How Did You Find Out About Berserk?

Hi, Skull.net, first let me say that I'm happy to be accepted onto the forum, and I hope to make as much attributions as my free time from school allows lmao.

Okay, so I'm pretty new to Berserk. I've watched the 90s anime, and I've gotten to around 260 or so in the manga, but I'm curious:

How did you find about Berserk? I'm sincerely curious to know.

I'm just curious because you don't see much adds for it, and I've heard there are people in the anime viewing community that don't even know what it is. Although I wouldn't know personally because I'm in any general anime communities.
 
I was lucky enough to have a friend recommend it to me about 2 years ago, we were talking about plot heavy stories and went from dune to berserk.
 
Years ago I played Guts rage for dreamcast. Loved it, but knew nothing of the anime or manga.

Years later in 2007 my friend convinced a very reluctant version of myself to watch this anime called Berserk. Cue insane lust for more. Connected the dots of this show and that old dreamcast game, found out about the manga and read it all quickly.

Slowly started collecting the books and even had a myspace fan page way back when, but little did I know there was already a very well organized page right here.

You should catch up right now. :)
 
All I remember is being 13 or 14 and typing "Bersek" on now defunct p2p file sharing software Kazaa so I could download the anime. I actually managed to download several episodes by spelling it wrong like that.
 
I'm not certain of the first time I heard of it, but I believe it was when I made a thread in another forum asking about the most powerful stories in manga. Someone (many actually) said Berserk and I looked if up and it was in my mind until I read it a few months later. That was six years ago.

The series scared me away at first and it wasn't until 2015 when I randomly decided to watch the first movie when I found it on Netflix. It was on a whim and I'm glad it happened because it led me to read the manga and I've been a massive fan ever since.
 
I'm a very new fan since I just got into the series back in May. The biggest factor in me getting interested in Berserk was TwoBestFriendsPlay. They're big fans and have talked about it quite a bit. Earlier this year they were playing Dark Souls 3 and kept making comparisons to Berserk so I got curious, especially since I've had the Dreamcast game in my gaming collection for a while and had no context for anything. I looked up Berserk and almost immediately had The Eclipse spoiled for me :judo: But I found the '97 anime and gave it a watch, and even though it was low-budget and the voice acting was a bit cheesy I really enjoyed it. Once I finished it I started searching for official manga scans.

I've tried to read a few mangas before but I've never read any other beyond a few episodes. Somehow Berserk compelled me to read it every chance I had and I caught up in less than a week. It was like I wasn't even reading it most of that time, more like watching it. I was so enthralled with the story and characters and artwork that my mind just filled in everything else. It was really surreal. Now I'm working on buying new volumes to offer my support to the series. I currently have 1-4 and 37, and I'm expecting 5,13,17, and 19 to arrive this week.
 
One day I was browsing through a manga website when I came across the latest Detective Conan chapter (ch. 940~), I was baffled by the number (I mean how can somebody keep an episodic series running for such a long time?) and decided to find out if it's ever going to conclude. My search led me to a thread on MAL where I learned about Berserk, the fact that the series was older than Detective Conan and only 337 episodes had been published sparked my curiosity.
 
The very first time was in a issue of EGM or Dreamcast Magazine. (This was around 1998-1999, the Dreamcast wasn't even out yet. I'll try to dig up a screenshot of it later on.) There was a small article of it with a tiny screen shot of the Guts Rage game. All I could see was blood every where, and a "guy" swinging a Cloud-like "Buster Sword." I remember thinking "I would call this some sort of rip off, but there is just too much blood not to want to play this." I truly knew too little. In a short time, I would forget all about the game, until I came across it about a year later. "Oh shit, I remember reading about this!" If it wasn't for that tiny screenshot a year earlier, I would never of bought it. That juvenile lust for blood and guts (no pun intended) would introduce me to a surprising well made game with a pretty decent story. It really show cased what the Dreamcast can offer at the time. Looking back, it honestly did feel like a middle chapter but it was entirely enjoyable out of context.

