obvious failures on the level of composition, framing, pacing, and so on, that even if you ask Miura himself to redraw the frames by hand, it would still look poor. The same applies to bizarre color choices, subpar acting, laughable sound design, and other aspects of production that directly suggest the studio being incapable of adapting this sort of material whatsoever. And all of this reeks of perpetuation of poor decisions on behalf of the production committee, which is a very common theme in Japanese industries: if they make a bad decision once, they're far more likely to stick with it as long as possible instead of admitting and fixing it. If you cannot see any of this and thus cannot infer that investing into collector's editions of the 2016 and 2017 adaptations' BD boxes will NOT remedy the situation at all, then there's no helping your ability to argue your point, either. Thanks for your attention, I'm done here.

zodd0 said:
[yt]Dl0BNk7WTB4[yt]

Animation seems to have improved slightly.

moozooh said:

This argument doesn't work. At all. You evidently don't have a clue what you're talking about, and just because I really dislike ignorance being disseminated I would like to take the time and explain this very thoroughly.

First and foremost, the "anything is better than nothing" mantra simply isn't true. The main reason is opportunity cost. If something costs a given amount of money to produce, you have to think whether that would be a good investment of the money and whether something else wouldn't be a better investment. So if you decide to proceed with an adaptation, you better make sure it garners enough mass appeal to at least make the investment back, and ideally increase the brand's value by attracting new fans and expanding the potential audience. A good adaptation is both successful on its own and helps the other parts of the IP grow as well. If your adaptation is panned by critics and general audience alike—and deservedly so—you've just shot yourself in the foot. Not only you have failed at expanding your market because the newcomers wouldn't have guessed that the original material was that much better (who would?)—you have also succeeded at dropping the brand value beyond the cost of production. Why? Because alongside the loss of prospective newcomers you've also alienated a percentage of your initial fans which constitute your core financial support. By making an inherently inferior product, you double-down on your losses. It's NEVER profitable in the long term to make bad things. If somebody says or does otherwise, it betrays their critical lack of business foresight, and just because that person or company hasn't failed yet doesn't mean they won't. Even relatively large companies fail all the time, and they only have their management to blame.

Then there's this thing called marketing, something many (most?) Japanese publishers are just laughably bad with. Most of them only care about the domestic market even though there are tons of money available abroad, and they often don't care if the adaptation does well on its own as long as it boosts the sales of the manga or LN source material. To provide a counterexample of this, Joker Game, a woefully mediocre anime with no previously established fanbase to speak of, has done consistently well on sales figures because of its aggressive marketing campaign (I was in Japan at the time, and Akihabara had tons of huge posters and other POS promo materials for JG on almost every corner). Kabaneri, a bloody action late-night flick that aired the same season as JG, has also been commercially successful despite the much higher budget poured into it, despite having literally no fanbase prior to the announcement, and despite actually being dumb as fuck unlike Berserk. And that's considering the similar parental control restrictions being applicable to it. The production committee made profit there despite much larger expenses, because the show was marketed better and released with an international audience in mind—and I assure you, Amazon being on the board from day 1 had a lot to do with both, because it's a company with decent amount of business sense. This goes to show that as long as you are being smart about marketing something, you can sell a steaming turd and make a profit. Whereas the Berserk adaptation production committee seems very content with making a quick buck from the increase in manga sales instead of making the adaptation itself profitable and otherwise successful on its own. Instead of adding to the value of Berserk, it actually detracts from it.

Let me reiterate so that this is very clear to you: in the business world, you don't start small and hope for eventual popularity—you create the popularity by investing into it. For a title like Berserk that has already had international fame and more accolades than most of the published manga series combined this should've been piss-easy. And they've flushed it down the fucking drain because they didn't want to take a small risk (probability-wise) to reap a huge reward like the other publishers did with inferior works. The only way for something to become popular without major investments is if it's quality is so far above the average it starts speaking for itself—unfortunately, this works the opposite way when the product is notably bad. And because this is all recent history and the internet is merciless in disseminating unwanted opinions, every next blunder becomes progressively harder to cover up and pretend it didn't happen. Consider also that this is the second season of the third TV adaptation of Berserk, so "testing waters" (for 20 years, lmao) isn't just inapplicable to it, but also quite ridiculous considering most written works don't even receive a second season of whatever initial adaptation they go with. Besides, tests like these are only going to show inconclusive results because it's too hard to sort and pin down the reasons for overwhelmingly negative press. If you're producing an inferior adaptation, you're running the risk of it being hated for reasons that have nothing to do with the original work—which is exactly what we're seeing here. When you're doing this repeatedly, you also tend to use up your credibility—if you've made a blunder twice and learned nothing from it, who's going to believe you the third time?

