The first thing you are likely to notice in this show is how scarce the animation is. A very high portion of the show, especially the action scenes, are no more than a series of zooming/panning stills. This aspect may be due to budget constraints, but it is consistent with the other elements of Berserk.
Berserk has an understated, beautiful, and sophisticated soul. This is notable and appreciable. Beneath that soul however, sparse, simple, and incomplete very accurately describes Berserk.
The story is extremely sparse and simple, and it seems things just happen so we can get on to the next setting, the next event. The story is well-paced, and it is well-written and thoughtful but only in a theoretical way. Many things are never addressed and many events have no/little effect on the future and the characters. Some things happen for no explicable reason, like there is an exterior purpose, an exterior goal. In Gut's words while fighting Zodd, a god-demon: "It can't be. How can this possibly be happening?" Impossibility, unbelievability. The supernatural, otherworldly part of the story especially seems purposeless, thrown together with the rest of the story. Deus ex Machina in the form of the supernatural. The final episode and the first scene of the series are especially disappointing, hopeless, and frustrating. The anime ends with a giant, improbable cliffhanger. There is little ultimately unique about the story in Berserk.
Many things in Berserk are cliché. The themes of Berserk — bloodshed, demons, medieval, middle ages, sword fights, war — all have something in common. Berserk probably has resemblance to a game, to an RPG. Berserk also happens to inspire Dark Souls, a role-playing video game. Dark Souls has a typically minimalistic plot and it is mostly left up to the player to put the pieces of the story together.
There is a bit higher than ordinary amount of explicitness — gore, nudity, sex, and rape in Berserk, especially in the manga. The last, frustrating episode of the series has Griffith rape Casca for little/no reason. The movies seem to be lower quality than the show, and the movies over-emphasize, overly focus on, use tasteless sex scenes while they were sparse and (mostly) tasteful in the anime. Every female in distress in Berserk is immediately chosen by default to be raped, which may seem sexist. These elements are not inherently meaningless but they aren't quite distinct and quite purposeful, like the author was not quite sure how to advance the story and make it seem thoughtful. The author puts little effort in creating meaningful and sophisticated plot devices. The author is thin on ingenuine ideas.
The characters in Berserk are also simple and thin in a practical way. The characters are well-designed, beautiful — lush in a theoretical, in a technical way. But there is little character development. There is no true interaction outside of the three main characters — Guts, Griffith, and Casca. Many characters also are effectively invincible. Guts, the main character, effortlessly, abruptly, and with little/no choreography defeats every foe he faces. Guts pretty much singularly defines the Band of Hawk, the group of the protagonists, in battle. Griffith, the soul of the group, is never really shown fighting in battle. In the anime, Griffith survives at least two otherwise-fatal events in an unbelievable way. The otherworldly, "gods" in this anime are also invincible. Invincible characters are empty and purposeless. Characters in this anime outside the main three serve like NPCs or APCs, fleeting and flat. Non-main characters are little more than plot devices, solely there to advance the plot in a not very thorough way. There is little ultimately unique about the characters in Berserk.
The sound is understated, beautiful, and sophisticated. But certain things like the OP didn't fit with the mood, like the creators were not quite sure what the purpose of Berserk was. Is it a military fiction? Is it a shōnen (manga)? Is it horror? Is it fantasy? It is probably all of these, or none of these.
Berserk is not quite distinct and not really purposeful. More so for the manga, Berserk may be an endless, hopeless, purposeless story — a bunch of thoughtful, loose ideas, with no single, unified, true purpose. Berserk is a well-thought, well-written story with very little/no heart.
