A spoiler free review of the late Kentaro Miura's masterpiece: Berserk

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With the news of Berserk returning under the supervision of Kouji Mori, mangaka of Holy Land among many others, I wanted to write a review for my current favorite piece of fiction ever by only looking at the work of the late Kentaro Miura. Maybe someday if Berserk concludes under Mori’s supervision I’ll review it again but for me, Berserk will always be Miura’s work which means to me Berserk’s last true chapter will always be chapter 364. This is not to say I do not want to see an ending because I’m actually ecstatic to hear its return and I hope the best for Mori and his team and that they will hopefully do justice to Berserk, but again for now I want to focus on what Miura was able to accomplish. Without further ado let’s dive in. (TL;DR at the end)

Berserk is one of those pieces of work that I believe to be so excellently well crafted that my mere words won’t be able to describe the series in such a way that accurately reflects its level of sheer genius. It is a work that could be described by so many words yet at the same time is a work that can’t be described by any, but if I were to describe Berserk in three pairs of words it would be despairing yet uplifting, tragic yet encouraging, and dark yet light. Berserk is a story of moral, psychological, and metaphysical duality that is elegantly expressed through its two main characters Guts, the struggler, and Griffith, the falcon of light. Their stories are so intertwined together that the similarities and differences between the two on both a surface level and an extensive dive create a story that could only be described as tragically human.

How delightful. I feel it all over again. Love, hate, ultimate pleasure, ultimate pain, life, death, all here to enjoy, right before our very eyes! The true nature of man and the devil is here and now. - Slan

This line said by Slan, one of the God Hand members, encapsulates the duality that berserk tries to capture throughout the series, and Miura is able to do so successfully through his use of contrasting light and dark not only in his art and dialogue but most importantly through his characters. Guts aptly dubbed the struggler, is a character shrouded in darkness. His hair, clothing, and sword are all drawn making full use of the color black capturing the darkness within himself but also the darkness that surrounds him. Guts’ brand of the sacrifice is one that is a literal reminder that he is cursed to struggle but also a brand that makes himself the curse. Guts is the living embodiment of tragedy itself. In contrast to Guts, Griffith, the hawk of light, is emboldened in luminosity. His hair, clothing, and sword are drawn using the color white capturing his ethereal and angelic presence that is expressed outwardly throughout the story. Griffith’s divine presence can completely shift the atmosphere of any given panel from one of horror to one of hope. After all the hawk of light is humanity's hope in many respects.

Despite the stark contrast between these two Miura is able to masterfully bleed the lines of light and dark making both characters more similar than meets the eye while keeping them somehow so distinct from each other. Miura is constantly using Griffith and Guts in ways that make the story morally grey and constantly adding layers of nuance and depth that only feed back into both characters making Berserk as a whole just that much more profound. On one hand, we have Guts the man struggling against causality or fate itself, and Griffith the man that seems to have the devil’s own luck on his side. Guts the man who has to become a monster to move forward, and Griffith, the man that appears as the savior to all to achieve his dream. Outwardly Guts would be perceived as the villain of the story and Griffith the hero, but Berserk is less a story about what happens externally but rather what happens internally, and it does this through inspiration from both philosophy and psychology.

If you desire one thing for so long, it’s a given that you’ll miss other things along the way. That’s how it is… that’s life. - Godo

Berserk is a story filled to the brim with Nietzschean philosophy and the psychology of Carl Jung, the father of modern psychology, both Nietzsche's philosophy and Jung’s psychology blend together to give Berserk its underlying message about winning the battles within in a cruel world. Miura depicts some of the most heinous deeds conceivable by man in Berserk but because of that darkness that feels so inescapable and suffocating in almost every panel of the manga when Miura lets us take a breather and allows simple moments of normalcy and peace they feel like triumphant victories. Just as Berserk points out how devastatingly hard life can be it also celebrates the simplest aspects of life itself. Berserk as I mentioned before is about what is going on internally with our characters, and through Jung’s psychology, we realize that Berserk is about self-actualization and becoming the best version of one’s self. Discovery of what internally is eating us up and overcoming it that is what makes Guts our protagonist/anti-hero and Griffith our antagonist/anti-villain. Guts is able to overcome his internal demons making him someone who can better serve the people and world around him while Griffith is unable to make himself overcome his demons making him destructive to the people and world around him. Obviously, Griffith is by no means completely destructive and Guts completely constructive because Miura never makes it that simple. Berserk is meant to be a hard, morally grey, and contemplative work that forces its readers to see the good in evil and the evil in good.

