Berserk became the first manga I’ve read. I rarely watch anime either, so when a good friend of mine, who has great taste in good storytelling, suggested I watch the 90s anime adaptation of Berserk around 2004 or so, I went in with no expectations. Yet I loved it and immediately went for the source material, just as said friend already did, downloading and reading through all of the scans of the fan translated manga that, at that point, has just started to get officially translated and sold in the US, which was way too expensive to import to Ukraine. Decades went by and amidst the ongoing russian full scale invasion of Ukraine I decided to gift myself the full set of currently released hardcover Deluxe volumes from Dark Horse, importing them through Amazon and re-experiencing Berserk from the beginning in the way I never could before.
Kentaro Miura, the author of the manga, unfortunately passed away in 2021 and the episodes released since that time were done under the supervision of his friend and colleague Kouji Mori, who is trying to finish the story. He is, however, only doing what Miura described to him, without any additional embellishments and episodes of his own, so as a result, the storytelling is a lot more condensed and already starting to resemble the shorter more unfinished elements of The Silmarillion. I’m still hoping to see the end of the Berserk story as Kentaro Miura has envisioned it, but it clearly won’t be told in the way he would’ve wanted if he could. In this post I wanted to share some of my thoughts and love about Kentaro Miura’s Berserk in its completed, and sadly unfinished, form. And maybe revisit this topic again once the story concludes with the help of other people.
Read more“Just wanted to talk about Kentaro Miura’s Berserk”