I would never have imagined, there was a anime... or manga. But I was determined for some reason in my teens to never read manga. That was a new level of nerd I wasn't going to touch at the time. I however, found the BOX of WAR volume 1 at a local video store that was way over priced. Interestingly enough, I didn't put two and two together. The Berserk "title" text was different from that of the Dreamcast game. What stood out was the collectors box, and how I didn't get it what the big box itself was all about. "How come there is only one DVD in this thing... what a rip off." I visited the store quite a bit, and was always on the hunt for new anime. I was just coming off the Samurai X OVA kick, and for a long while just needed to fill the void. I finally came across Berserk that wasn't wrapped in the "big box." It was volume 2, or 3 and still nothing added up that it was the same series that the Dreamcast game. Really, thinking about it, Guts Rage is based off post Golden Age. Big Sword, Casca's mind was gone, she had long hair. I wouldn't have recognized anyone. The anime presented a large-yet smaller sword, Casca had short hair, Griffith wasn't in the game. (Also I also somehow got the impression that Zodd was Griffith, I guess because I thought it was a play on the word "Griffin" which is what kinda of creature I thought Zodd was in the game. Meaning... he would of been talking about himself in the 3rd person in the game, when he mentions Griffith. Yeah, I was pretty confused on that.) Any how, I read the description and Guts name was mentioned, but didn't stand out. Band of the Hawk was mentioned, and still nothing in my head added up. It wasn't until I read the name "Griffith" that the gears started to turn or more so, correct themselves. The name Griffith, which I only ever heard in Guts Rage made me think of just that, the Dreamcast game. I said "Hang on a minute..." I looked at Guts name, and thought "Oh shit!" I scuffled around and found the other 4 or 5 available volumes and started to put it all together. I said "It's a prequel!"

I was entirely relieved, because I liked the game and I was very interested in "what the fuck was that game all about." I would of never of guessed just how much the anime would not only eclipses the game, but would open me up to just tidbits of the greatest story I ever read. For years, I borrowed the anime to friends. Even now I own 3 different complete sets of the anime. I turned so many people on to the anime. It wasn't until I was hearing "Man, that cliffhanger sucked. I just want more Berserk man!" from so many people, that I decided I myself did as well. Somewhere along the way, I had read that the anime was based off a Manga. This was bad news, as in Missouri back in 2003-2004, there just wasn't a whole lot of options unless you went to a big city. Which for me, was two hour drive. Amazon and online ordering wasn't streamlined yet, and I was still in high school. Even if I found it at a store, I couldn't of bought it. No funds and there was simply too many volumes to contend with. So, getting the manga was never option. So I read scans. Which I thought was okay until thankfully Aaz verbally-bitch-slapped me one day when I mentioned it. I shit you not, sometime in 2008-2009 I systematically bought the entire available series. I do consider it a prize possession.

I'm proud of my slow-burn of a journey of discovering Berserk. I took baby steps with the series, and it feels like I somehow raised a relationship with the series. It's literally part of my life. Somewhat of a comfortable place, or a old friend that seems to have been around since forever. It's taken a life of its own in a lot of ways really. Hell, I pop in here now and then and feel like I'm visiting the series, even if there's no new episode, I'm investing my time into my fascination and love for the series. As we all are. Again it's like stopping in and checking up on a old friend to see how they're doing.
 

Squiddot

The Falcon needs you. You don't need him!
Berserk hung in my periphery for probably years before I actually picked it up. The earliest I can remember hearing about it was when I got into Dark Souls and read about the oft repeated Guts and Artorias comparison.

Eventually I kept noticing it popping up enough to look into the story online a bit. I scoured the wiki for a bit (because I sometimes do that rather than devote too much time to reading a series i'm only curious about. It has its downsides.). All that stuck with me after I left was the Eclipse and the World Transformation, but it was enough to get me interested. So next time I visit my friend who watched loads of anime, I bring it up. He's never heard of it so we get hold of the movie trilogy (don't judge) and power through the first two. We have to split up before we get to the third and watch that alone (Which was probably for the best) and we both start the manga a few days later.

He wound up racing ahead of me only to drop it around the the time Ganishka shows up. I completely fell in love by Lost Children and the rest is history :badbone:.

That was maybe 2 or 3 years ago. Nowadays I have the 37 Dark Horse volumes sitting on my shelf. I remember trying so hard to get my friends into it but they all resisted, save for one who read through my collection last year. Through chance I discovered a few other friends of friends read it as well. So we bond over the current series events whenever we run into each other.
 
I found the old anime a few years back and watched all of that, the eclipse scene left me confused and wondering what the hell happened, so i checked out the manga. And from then on i have loved berserk as a whole. I don't know why but everyone loved the lost children arc, and that was one of my favorite apostle fights. I could imagine it animated in fact. That's another thing that makes berserk great, if you actually read the manga and then look back on it in your head you can see how it should be animated. My favorite part of the lost children arc is somewhere between the pseudo elves killing each other, and when Guts face got skewered.
 
