We're never going to get a worthy Beserk adaptation. This is something that fans of the manga have just come to accept after God knows how many years of waiting. The 90's anime really wasn't all that bad, but it was a slideshow even for time period, and the Golden Age films were an unsettling mix of decent hand drawn art and horrid CG, not to mention they just retold the same story that we've seen adapted twice now. The Golden Age arc is effectively a prequel to the rest of the Berserk franchise, so have twenty years where nothing but that was adapted is incredibly frustrating, especially with a series that has as strong and beautiful a piece of source material as Berserk does.

Berserk (2016) takes the terrible CG from the Golden Age movies and makes it the main focus. There are smatterings of hand drawn art mixed in, but never enough to offset the CG and just enough to remind you what this new series could have been. We're finally pushing past the Golden Age arc into the core Berserk story, but the studio took a massive liberty with the source material and condensed about 400 panels into just five minutes of animation to accelerate the story to where Guts first encounters Farnes and her group of knights. This is the "Black Swordsman" arc, which serves to introduce us to the broken and desperate post-Eclipse Guts, and like I said above, is cut to about 5% of its original content. From this point, more large changes from the source come at a rapid pace. The entirety of the "Lost Children" arc, one of the most emotionally powerful arcs from the manga, is completely cut, with the story accelerating to Guts being captured at Farnes' camp. There is also an anime original (but Miura directed) episode that fills that gap between the camp and the beginning of the "Conviction" arc, that is decent and introduces us to just how damaged Farnes really is, but is still tragically low quality compared to the source.

It's at this little-less-than-halfway point that the adaptation really starts to step it up and make you mad at what you're given. The "Conviction" arc is more or less extremely well adapted, as in true to the source, in its entirety; it's just adapted into complete garbage. Aesthetically, Berserk (2016) is about as bottom of the barrel as it gets for the CG portions. CG movement is jerky and unnatural, models "pop" jarringly out of the average backgrounds, and the texturing is incredibly low-fidelity. They try to emulate Miura's hashing-based shading by slapping a half-assed version of the effect on top of the 3D models, and it does nothing but look incredibly stupid. The small amount of 2D, hand drawn art is actually decent but nowhere near the quality that Berserk deserves. The sound design is also particularly terrible, which is a shame because the VA and music are both actually pretty alright.

Everything about Berserk (2016) is just a massive letdown, and is even moreso considering the studio seems to really wants to adapt the source into animation faithfully (outside the strangely accelerated start) but obviously does not have the budget or talent to do so. I'm not sure what has to be done for Berserk to get the high quality anime adaptation that it deserves, but I'm convinced that it must be fucking impossible.

Go read the manga, don't waste your time with this.