Miura’s dialogue in the manga helps to add to this duality that is created through Guts and Griffith. Like the Slan quote above she mentions love and hate and life and death. Miura here is explicitly stating the duality of the story, but Miura uses dialogue in more poetic ways as well.

People bring the small flames of their wishes together… since they don’t want to extinguish the small flame… they’ll bring that small flame to a bigger fire. A big flame named Griffith. But you know… I didn’t bring a flame with me. I think I just stopped by to warm myself by the bonfire. – Guts

Lines such as the one above are poetic, symbolic, and somber and create a profound introspective look into the desires of our characters. Miura also loves to create symbols by cleverly associating certain ideas to any given object and then associating that object with a given character helping us as the audience better understand the relationship between the two characters on a deeper level as well as giving us greater insight into each individual character as well. A common symbol is a sword and so when Miura describes a sword as heavier than ever he gives the audience another look into the thoughts and feelings of our characters making both the characters easier to understand and making them more human as well as providing us with a keen understanding of Berserk's overall message. Miura seems to always be using every symbol, dialogue, and pen stroke to recycle back into his characters so that the ever-profound message of his story becomes something that is ingrained in the very essence of his reader.

Even though Berserk is a fantasy story with a large world with many governments, political climates, and magic systems like the dialogue Miura only uses this to create situations that force our characters to either grow or to give us more insight into who our characters truly are. While stories like Vagabond are more purely character-driven and lack the interesting plot of fantasy stories, and stories like One Piece are more purely about the plot and miss out on the genius of character-driven stories, Berserk is able to balance the fine line between the two. Berserk is able to constantly feed the world and its fantasy aspects back into the characters and their issues and if he is unable to Miura efficiently and effectively moves through those parts to get us back to the characters in the story. In doing so Berserk becomes a rare story that feels like it has the living world of a fantasy epic like One Piece, but the characters that feel so human of a character-driven story like Vagabond.

Finally to conclude the art. The art in Berserk evolves quite a bit. In Berserk's first arc: The Black Swordsmen arc the art is fairly antiquated but not to say it's bad it is just a style that has been moved away from. I personally like the art in the Golden Age arc the best but I think it is clear that Miura has improved and evolved as an artist over the years and continued to do so through the last chapter he would draw. Miura does the best job I’ve seen of any manga artist at using blacks and whites to create contrast. His paneling and line work also do an excellent job of capturing motion. Early on, especially, Miura was able to capture the action and energy of the fight making the fight look as if it was moving in real-time. On top of that Miura’s style was known so well for its attention to detail, and because of his attention to detail, he creates some panels that beg the reader to stay and look as if they were some Da Vinci painting in a museum. Finally, Miura’s use of perspective and scale is masterful. He is able to capture the sheer scale of anything so well and depict its magnitude so greatly. Miura was as amazing of an artist as he was a storyteller.

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#~TL;DR~

~~~ Berserk isn’t a story for the faint of heart. It is a story that tackles deep themes such as overcoming trauma by depicting the worst conceivable things man can imagine. If you are unprepared for things such as sexual, physical, and mental abuse to be portrayed in a manga I suggest you steer clear, but if you can read through the painful, despairing, and miserable panels of Berserk, Miura gifts you with some of the most tragically beautiful peaks in all of animanga. Berserk is able to balance characters and plot on an unprecedented level and Miura uses everything at his disposal to create a story that can only be matched by a few. Just as this review was meant to be a celebration of Miura’s life work, Berserk is meant to be a celebration of life itself amidst the tragedy of being a human. Thank you for your countless years of creation Kentaro Miura.

Even if we painstakingly piece together something lost, it doesn’t mean things will ever go back to how they were. – Guts

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