The 97 anime blew me away when I first saw it. The story was top-notch, the characters were wonderfully crafted and complex, and the plot was tightly-woven and near perfectly told. Yeah, the animation was awful, I noticed its cheapness back then, particularly during the action scenes with their rampant abuse of looped frames. But he aesthetics were able to present the appropriate atmosphere regardless, particularly since they made good use of detailed stills for the more climatic moments, and backed them all up with excellent sound design and music. Nothing about the series ever distracted me away from its narrative.
Since reading the manga though...it's admittedly hard to go back. It's easy to notice the material that was cut out, and I can't help but miss its presence. Guts' childhood in particular stands out the most to me personally. It feels awfully rushed, and the omission of Donovan had a bit of a cascading effect on later events that really hurt the story; Guts and Casca's love scene in the manga is beautiful in how we see Guts break down from years of repressed trauma catching up to him, followed by Casca helping him finally heal from it, but we don't get that from the anime, which made their relationship feel nowhere near as deep as it was supposed to be. And then there's the subject of the ending; it's too abrupt, it leaves tons of holes, and little effort is done to build the bridge between the last and first episode. If they really wanted to make the series feel like something that could stand on its own, then they should have at least adapted the rest of the Golden Age arc. It would have given the anime a greater sense of closure than just suddenly jumping out of the Eclipse and showing Guts walking out of Godot's without any explanation on how he got out alive.
Still, I guess it did its job. It left me wanting more and got me into reading the manga, which would probably have flown under my radar had I not watched it, so I'm glad it was made. Though I can't help but wonder if that makes me a hypocrite because I do NOT have the same sentiments towards the movies or the 2016 series. Sure, they got people talking about Berserk and may have attracted more fans, but everything about them is just so terrible that I can't help but think they give people the wrong impression. I know for a fact that if they were where I got my first impression of the series, then I wouldn't have ever given Berserk the time of day; I would assume the manga is as trashy as they were and ignore it completely. Worse, the fact that we now have three anime series all made completely separate of each other is just generating a lot of confusion about where people are supposed to start or where they're supposed to go after they finish one series.