I feel like I should preface this review by saying that Makoto Yukimura’s Vinland Saga is one of my favorite manga I have ever read. Perhaps, Vinland Saga being one of my favorite manga of all time gave me some unreasonable expectations or made me view it under a more critical lens than I would have if I had been watching the show blind. But, I cannot help but speak my mind in this situation regardless. 

The process of watching Vinland Saga was coupled with a pretty sad experience for me, the realization that I was watching an inferior adaptation of one of my favorite manga.

Vinland Saga falls to one of the common trappings of anime adaptations which is botched pacing. Some people call the show a slow burn. Whether or not that enhances the experience for a viewer is definitely something that varies according to a person’s taste. Personally, as someone who has read the source material and is caught up, I thought the anime could have benefited a lot from a faster pace, not every anime has to be 24 episodes, and the prologue arc to Vinland Saga is an arc that in my opinion is better suited to a less common length of 18 to 20-ish episodes, maybe shorter. The pacing leads to a number of episodes where not a lot happens and the anime original filler content doesn’t contribute much in terms of developing characters or the plot. In the case of the penultimate episode of the anime, the filler content actually detracts from the original text. 

That being said, the writing itself of the show does a semi-decent job of adapting the source material in the script minus the filler and in spite of the overly slow pacing. Though honestly, I'm not sure if it was the script or the subtitlers' fault, but the script feels very dumbed down in comparison to the manga; with poetic and interesting sections of prose whittled down to the bare minimum needed to get the point across. The script is also not the best at getting the relationship between Thorfinn and Askeladd as characters. There is a lot of subtext between the characters in the manga that the show isn't really able to get across. I believe that two of the filler episodes might have tried to rectify this but fell flat since they just felt like more padding for an already bloated show.

The animation is fine for the most part, though there is a steady decline in animation quality towards the end which detracts from how nice the first few episodes and the finale look. The soundtrack is fine though it isn’t very noteworthy. I wanted to love the Vinland Saga anime despite its shortcomings but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Ironically enough, while it’s my love of the source material that led me to feeling disappointed about the anime, it’s also my love of the source material that prevents me from rating this series lower.

While I love Vinland Saga, the manga, the anime is not where I would advise a newcomer to begin with unless they were particularly averse to reading.