Kentaro Miura’s Berserk has established itself as one of the best manga ever put to pen and paper. His passing in 2021 was met with mass mourning from fans around the world, and the status of the series currently remains in limbo. Regardless of whether the publisher decides to continue with Miura’s understudies or leave it unfinished out of respect, the legacy he and his work leave behind is arguably some of the best that the dark fantasy subgenre has ever seen.
However, what started as a compellingly grim and blood-curdling revenge epic evolved, along with Miura, into an inspiring story of humanity’s indomitable spirit and sheer force of will when at its best. The admittedly horrific scenes depicted result, in the short- and long-term, in a story about healing from the unjust traumas inflicted by an unforgiving world and learning to trust people again, as well as an emotional theme of found family.
That indomitable spirit as the Struggler fighting against the Current of Causality and the very concept of fate is the narrative pillar of his journey — punctuated, of course, by some of the most cathartically brutal fight scenes in a manga. It was a disappointment for many fans on more than just a superficial level, as that show was the first Berserk anime to move onto the Conviction and of the Falcon of the Millennium Empire arcs.
A bloody, haunting beauty And for all the comparisons to George R. R. Martin’s sprawling and dense brainchild that Berserk gets, its plot seems to have elements comparable to The Witcher, or at least CD Projekt Red’s interpretation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s work. It’s understandable, to an extent, that Game of Thrones comes quickest to mind, but the point-of-view of Berserk‘s story is much tighter in scope.