What is Berserk?
Berserk is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kentaro Miura. Set in a medieval Europe inspired dark fantasy world, the story centers on the characters of guts, a lone swordsman, and Griffith, the leader of a mercenary band called the “Band of the Hawk”.
A manga is a comic or a graphic novel of sorts originating of sorts. the berserk manga has 41 volumes at present with 366 chapters as of now. I heard of berserk around two years ago when i first starting entering the world of manga. It was only after the shocking news of its legendary author kentaro miura passing away in may of 2021 was broken that I started my journey of reading the greatest dark fantasy and quite possibly the greatest manga ever written.
The Premise:
Berserk belongs to the dark fantasy genre. It single handedly inspired some of the most infamous media that exists in this genre like Dark souls, Doom, Elden ring and much more.On the outside Berserk is a brutal gore fest with nightmarish imagery, brutality and the main protagonist Guts who is presented as a edgy lone swordsman known as the Black Swordsman.
With this introduction Berserk presents itself as an Edgy and unnecessarily over the top gore fest with a protagonist that the reader is baited to self insert into. However, the reality cannot be farther from this. As you read more of the story slowly and steadily you realize just how messed up yet mesmerizing this manga is.
It pulls you into the world, the characters and the story it creates. It forces you to connect with them and gets you to care about them. And then it hurts you to your core, makes itself hard to even read at times and yet forcefully holds you from stopping. No matter how uncomfortable you feel at times, you still want to keep reading.
The art:
One of the most important aspects of a manga is the art. the visual look of a manga has great impact on what the reading experience is and how well the story translates and gets through to the readers.
The art for berserk is quite simple one of if not the greatest art in the history of manga. The reason why it’s story and world can pull people into the manga is because of the existence of art that deserves to be framed and displayed in museums around the world. The insane amount of detail that every single panel portrays is honestly daunting.
It makes berserk larger than life and makes you wonder how one person can draw all of this one pixel at a time. But its not just the art, its the imagery and the imagination and how well it translates into the art. Miura creates some of the most disturbing and the most beautiful imagery that one couldn’t possibly fathom.
There is so much detail in his art that it can hurt to look at while reading. But the greatest quality that Miura’s art posses is the fact that its picturesque.
Every panel looks like a painting. A painting that has taken years to perfect. Imagine an entire story told through pictures drawn by some of the greatest artists in the entire world. Except you don’t have to imagine because you can read Berserk.
Also as time went on the art just went on getting better, which means that you never have to worry about it ever getting worse since it never will. It just keeps getting better as the story progresses.
The World:
The world of Berserk plays a major role in setting the atmosphere for how this story unfolds. The world itself whilst being ruthless and unforgiving has aspects to it that bring our characters peace and quiet.
And for every single troublesome situation that our characters have to face there are equally as many quieter more intimate moments that add a grounded sense of realism to our story.
Miura creates an incredibly diverse world with his infinite imagination running wild and infinite possibilities ready to jump out from the pages and yet he manages to add in more intimate moments in between which end up being the most impactful in the story as a whole.
For every 10 chapters of fighting the most incredibly vile and terrifying monsters you have ever seen, we get one chapter of just the aftermath, the quite and calm, to get to see just how everyone makes sense of what they go through into just physically but also mentally.
This is what sets Berserk apart. Its the master of all trades and the jack of even more. Our characters and our protagonist make it through these situations, not just physically but also mentally and go through character changes that feel deserved . Which then of course brings us to the characters.
The Characters:
Berserk has a wide range of characters that exist not only to drive the plot forward but to add a variety of varying perspectives of this world.
Even thought the plot itself has very high stakes throughout the story the story itself feels very personal to these characters due to the format Berserk follows. We never focus on the bigger picture. The story is never about saving the world from some great evil. It’s about our characters and their motivations and desires.
It’s these desires, sometimes selfish that drive the plot and impact everything around them. Even if the stakes are at an all time high it is usually due to the desires and motivations of characters that we follow throughout the entire story. The depth and character development that each character receives is what makes the story impactful on a personal level.
You can connect with the story with the characters and with their desires and motivations on a deeper level which makes the decisions they take or the consequences they suffer all the more dreadful and yet gripping to read.
The story is not carried by overpowered gods or some overly complicated combat or magic system but through its human characters and they are the ones that form the pillars of this grandiose adventure. And the two most important pillars of this story are the protagonist and the antagonist for this tale.
The protagonist and the antagonist:
Berserk has given us in my opinion two of the greatest characters to ever exist in all of fiction in our protagonist Guts and our antagonist Griffith. Without giving away too much of what the story really is, I want to bring across to you just how impactful these characters really are and how much they attribute to making Berserk the behemoth that it is today.