Now to the next part, the most important one in my opinion. Unconditionally defensive "fans" like you are the problem of any commercial industry—which anime definitely belongs to. Miura draws his manga and does it so well not because he's driven by the profit—far from it—but because, above everything else, he has (or at least had) a passion for the world and the story he created, and the fact that it brings him profit allows him to continue working on it at a comfortable pace. For him, Berserk is not a business venture. But publishers are different: where there is no profit for them, there is no passion. Which is why they look at the bottom line as a measure of success, and will jump on any opportunity to increase it—such as by cutting their expenses. And the amount and the quality of opportunities they see depend entirely on their business sense which isn't always good. Now if you compare the 2017 adaptation to the 2016 one, what lessons do you see learned? Has anything become drastically better, can the adaptation stand on its own legs without relying on the source material and its fanbase as a necessary crutch? If your honest answer is no, then you've been had, plain and simple. And no, I don't have to hear the answer because it's obvious enough, and I have enough sense and education to prove it. The 2017 adaptation is just as bad, and for all the same reasons as the previous one. (To save myself some time, I will direct everyone interested to Super Eyepatch Wolf's videos that provide a good and well-illustrated summary: 1, 2, and also this talk by Digibro and his brother where they directly compare the 1997 and 2016 adaptations of the same manga scene.)

This brings us back to the opportunity cost, but this time from the consumer's perspective. If an adaptation doesn't add anything of value to the original (which this one certainly doesn't), it's not "better" nor "needed"—because the original is still there and is great, so no-one has to bother with an inherently inferior version. I reread the original manga several times because it works and is consistently great in execution, so every time I read it I think, man, this is so fucking good. Conversely, when I watched the 2016 adaptation, the only thought I had is that of suffering through it in the vain hope of something becoming better. I seriously considered dropping the show after episode 4, but decided to continue for completion's sake more than anything else. I would never consider rewatching it, and this new season I dropped by the end of episode 1, seeing as nothing has changed for the better. I mean, I already know the story by heart in any case, so why would I possibly subject myself to something that is so much worse than the manga I already have, let alone pay extra for my own displeasure? I'm not an idiot; I have standards—and I encourage you and everyone else adopt them as well. The fact that the adaptation was evidently made to make a quick buck is a slap in the self-respecting fans' faces more than anything else. Failed experiments and honest blunders are unfortunate but forgivable; this isn't. Adaptations should at least try to elevate the original. Vote for the good adaptations with your wallet, help the promising ones, and let the incompetent and lazy ones drown. The open market has built-in self-correction mechanisms like this for your own benefit, but they only work if you allow them to in the first place.

Another thing that bothers me, perhaps the most of all, is that your argument seems to suggest that merely raising the budget would actually solve all the problems with the new shows. While this is partly true—the Blurays do have more hand-animated 2D frames that actually look better (which is, again, mind-boggling because essentially the same work is being done twice—again, great business sense right there)—you cannot magically make the director more competent even if you shower them in gold. There are so many obvious failures on the level of composition, framing, pacing, and so on, that even if you ask Miura himself to redraw the frames by hand, it would still look poor. The same applies to bizarre color choices, subpar acting, laughable sound design, and other aspects of production that directly suggest the studio being incapable of adapting this sort of material whatsoever. And all of this reeks of perpetuation of poor decisions on behalf of the production committee, which is a very common theme in Japanese industries: if they make a bad decision once, they're far more likely to stick with it as long as possible instead of admitting and fixing it. If you cannot see any of this and thus cannot infer that investing into collector's editions of the 2016 and 2017 adaptations' BD boxes will NOT remedy the situation at all, then there's no helping your ability to argue your point, either. Thanks for your attention, I'm done here.