Berserk

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Synonyms: Berserk: The Prototype

Japanese: ベルセルク

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Information

Type: Manga

Volumes: Unknown

Chapters: Unknown

Status: Publishing

Published: Aug 25, 1989 to ?

Genres: Action, Adventure, Award Winning, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Supernatural

Themes: Gore, Military, Mythology, Psychological

Demographic: Seinen

Serialization: Young Animal

Authors: Miura, Kentarou (Story & Art), Studio Gaga (Art)

Statistics

Score: 9.47¹ (scored by 361,230 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #1²

² based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #1

Members: 720,399

Favorites: 129,825

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9.47

Ranked #1Popularity #1Members 720,399

MangaYoung AnimalMiura, Kentarou (Story & Art), Studio Gaga (Art)

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Synopsis

Guts, a former mercenary now known as the Black Swordsman, is out for revenge. After a tumultuous childhood, he finally finds someone he respects and believes he can trust, only to have everything fall apart when this person takes away everything important to Guts for the purpose of fulfilling his own desires. Now marked for death, Guts becomes condemned to a fate in which he is relentlessly pursued by demonic beings.

Setting out on a dreadful quest riddled with misfortune, Guts, armed with a massive sword and monstrous strength, will let nothing stop him, not even death itself, until he is finally able to take the head of the one who stripped him—and his loved one—of their humanity.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Included one-shot:
Volume 14: Berserk: The Prototype

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Background

Berserk won the Excellence Award at the sixth Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2002. As of September 2023, over 60 million copies of the manga are in circulation.

The series has been published in English by Dark Horse Comics since November 4, 2003. It has also been released in Argentina, Brazil, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, México, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey.

In May 2021, the author Kentaro Miura suddenly died at the age of 54. Chapter 364 of Berserk was published posthumously on September 10, 2021. Miura would often share details about the series' story with his childhood friend and fellow mangaka Kouji Mori. The series resumed on June 24, 2022, with Studio Gaga handling the art and Kouji Mori's supervision.

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Characters

Guts

Main

Griffith

Main

Casca

Main

Puck

Main

Schierke

Main

de Vandimion, Farnese

Main

Serpico

Main

Isidro

Main

The Skull Knight

Supporting

Judeau

Supporting

Reviews

Sep 28, 2024

Mara2463

Recommended

Preliminary (376/? eps)

Berserk – Spoiler Free – Recommended

TLDR
Story – 10/10
Art – 10/10
Characters – 10/10
Enjoyment – 10/10

Story - 10/10
Berserk's story is just incredible. From the very first arcs - including, of course, the Golden Age Arc, the second and most famous arc in the entire manga - Berserk's story never lets up, showing and consolidating why it will always be an inescapable classic for any otaku. From a depressing plot with elements of comedy, dense but very easy to read, and coherent but with multiple strands, Berserk unites in itself the plurality and quality of an almost unique story. The biggest pity is that it was never finished, ...

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Aug 21, 2023

tabbycatcircus

Mixed Feelings

Preliminary (367/? eps)

I get why Berserk is at the top of MAL's manga section, and it's because of the Golden Age arc. It's in the character development and outstanding writing. We get to see how the characters react to different developments in their lives (especially Griffith) and how their relationships and motivations change. Characters like Griffith are detestable, but they are completely understandable and even relatable. All the events that come to pass to culminate in the Eclipse make sense. It's like watching an epic Greek tragedy.

