Berserk

This in an awful, low-budget adaptation made by a team that I can only assume has no idea what it's doing. It all but makes a mockery of Miura's fantastic manga art. It also lacks the great soundtrack of the 1997 adaptation.

The animation is truly awful, with the human characters moving stiffly and awkwardly. The cinematography is atrocious. The camera is constantly, unnecessarily panning, the shot selection is puzzling, the rule of 180 is consistently ignored. Typical action scenes in Berserk feature the camera swooping through the scene and rapidly cutting and repositioning for no good reason while your eye struggles to follow the action. There are several shots in which it is literally impossible to discern what's taking place. In addition to this, the art is incredibly bland, featuring unfinished-looking CGI that looks like it belongs in a cutscene of a Final Fantasy game from the '90s.

I can only assume that such an adaptation was made by a team with a very low budget and very little experience in crafting a visual narrative. To top it off, the soundtrack is putridly stereotypical, featuring generic heavy metal that only goes further in proving this team was consistently shooting to make something that looks "cool" rather than putting any effort in telling a compelling story.

This is really only worth watching if you're a hardcore fan of the manga, otherwise it's not worth your time. Incredibly disappointing. Hopefully they find a different studio to continue this series rather than just completely canceling it, though after two seasons I'd honestly rather see it cancelled than continued in such a horrible fashion.

2 stars on the strength of the source material alone. If you're interested in Berserk, read the manga instead. This trash isn't worth the time it takes to watch.

I need to get this out there; This show IS good, but you need to get used to the animation. It is not as horrid as some people say, it's more of a hate/love thing in accepting the fact that it IS 3D with some frame rate issues. Quite frankly, once I decided to watch it no matter what, the 3D didn't really bother me too much. I was more interested in continuing Guts' adventures than nitpicking the animation apart.

Don't misunderstand me, I've no idea why they simply didn't do a good 2D animation on this and continued the 1997 story straight off the bat, and as such it is a flawed product. But definitely not flawed enough to deserve being called 'ruined'. That's childish.

This show continues the story of Berserk and is definitely for people who've seen the original 1997 animated series. It's dark, grim and surprisingly funny for such as dystopian tale. Guts slaughtering his way through mounds of enemies and facing all sorts of impossible challenges, all the while having to watch 'weaker' people die around him, is exactly what I wanted, and exactly what I got.

Looking forward to season 2! (Though seriously, whoever made this, considering improving your 3D drastically or switch over to 2D.)

The long awaited continuation of one of the most acclaimed animes of all time is hard to watch due to atrociously bad CGI/animation, angles, and worse editing. Luckily the story remains somewhat true to the books so it was able to hold my attention but just barely as every time a character opened their mouth you lose focus on the story as immersion is completely broken.

Just how bad is the animation? Well, it reminds me a bit of 15-20 year old kids cartoons. We also had similar quality in cut scenes back in the N64/PS2 days. Now imagine if those cut scenes were the focus of the games and you will have a good idea of what this anime is like. Its almost like sabotage. If younger folks watch this without seeing the originals they will disregard the entire franchise from here on.

Anyway, like stated above, it still follows the books as best it can so by virtue of having a good manga, this one still gets a rating of 7 from me which makes it better than average overall. Thats how good the berserk story line is. In the future, they should definitely wait until they have enough money to get a quality animator.

Anime itself is not the worst it is not great but atleast okay to watch as a sequence. But seriously disappointed with the anime style the 1997 had the best anime style and it's better not to ruin the classics either should have continued as is or shouldn't have touched it.

I was hesitant to watch this because of how bad of a reputation the series has due to the horrible animation. Truthfully it is still worth the watch. The animation has its moments where it shines, but it had tough shoes to fill considering 97' and the manga is highly regarded as the best of the best.

All other aspects of this series is great. They pulled all the right material. Pacing was steady in terms of lore and action. The score was exciting and season 2's opener is a contender to one of my favorite anime openers of all time. Again, the only true flaw is the animation.

My only other recommendation would be to make sure you watch 97' prior to this series.