Berserk

Due to double friend recommendation, both claiming this to be best anime ever, and seeing most top reviews being 10/10, it's fair to say I had high expectations. Not too high though as I'm generally not very fond of the style of old shows, especially ones old enough to be in 4:3 aspect ratio. I was also told not to watch this in fast forward (advice I gave up on halfway through) and to watch series rather than movies as all the extra details are important to the experience.

Rest of the review will contain spoilers.
It was watchable for the most part but overall I can't say I liked it. Especially with the way it started improving in the second half I expected at least the ending part to make it all worth it, only for the ending to go batshit insane with what I percieve as torture gorn porn that has no real relevance to the plot. The same theme could have been communicated without all that. Good writing should be about me experiencing the psychological trauma of the character and empathise with it without the need to actually visually see the characters literally tortured for like an hour of my time, an hour I'll never get back.

From my understanding, it's a story about following one's own dream versus getting subsumed by someone else's. Or rather a story about consequence of following someone else's dream, and also about how people with greatest power get there by stepping on the corpses of others, using them for their own gain and discarding them when they're finished. I guess this could be considered a deconstruction of the shonen trope of being happy and finding life purpose in merely being a useful tool for someone else. Since this is a staple of japanese culture, it could be considered a criticism of this aspect of culture as well.

But unless I completely missed the mark on what this show is about, I'm finding that it does a pretty poor job of doing that. Sure it does it, but it just shows it, gruesomely, with what feels like an excuse for having power fantasy character rack up several thousand kills. Something that just doesn't feel like it belongs with the chosen artstyle and setting which feel all gritty nitty realistic. I suppose this was seen as a good thing since it might have been the first show to merge shounen like power fantasy tropes with realistic middle age setting, subcomunicating that these tropes are legit adult tropes, not only something for children to enjoy. Berserk might be trying too hard to make itself not-a-shounen, perhaps that's what explains all the excessive gore?

Experience wise show is best watched at 1.6-2x speed, especially for the modern viewer that has a huge backlog that's only getting bigger, as Berserk is just unbearably slow for the most of its progression and often feels like watching still frames of manga presented on screen. Some of the music is really good and atmospheric, but that means little with show being unwatchable at 1x speed. Some of the still art and framing is pretty decent in a timeless way but that's the best that can be said about visuals. I liked some of the military tactics subplots, which were probably the highlight of the show, though they were just good, not really amazing.

I see one of the top reviews suggesting that theme of Berserk is "What are you living for? This is the question posed by Berserk, pitting humanistic free will against nihilistic predestination." Of course that nihilistic view would be bad in every conceivable way, what's there to explore? What are we living for? Guts was living to kill people, it's all he knew how to do, and never thought to try anything else. Show doesn't paint this as a bad thing or even really question it. Griffith just lives to gain power, he suffers a lot and then succeeds, kinda turning evil and sacrificing everyone and everything in the process, and isn't shown regretting it, but is instead shown savoring it. What? Wow. Such exploration of life's purpose. Exploring free will in itself would be an excellent theme, but I saw no exploration of that. There was some demons yelling some nonsense that all is predetermined and all struggles are in vain and such but it's not like that was ever explored in any meaningful way, nor confirmed or disconfirmed. Any actual point raised by determinism doesn't even get a passing mention, not even metaphorically. You'd think that'd be relevant if theme is free will and destiny.

I hoped reading top 4 MAL reviews would explain what's good about this show, what it was that I missed, and was disappointed to find they didn't explain anything but gush about liking the tangible details such as setting and characters and philosophy etc... nothing substantial. I'm lead to conclusion that this is a show that aged like milk, show that has been cool in its time for being different and appealed to an aging demographic that grew up on shonens and was craving something in this genre (at least partially) but with a more serious and mature tone.

edit: One reader reached out to me pointing out that I'm trying to find a theme in an incomplete story, where anime kinda focuses on the 3rd arc instead of starting properly from the beginning. I was definitely under a wrong impression in this regard, so my take on it isn't exactly fair towards source material given this. But I'll leave the review as it is, since it still paints my subjective experience of this single anime season on its own.