My biggest problem is with the portrayal of the female characters. To start off, there's an evil group called the ... "God Hand," consisting of 5 members. And the only woman just happens to also be the weird sexual sexy one while all the males look very different from one another and don't get spicy angles. It gets worse: how this series handles depictions of rape. In one character's backstory we see that his childhood rape gets handled tastefully with no unsavory camera angling, but in the rapes of women they go on for way too long and are heavily angled to emphasize certain areas. Now before you say "but what about all the depictions of men brutally killed" are they all conventionally attractive and hardly look different from one another? There's this depravity that's too commonly found in men where they seem to really like drawing conventionally attractive women getting brutally raped. And I didn't even get to how the female characters are actually handled. If you look at them without their contexts they do seem very decently handled, with carefully thought out motivations and dialogue, but in the context of the story as a whole they are sidelined and used as plot devices. For example, the main female character's motivations center around one man, and later another/both men. That's not a bad thing, but the narrative seems to paint her romance with the other man as "true love" when in reality they're replacements for someone else. None of these issues are resolved or addressed, especially since that female character is "absent" for a large portion of the narrative so we never get to see her thoughts on anything until a small portion where afterwards she is rendered a damsel in distress again. And the female side characters are handled no different (female children aren't spared and are also given strange naked camera angles). A prominent female side character's story is overly sexual, and her "character arc" turns her from the weird sexual one in a leadership position to the meek, demure one following the team. I get that there's nuance in the other bits of that narrative but in the wider context of the story it's just so coincidental that she has to have those traits, especially when a certain male character's attitudes towards sexuality are handled with much more taste. And because of that, this work feels homoerotic, not in the sense that it's yaoi, but that there is a clear love for and preference towards men and the deep, transcendent relationships they form; women are simply middlemen or vessels of lust.

Guts is better than many protagonists I've seen and he does go through a character arc so I'll give him that. I've seen people complain about the battle shounen-eque parts of the later story but I actually think it serves his character well, except when nothing ends up changing and he continues blindly on his clearly pointless and meaningless goal. But that's not his fault, that's the fault of the writers for padding out the main conflict; Guts wants revenge on the main antagonist, who the writers have no idea what to do with. He's way too powerful and every arc ends in some kind of horrorfest where everything keeps going wrong, so they move to another area, and villain man keeps getting powerup after powerup while the few powerups Guts gets are killing him whenever he uses them. It gets tiring after a while, seeing this predictable parade pan out, because you cant tell there's no clear goal. There's never going to be an end to this godforsaken story.

But when themes are handled excellently, they do hit hard, especially coupled with lovely, unparalled art, which was what allowed me to read 300+ chapters. But I'm not keeping up with this manga any longer.

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Sep 5, 2024

MontanaWeise

Not Recommended

Preliminary (341/? eps)

Overrated, absolutely.

It started out really strong, as the story of Guts, the tragic hero drawn into a a web of deceit, betrayal and eldritch horror, and now sworn revenge against his former ally and friend.

Later on, it had descended all the way to just a somewhat more brutal version of the worst cliches of shounen action, with Guts and his merry band of quirky misfits traveling the land, encountering new and ever more ridiculous enemies, struggling initially, but then prevailing through the power of friendship and a last minute power-up, at which point the next set of even more ridiculous enemies is introduced, rinse and ...

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Recent News

Kentarou Miura's Assistants Resume 'Berserk' Serialization, 'Holyland' Creator Kouji Mori to Supervise

The editorial department of Young Animal announced on Tuesday that the late Kentarou Miura's Berserk manga will resume serialization in the 13th issue on June ...read more

Jun 7, 2022 12:33 AM by Vindstot | Discuss (70 comments)

'Berserk' Creator Kentarou Miura Dies at 54

Prolific manga author Kentarou Miura, best known for creating Berserk, died on May 6 at 2:48 p.m. due to an acute aortic dissection. He was 54 years old. "We w...read more

May 19, 2021 9:39 PM by Vindstot | Discuss (437 comments)

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Poll: Berserk Chapter 73 Discussion KitaTsuki - Nov 4, 2011	24 replies	by YuriSpacePirate »» 9 hours ago
Poll: Berserk Chapter 105 Discussion AlexSadist-sama - Nov 6, 2011	27 replies	by RFXs »» Yesterday, 1:19 PM
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Poll: Berserk Chapter 224 Discussion AlexSadist-sama - Nov 12, 2011	20 replies	by VioletBrokeAgain »» Oct 10, 2:18 PM
Poll: Berserk Chapter 1 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) kage-bunshin - Aug 30, 2009	118 replies	by a_Shape »» Oct 9, 2:38 PM

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