- The first three volumes: before it gets to the hailed Golden Arc, the first 3 volumes are boring, edging onto cliched and while I was reading them, I was genuinely feeling disappointed throughout, as I had been given high expectations when reading some reviews on here. Thankfully, it gets better after those three volumes, but just be warned that they are not great.
- Nearly everyone is in love/is a fan of the protagonist. (That ol' cliche)
- Puck is irritating as comic relief (though he gets thankfully less and less screentime)
- Sometimes it feels like it's being unecessarily dark: you will see a *lot* of scenes where women are being raped by disgusting looking creatures and when scenes like this happen nearly every arc, it gets tiring and feels gross. This is more personal preference than anything else, it's not a thing I particularly enjoy reading about.
The last one is probably my main gripe with the series, the rest I can quite happily forgive because of the outweighing positives.
Story: The storyline is ridiculously engaging, and despite the manga being so long (a little less than 350 chapters as of this review), there are hardly any "filler" arcs. If an arc isn't focusing on Guts, it will be focusing on Griffith or it will be focusing on any other of the main characters. This is refreshing, compared to something like One Piece (which is a solid favourite of mine) which can easily dip into "filler" arcs every so often.
The world building is excellent and you feel like you understand the world that Guts lives in, without having to have a stupid amount of background context or story explaining everything. The reasons for the wars and the fighting makes sense and there isn't an overcomplicated political plot - politics are not hashed out constantly so the reader gets bored.
Art: The art isn't great at first - like with all mangakas - but it gets better and better. The recent chapters are beautiful to read and the amount of work that goes into complicated backgrounds shows. When things start to get fantastical, you get that coming through so clearly and magically in the manga and it is wonderful to read.
Character: Characters are really a strong point for me in Berserk, all of the main characters feel real and have their own distinct personalities and opinions, as well as their own flaws. To me, I would say that Berserk actually comes into its own not after the Golden Arc, but actually when Guts starts travelling with another group of characters later on in the story.
On the whole, Berserk is a wonderful fantasy manga that really grips you into reading. It plays around with the tropes of "light" and "darkness" a lot, but in a way different from most stories that I've read before and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of adventure/fantasy mangas. The way it deals with revenge is very refreshing and I have only praise for how it portrays such a vast and diverse group of characters.
