With Berserk, be it through the comic format, through the epic/heroic genre adopted - and largely subverted here -, or with the spirit of Nietzsche and the absurd, I reacquaint myself with a fictional world where, grim, merciless and bloodthirsty as its characters may be, the lines and parts feel quite clear-cut, the questions coarse and blunt but definitely posed, and the problems however unsurpassable - are defined and faced right away. Which is also an issue, since Guts is still the one defeating most of the enemies while everyone else is low level support. Despite the story expanding to include a dozen other characters and themes, it still has the same one guy doing all the work. While Guts was butchering to pieces anyone standing in his way, it was excused because he was getting the spotlight. Now a dozen other characters get some spotlight and are close to worthless in battle. How can you care about all the extra stuff thrown in there when none of them can stand on their own without Guts constantly jumping it to save them?

The Lost Children arc is often written off as a short filler mini-arc, but I think it serves its purpose more than well in just 3 volumes. I will go as far as say the 90s anime adaptation is the best version of them all. Sure, the budget wasn’t the best, but for the material it covered, it was even better than the manga.After a life of grief and trauma, Guts reluctantly joins Griffith on his quest to attain his own kingdom while simultaneously struggling to come to terms with his own identity. We get to see a side of Guts we’ve never experienced up until this point. We see his vulnerability, his wounded soul, his ability to show affection to others, his role as a battle commander, and his blossoming relationships with Casca and Griffith; the two people who end up having the biggest impact on his entire life for very different reasons. In 1997, Miura supervised the production of 25 anime episodes of Berserk that aired in the same year on NTV. Various art books and supplemental materials by Miura based on Berserk are also released. In 1999, Miura made minor contributions to the Dreamcast video game Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage. 2004 saw the release of yet another video game adaptation entitled Berserk Millennium Falcon Arc: Chapter of the Record of the Holy Demon War. Don't get me wrong: this is certainly not what you would call material suitable for toddlers. This is some gory, brutal and unremittingly dark story, at the onset of a series famed for its gruesome horrors, cruel fates, and unflinching depiction of the absurd side of life. The events in this first tome are already merciless and harrowing. Nieztschean tragedy indeed. This is also an emotion and a state of spirit I find when reading some works by H.P. Lovecraft. Facing Old Ones or Apostles, the odds are so monstrous, the part played by the characters so seemingly futile and abysmal, that paradoxically, the most resilient form of meaning appears. With H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, if you want to keep a litteral interpretation of them, that is certainly not the case with most of his tales. And yet I still hold that his stories have a curious life-affirmation quality to me. Life appears so ludicrously gratuitous, uncalled for, fragile, in a word impossible, that I am never more conscious that the mere fact of my being alive in such a puzzling universe is quite a wonder. It’s difficult to review this arc because it was left unfinished after the author’s untimely passing. Since that time, the Berserk manga has spanned 34 tankōbon with no end in sight. The series has also spawned a whole host of merchandise, both official and fan-made, ranging from statues, action figures to key rings, video games, and a trading card game. In 2002, Kentarou Miura received the second place in the Osamu Tezuka Culture Award of Excellence for Berserk.[1]

Just as the arc was heading for a climactic buildup to the finale, it ends on a tearjerking cliffhanger that serves as the untimely ending of the series as a whole. It’s a shame that Miura’s masterpiece wasn’t able to be finished, but he’s created the most influential manga of all time that heavily impacted millions of readers and thousands of artists all over the world. But you know what? This is a minor issue compared to how it’s being made for three decades and there is no ending in sight. Since the Eclipse event, the only thing I wanted to see is Guts getting his final showdown with Griffith, but chances are I am never going to get it because Miura is busy playing Idolmaster and keeps throwing more shit between them to make sure they will never meet. At this rate the creator will die of old age before completing it. I mean, the pacing was always slow and not focused on plot progression as it was on getting to know the characters or getting prolonged random battles in between. But just like it happens with everything that overstays its welcome, it eventually becomes tiresome. There's something special in this weird little medieval-fairy-tale-Europe-as-imagined-by-20th-century-Japanese that kept me reading. A whiff of Nietzsche and Sartre and Kierkegaard, a promise of complexity and depth hiding behind the simplistic tale of an unlikeable protagonist's journey of revenge, despair and brutality toward self-knowledge. It's cringy, stereotypical and very much rooted in the '90s but there's earnestness and some emotional truth in this ugly, depressing tale that makes me read on. No me puedo creer que mi novio me haya convencido para leer esto... PERO tengo que admitir que engancha, se lee fácil, rápido y Guts me ha gustado bastante (a pesar de no saber mucho de él aún). Es el primer manga que he leído en toda mi vida y no esperaba que me gustara tanto, pero al César lo que es del César. Eso sí, me han dicho que el dibujo mejora conforme van avanzando los volúmenes y lo he agradecido, porque me daba la sensación de que esto era un borrador que no quisieron mejorar. Y le doy de puntuación 4.75⭐️ porque he visto faltas de ortografía que me han molestado mucho y que la traductora pedante que hay dentro de mí no ha podido dejar pasar.

Hellraiser + Conan the Barbarian + Game of Thrones + Ash vs Evil Dead + Elric of Melnibone + Macbeth = Berserk. Medieval kingdoms, big swords, frenzied warriors, gore, nude, sex, intrigue, betrayal, demons, a quest for vengeance. Berserk is the encapsulation of the best parts of dark fantasy. You know how nowadays everything gets compared to Dark Souls? Even Dark Souls took heavy inspiration from it, if that is any indication for how well executed it is. The story is also expanding beyond its initial premise to something much greater and multilayered. What began as a simple revenge story of one guy versus another guy, it moves away from Guts’ objective and slowly gets enriched with all sorts of extra themes, such as the intrigue of politics, the concept of faith, the origin of magic, and different dimensions overlapping each other.