-- [ Berserk ] --

One line: "Highly detailed scenes. Very impressive and complex plot. Lively and varied characters. Berserk rules!"

- [ Story - 10 ] -

Berserk is about Guts, an exceptionally skilled swordsman and his adventures with The Band of the Hawk, along with its leader, Griffith, and other characters like Caska. After a betrayal, Guts is branded as a sacrifice by the God Hand and loses all his friends and his love, set to be killed during The Eclipse. He fights like an insane, becoming an Eclipse survivor. Following this, he is cursed and always attracts evil spirits and violence around him. He now devotes himself to fighting God Hand, his betrayer and all evil accumulating around him, even at the cost of whatever he came to cherish in life, accumulating scars after scars, and risking the lost of everything, including his life. All for revenge.

Berserk is a dark, violent series, definitely targetted to an adult audience. It also contains significant amount of nudity and sex, even rape. Ok. now you are warned.

The plotline is extremely detailed and complex, going from the present, to Guts' background story extensively, before returning to the present and moving on. This is makes very good chracter development and background story elaboration. You are told about most of the characters, how they are related, and why they behave as they do in the present. I felt that no detail lacked. Very very well made!

The story is very captivating too. There is no humor, since it's almost a tragic story, about real suffering at the lost of loved ones and dear friends, because of the betrayal of somebody held in high-esteem. A superb plotline, which views the classic "man fights demons" from a very different angle, as if you were inside the story. The problem is that there is no "good side" to balance the evil powers, so Guts is all alone in his fight for revenge, with no help at all. Berserk takes another look at religion and its concepts, at god and the foundation of faith, at friendship, love and betrayal. Overall, Berserk packs an incredibly complex plot, which is definitely worth discovering.


- [ Art - 10 ] -

The first volumes have quite poor art, with simplistic toning as shading. Even the characters are sometimes weirdly drawn, with wrongly positioned facial features and some other things.

The artist, Kentaro Miura, shows his true skills as the story goes. As the volumes go on, the level of detail, the quality of the drawings and shading increases exponentially, making Berserk a true piece of art. It's definitely one of the best illustrated manga I've seen till now. The characters and specially environments are magnificently detailed. You will see pages dedicated to picturing the environment, on which you will maintain your stare!

Just give a glance to the armor of Griffith or even Guts. It's extremely detailed, down to the nearest mail. Plain impressive. The art is sometimes "heavy" with shading, but this weakness is compensated with detail and intricate shading.

Miura excells in depicting complex fight scenes, with Guts surrounded by enemies, and in great, gory details. Those spread pages are a real pleasure for the eyes. Specially when you get to see the environment too. Miura is definitely the details-man!


- [ Characters - 9 ] -

This manga takes character development to a whole new level. You are given every small detail about all the major characters, and how they are related to all the other characters. The development is made at a great pace, not too fast, not too slow. You will be given details just when they are required. You won't be complaining about lack of details about characters in Berserk.

There is nothing very extraordinary about the characters. In fact, they all seem normal! Guts looks kind of evil and loveless at first glance, and Griffith, seems to be kind-hearted. That's just at first glance though, because the characters have incredible depth. So much that the reader can almost feel the emotions of the characters. You will even pity Guts at time, telling yourself "poor guy...".

The characters are driven by their emotions and ambitions. Guts wants revenge, and channels all his anger and frustration in his fights, even hurting those he cares about in the process, literally becoming berserk. Griffith has ambition and will stop at nothing to reach his goals. The God Hand is pure evil, despite the word god often associated with good in their name. Such a lively and varied cast of characters makes Berserk great.

Interesting enough, Berserk is one of the few series where the main character is not always present and hogging all the action. Sometimes, Guts is not even doing anything great, save for some talking. This gives other characters some role, which makes Berserk even more interesting, since you get to discover side characters. An example would be the Farnese/Serpico arc.

Then why 9 and not 10? Because in my opinion, Griffith gets too much attention. It's just my opinion though! :P


- [ Enjoyment - 9 ] -

Berserk is not something you are going to enjoy, considering the violence and dark theme. You are going to appreciate it, if I may say. That, I did!

The detailed art, the non-lacking story line, the varied cast of characters and the plot twists make Berserk totally great, unsurpassed in its genre in my opinion. You will get to admire, hate or even support the characters as Berserk progresses. As I said earlier, you will become part of Berserk.

Why 9 for enjoyment? Because I didn't like Guts getting trashed incessantly for nearly 25 volumes by overwhelming force and not getting any powerups! It was plain unfair, specially considering all odds are against the guy.


- [ Overall - 9 ] -

If you can handle the violence, gore, fighting and sex, you will want to see Berserk, simply because there is nothing better than Berserk when it comes to those themes! :D

I am not convinced about the re-read value yet. I find it difficult to go over all those dark plots again. It's going to be a once-off-love-it series I guess. For me at least.