K

Kobby

Guest
One of my favourite anime Youtubers, King of Lightning, mentioned it in one of his videos years ago (2011/2012). Though I didn't start Berserk until the summer of 2014.
Some people on a facebook group I used to be in recommended it to me as well.
 

DANGERDOOOOM

Rest In Peace, Kentaro Miura. We will miss you.
I had a friend in middle school (somewhere in 2003), and he had the first Berserk volume. I glanced at it for a bit and didn't think much of it. Years later I happened to spontaneously by the anime from some review online and slowly became obsessed with it. When I found out there was more than the giant cliff hanger the anime left me at, I ended up buying the books from Amazon.

Berserk is an amazing experience and I'm happy I came across it :guts:
 
A close friend mentioned it something like two years ago but after looking it up extremely briefly and seeing Guts' Dragon Slayer, I thought this would be too heavy on the fighting side for it to interest me.

And then at the very beginning of this year, I read an interview from the author of Shingeki no Kyojin saying that he had been inspired by Casca's character when he imagined the main girl of the series, so I went to look it up again, remembered my friend's words, read some extremely positive reviews and watched the three movies not long after to see whether this could be something I'd enjoy.

And... well, I picked up the manga from the very first volume immediately after and it took me about 3-4 months to read through it and buy all volumes.

Easily one of the best (if not the best) series I'm following right now and I'm glad I looked it up again and gave it a chance.
 
Squiddot said:
Eventually I kept noticing it popping up enough to look into the story online a bit. I scoured the wiki for a bit (because I sometimes do that rather than devote too much time to reading a series i'm only curious about. It has its downsides.). All that stuck with me after I left was the Eclipse and the World Transformation

...you basically spoiled 2 of the biggest highlights of the series for yourself.
 

Squiddot

The Falcon needs you. You don't need him!
hearTes said:
...you basically spoiled 2 of the biggest highlights of the series for yourself.

It didn't affect my reading too much at all. When I watched the adapted Golden Age, I already knew Griffith would eventually sacrifice everyone (read. Guts), but I had no idea what the context would be, or how the event would actually play out. Which is essentially the exact same position any manga reader would be in by the time they finish Black Swordsman.

And my knowledge of the World Transformation was literally "Griffith floods the world with magical stuff". Do you think I had any idea about Ganishka, Skullknight, Zodd, the Kushan war and the events that led to Femto incarnating and leading Midland's army? For a while I even though the WT and the Eclipse were the same event, or at least happened much sooner to each other than they eventually did.

Maybe those were the biggest highlights for you. But I still distinctly remember my first read through's highlights turned out to be the quieter moments like Guts' goodbye to Jill, meeting Rickert and Godo again, Guts reuniting with Casca in the heretic cave as well as the Hill of Swords, and the battle against Grunbeld. Overall I don't regret anything about knowing that information beforehand, if I had to sacrifice those scenes to convince myself to get into the manga, so be it.
 
Squiddot said:
It didn't affect my reading too much at all. When I watched the adapted Golden Age, I already knew Griffith would eventually sacrifice everyone (read. Guts), but I had no idea what the context would be, or how the event would actually play out. Which is essentially the exact same position any manga reader would be in by the time they finish Black Swordsman.

And my knowledge of the World Transformation was literally "Griffith floods the world with magical stuff". Do you think I had any idea about Ganishka, Skullknight, Zodd, the Kushan war and the events that led to Femto incarnating and leading Midland's army? For a while I even though the WT and the Eclipse were the same event, or at least happened much sooner to each other than they eventually did.

I assumed you knew the details by the time you finished scouring the wiki, I'm glad that you didn't completely spoil yourself. :guts:

Squiddot said:
Maybe those were the biggest highlights for you. But I still distinctly remember my first read through's highlights turned out to be the quieter moments like Guts' goodbye to Jill, meeting Rickert and Godo again, Guts reuniting with Casca in the heretic cave as well as the Hill of Swords, and the battle against Grunbeld.

No, of course not, I wrote "2 of the biggest highlights" not "the biggest highlights".
 
It was sometime in 2001 for me and I was about 16 years old. My friend gave it to me on a bunch of burned CDs and one day IMed me on ICQ asking me why I wasn't watching Berserk yet.

