Berserk Review

This adapts only the Golden Age, which turns out to be the right decision. Guts, Griffith, and Casca get a complete arc, and the show is patient enough to spend most of its run on a mercenary company winning battles and building a friendship, so that the last three episodes have something to destroy. Griffith is why it endures. He is not a villain for most of the series, just a charismatic man with an ambition he has never once questioned, and the story keeps asking what he owes the people who follow him.

Susumu Hirasawa's score gives the whole thing a strange liturgical grandeur. The animation grade is deliberate and it is the one serious failing. OLM has almost no money here, so battles resolve in slow pans across still frames, identical cuts recur from episode to episode, and the character art drifts badly week to week, a real cost in a story whose horror depends on what you are shown. It sits well under the whole because the writing and the performances carry the series in spite of it. Nothing since has adapted this material better.