I do recommend this title to everyone, but with one condition - if you are prepared to have another half life 3 in your life, since this manga is pretty much the half life 3 of manga/ anime, as in only god knows when and if we'll ever get to see the ending. 8/10
*contains spoilers, obviously*
Well, my experience with the show and manga was quite the odd one (compared to actual fans) and by that i mean that i literally didn't have any involvement with this title until about a month ago (i'm writing this on july 09 2016). First i finally decided to look into the anime. Took me about two days to finish it. I couldn't rate it too high (7/10) due to the extremely dated visuals and somewhat slow parts of the story, but most of the show was still very enjoyable.
What really got me interested though, is what happened after the eclipse, and since the end was a cliffhanger, i obviously had to know what comes next. Next came the long trial of trying to figure out the movies and eventually ending up on the forums, where i finally got convinced to try out the manga. And i am glad i did - immediately i was enjoying the great art it has, all the things the anime decided to drop and the continuation of the story.
More than with the anime, i enjoyed the grim atmosphere the story has, the obvious aim of it to mature audience with not hesitating to perform the darkest and most vile of acts (gory slaughter, rape, and both of those don't discriminate between men, women, and even children...), and show them pretty much without any censorship at all. This is a truly adult title... Or so i thought. After the eclipse, things slowed down quite noticeably, and although it was still really interesting, it just kept and kept slowing down, until when apprentice boy and the witch came around, i finally noticed - the manga is nothing like it was before.
Slowly, from an original title that had lots of interesting concepts and ideas behind it (well at least back when it came out) that where mostly not seen before, it became more and more like a standard Shounen title - the progression pretty much stopped, while the story started focusing on new main and side characters, distracted by fights that don't bring the hero any closer to his goal. Before you know it, Guts suddenly gained a "dark side" that gives him power but tries to take over, gets tons of friends and even a frigging harem that he opens to, gets an armor that grants him superpowers but works with his dark side, and the manga gets pretty preachy about the values of friendship and whatnot... Sounds familiar? It does to me, most Shounen title kind of familiar in fact.
And then, before i knew it, it ended. Well, not really, more like i caught onto it, but for me it felt like it, since i also understood that over the week that i read the manga from start to 'finish', i went over 26 YEARS worth of material. 26 years and you could finish it in a few days of reading, and what's worse, 26 years, and the ending seems as distant as it was after the eclipse, if not more.
So then my final verdict - 8/10, and that's actually barely, i'd rank it 7.7/10 if i could. If i could separate it into 4, i'd rank it 9/10 for the first 3 fourths and 5/10 for the newer part (around when the witch came, or maybe a bit before that), but again, i have to put one mark on it as a whole, so too bad, since i'd prefer to rank the older stuff separately, it really was great. Now i'm probably going to drop it, at least until its complete (if it ever will be), since to me it looks like we can't expect an ending in the closest decade at the very least...