Well, I took the initiative and ended up watching the whole damn thing in one sitting. He came over to my place around 2am and I was just getting into the eclipse and he was like "holy shit, you're here already?". About another 20 minutes later I was like "wtf, what?".
 

jackson_hurley

even the horses are cut in half!
Back around 2002-03 a friend suggested the anime. I took note of it in my mind and then later on found the first dvd of the 97' anime. Bough it, watched it, loved it. I returned to the store at the next pay check and bought disc 2, then disc 3 and so on. When I was done with the anime I wanted answer to that shit storm of an ending. Found out that Dark horse just released the first 3 volumes. Got them on amazon. Since then, everytime there was a volume to be out I reread the series. And when it was too long, I reread the series. I read it around 1 time a year. I'm at volume 28 right now in my rereading.
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
In spring 1999, there was a store near Atlanta that (blatantly illegally) rented fansubbed anime tapes, and I found Berserk on the shelf. I watched the first VHS. The tape was so worn that the colors bled and I was convinced that it was an '80s anime that I'd never heard of before. I was immediately intrigued by Guts, but after just the first 4 episodes, I wasn't hooked on the show. I resigned to move on, and maybe I'd revisit it later.

A few months later, I encountered a guy at a convention who said Berserk was his favorite series. That struck me as a very strange thing to say, because from what little I had seen of the anime, it didn't really seem to be of the caliber to be anyone's favorite. So, based on this stranger's devotion, I acquired more episodes, and by episode 10 (Adonis' death), I was in love. The full series hadn't been released by fansubs at the time, so I turned to the manga, buying a few volumes at random at a local Japanese bookstore. At the time, Volume 18 was the latest volume, and just judging by the cover, figured "cool, the series is over and I can get the full thing." I also bought some text translations through Aclimate Solutions (a now defunct service where you paid a service to mail you printed transcripts of very literal translations of various series). Around this time, summer 1999, I also discovered Black Sun Over Midland, the only Berserk fan community in existence (which I've kept alive here: ), a community that eventually transferred over to here, after the admin there stopped updating regularly. And well, here we are.
 

jackson_hurley

even the horses are cut in half!
Walter said:
Around this time, summer 1999, I also discovered Black Sun Over Midland, the only Berserk fan community in existence

I remember stumbling on that website, a little bit before rediscovering it here.
 
Berserk was reccomended under the category great monster designs on an image on 4chan, so I checked it out, it was a piss poor Hawks translation (sorry), and I was deterred by Guts being a total bastard during the Black swordsman arc. However the Berserk 3 trailer sparked my interest again, after that my opinion of and interest in Berserk kept growing. Took me 3 years to complete my volume collections, especially since inn my country Berserk volumes are like unicorns, finding them is a miracle.

Also fuck the Hawks translations, they're the worst trap for new readers.
 
I had a few friends suggest the series to me many years back. I ended up reading the horrible Hawks translations online, but I still thought the series was incredible. After that I started building my collection of the Dark Horse volumes until it was finished, and I discovered SkullKnight.net somewhere in-between.


Walter said:
Around this time, summer 1999, I also discovered Black Sun Over Midland, the only Berserk fan community in existence (which I've kept alive here: http://bsom.skullknight.net), a community that eventually transferred over to here, after the admin there stopped updating regularly. And well, here we are.

I guess I am too young to have ever seen (or remember seeing) Black Sun Over Midland, but the page you linked brought back a lot of fond memories from website design back then.

Also, is that a Diablo font type on the BSOM page?
 

Squiddot

The Falcon needs you. You don't need him!
Wenliinvictus said:
Berserk was reccomended under the category great monster designs on an image on 4chan

I remember that picture. It always used to bug me the example they used was the hydra eating the unicorns. You have dozens of totally unique apostles to choose from and you choose the most "generic high fantasy" panel you can get. :ganishka:
 
I watched the 1997 anime in the early 2000's. I liked it quite a bit but the abrupt ending at such a turning point was pretty devastating. Some years went by but I would always think back to Berserk so I re-watched it again. My reaction was pretty much the same and I knew absolutely nothing about the Manga connection to most Anime's. I decided to search the web for Berserk and of course my mind was blown. I got possessed by Berserk, eventually I found Skullknight.net and signed up. I rarely join any kinds of forums but Berserk influenced me in such a way that I had to read what other people thought about it and also share my fondness for Berserk via my own art (something I have been neglecting for years now :mozgus: forgive me Walter for I have sinned).
 
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