What makes this story special is how incredibly dragged out it feels and yet seems to be the only story that actually benefits from it. Its these two characters that hold the story up and its the connection that these two have that helps us connect to this adventure. Its one antagonist and one protagonist all the way through. Its the interpersonal conflict between these two that gives the story it’s heart.
Throughout the prologue of the story which is the first 100 or so chapters, what we see is some of the greatest character building and foreshadowing in all of fiction. But we also learn about these humans that we then move on to follow for the rest of the story.
The conflict feels human and grounded in reality with adds to the already grim and dark world of Berserk. And as we follow both these characters you get to realize that nothing in this story happens by chance, but due to the actions of these two characters, their actions which are fueled by their own human desires and ambitions. This itself forms the theme of this story and why I like it so much.
The Theme of Berserk:
Berserk creates a large fantasy world with larger than life characters and events but the rather simple and pure theme of this story is what made it my favorite piece of literature in recent times. It’s a theme that no matter who it is that reads can relate to and is the exact reason why just about anyone can enjoy this story. The all too simple theme of this story is purpose.
It’s finding one’s purpose in this world. All too often you see in the story this theme pop up. A character is present in this world and stuff is happening all around them but they don’t have purpose in this world. And it is this purpose that they strive to find. And nobody embodies this theme more that our main protagonist Guts.
Guts is someone who was plagued with misfortune ever since his birth. He was born from a dead corpse hanging from a tree and was then adopted by a band of mercenaries that happened to be passing by. His childhood was full of hardships including abuse from his adoptive father and the leader of the band of mercenary Gambino.
He grew up in war and to kill is all he learned. After many many disturbing things happen to him in these years of his life he was finally able to set himself free. Buts it’s when he’s own his own with no direction in his life that he finds the band of the hawk another mercenary group with young teens his age.
It’s here where he first discovers others with a somewhat concrete sense of purpose in their lives. But all of these individuals seem to be following and supporting the dream one of man, Griffith.
He’s the leader of the band of hawk and following a subsequent altercation with Griffith, Guts becomes a part of the band of hawk.
Through his years spent with the band of hawk he grows in strength and in skill. He becomes powerful, more powerful than he ever thought he could be. And yet he lacks something. He lacks his own dream.
He continues to live in the shadow of Griffith an equally strong individual however, one with a goal in mind. One with a dream and strong ambition. It’s exactly what separates Griffith from all others and guts himself.
After a ton of interpersonal drama and as Griffith gets ever so close to his dream with the help of Guts and the band of hawk, Guts decides to leave and find his own dream. This is where their paths diverge and descent into chaos in this story begins.
What happens after is some of the greatest and the most blood curdling storytelling I have ever witnessed, which I wont spoil. Guts isn’t a good person. Far from it. He makes mistakes. Some grave mistakes which some would say make him irredeemable. But that’s what differentiates Guts from other protagonists.
He isn’t a shining beacon of hope but instead a man who is fighting with himself for the bulk of the story. It’s his battle with himself to redeem himself of the things he has done while, at the same time finding a way to live in this cursed world and move ahead in life no matter is what makes him one into one of if not the most compelling protagonist in all of manga. And he truly embodies the themes presented in this story.
Berserk is a masterpiece:
Berserk is a beast in the art of storytelling. It isn’t your cookie cutter good guy vs bad guys story. It creates an immense and detailed world filled with beautiful and brutal intricacies alike and yet finds a way to balance all that with a very personal story that anyone can connect to.
Berserk was Miura’s magnum opus. A story that he first started conceptualizing when he was only 15. He revolutionized the world of manga and pop culture with his work. So many icons in gaming, books, tv, anime, etc. are inspired to some extent from Berserk.
The story of Berserk isn’t complete. For a long time after Miura’s death, the future of the manga was up in the air. However, very recently the studio along, with Miura’s assitant and his long time friend announced that they would continue his work as they had enough information regarding the rest of the stroy to be able to somewhat follow it to the end.
Following which two chapters were released which seem to have kept up with the quality that Miura himself would be able to deliver, at least to some extent. Nothing will ever come close to what Miura himself could have produced on the paper. In the latter half of serializing, Miura’s assistants said that he was so infatuated with detail that he would zoom into every pixel to draw for hours stuff that couldn’t even be seen from the naked eye.
No matter the conclusion of this story berserk has cemented itself as a pioneer of an entire genre of pop culture media and as on if not the greatest manga ever written. it has certainly become my personal favorite of all time.
