Guts is a battered, wandering warrior who slays demons and curses the fate bestowed upon him through his association with Griffith, king of the poisoned land. After a rough battle against a particularly monstrous demon, Guts reflects on the path that led him to this moment -- from the first time he falls in with Griffith’s Band of the Hawk to their meteoric rise through the social strata of the kingdom due to their proficiency in war. And all the while, fate ticks away in the background, just waiting to intervene ...
Berserk has a reputation for being a violent, graphic series, and with good reason: It’s quite bloody (even by today’s standards, although apparently the anime isn’t as gruesome as the manga), and it’s certainly far more directly sexual than most series. But while there is plenty of good, bloodsoaked fun to go around, Berserk is by no means a juvenile series (although there are a couple of cliche moments at the end that made me roll my eyes); it’s an adult series that is mature in content, story and structure.
One of the biggest problems with anime is that a lot of it is paced horribly. Durarara!! is one of the better series airing today, and it is paced like shit. Angel Beats showed promise, but all of that was destroyed with horrible pacing. (Well, that and the story can’t seem to decide whether its audience should take the damn thing seriously or not.) Berserk is an oasis in the middle of a shitpile of horrid pacing. There is always just enough happening in each episode; the story is never overwhelming, but it never wastes the viewer’s time either. The series knows exactly where it needs to go, and how it needs to get there.
The fact that the story is framed as an enormous flashback helps a lot as well. The themes of destiny and mankind’s will are big parts of the manga (or so I read), but they’re scaled back a bit in the anime ... but, in a way, that’s not really true; they’re just not direct in any way. From the beginning, the audience knows the end result of the story: Guts loses the use of an eye, an arm and is betrayed by Griffith. That might fall to the back of the viewer’s mind, but Guts’ destiny has been laid out before him without his knowledge -- until, that is, until the final few episodes make it apparent how very narrow the paths on which Guts and Griffith walked were.
Another problem with anime: Crappy endings. Sometimes it’s a by-product of the first problem, where awful pacing forces the writers to cram everything into the finale, spawning a disjointed trainwreck. Other times, the writers just had no idea where to go from the start, and the ending is simply a haphazard, anticlimactic mess. With Berserk, although the very, VERY end concludes on an awkward note, the final three episodes (which function as a finale of sorts) are fantastic and provide a chilling end to the anime and made me want to immediately read every available volume of the manga, even though I have heard nothing but horror stories about how slowly author Kentaro Miura releases new chapters (it’s to the point where fans are frightened the guy will kick the bucket before Berserk is complete, sort of like how every Dark Tower fan had a heart attack when Stephen King got into that car accident years ago).
(For the curious, I fawn over Berserk’s ending plenty in this blog post.)
Berserk has a good cast of kickass characters as well. Guts is a great (though flawed) hero straight from ancient mythology: The guy was born from the corpse of a woman who hanged herself on the battlefield, so death follows him wherever he goes. Isn’t that an awesome origin? Griffith is likewise a great antagonist, mainly because he isn’t even really an antagonist for about two-thirds of the series; he is single-minded in pursuit of his dream, he is definitely sociopathic and he is not afraid to coldly use people to get what he wants, but there is no denying that the members of his Band of the Hawk are better off than they would be if they were on their own.
Those Band of the Hawk peeps are pretty cool, too. The best of the lot is Griffith’s second-in-command, Casca, who practically worships Griffith but is fully capable of taking charge on her own. Her development is kind of shaky at times, though; on occasion, the series will emphasize her femininity a bit too much in somewhat patronizing ways, which is annoying, but the story doesn’t totally nerf her, thankfully.
Probably the only real problem with Berserk (aside from it being an incomplete story, that is) is that the series looks its age. It doesn’t look bad mind, but there are tons of obvious budget-saving shortcuts, the most egregious of which is the constant use of still shots for seconds at a time. I don’t think an episode goes by without still shots being abused to hell and back. Doesn’t really bother me too much, but it is a notable problem.
Berserk is the type of series that earns anime its reputation as the realm of adult storytelling. (Which you and I know is not always true, hur hur hur.) It is the best kind of story: Highly entertaining but at the same time intelligent and thoughtful. I loved it the whole way through.
If you like this, then watch ... : Claymore is like a poor man’s Berserk. They’re not really about the same things, but they have similar settings and styles. The ending is kind of weak though. Plus, Clare is almost as cool as Guts. That has to count for something.
