Anime – Berserk 2nd Season [2017][BD]

Anime Nov 22, 2019

Overview:

Berserk 2^nd Season starts out by showing the main villain and having him confront Guts for reasons explained in the first episode. With this season it is more of a focus on this main villain starting his domination in order to obtain his long standing dream. This person is still pretty much in the background but is prominent for the events that do happen as he is directly linked with them.

Orcs and the witch is basically the entire season with an end goal of reaching the fairy kingdom… still. More is learned about the fairy kingdom in the last couple of episodes. As for the witch and orcs, they were needed to give some additional background for some characters and allow Guts to obtain a pretty badass set of spikes… hehe, those who have broken down to watch it will know it can pull you back together to finish the season out.

There is a real emphasis on the world changing from what was once the golden age, everything slowly becoming darker and darker with more and more vial type scenes of rape and topics along those lines.

Visuals/Music:

Just like the Berserk [2016], the animation style is 3d based for better or worse. There is a slight improvement I think but that might just come down to better refinement that the studio was able to do given this was about a year apart from release, so they had more experience with the style chosen.

3d is still meh with the character animations, mainly the mouth movements seeming out of place… not considering the models themselves most of the time feel quite out of place. At times when the character models were not moving, it looked proper and they felt part of the show. Once movement started occurring is when things started to go south.

There is stutter movements and animations due to the fps of the show, Knights of Sidonia never had this problem, so I believe it solely comes down to the company and the way they animated it. Due to the show being 3d, should have rendered it out at 60fps to make it appear smoother, even 40ish fps would have been perfectly fine more than likely. Sometimes the movements felt 10fps though and it looked terrible breaking any immersion that could have been left.

As for the music, the same OST from Berserk [2016] is used. This is a good thing due to how good it was. Sadly, there was not any additional tracks added afaik, meaning no tracks that could be more soothing for those types of moments, at times it felt too intense.

Sound affects were still bad, after a year and no change to make them better and rid the mic rupture esque effects is simply a shame. Should have swapped them for better ones and balanced them out with the rest of the audio as the *huge* attacks that land get annoying real quick. The effects used don’t match as one would expect breaking immersion.

Final Thoughts:

For those that have watched the other seasons/movies of Berserk, might as well finish it out since it is a good show. There are glaring flaws more prominent here than other shows out there but that isn’t a reason to skip it. The action scenes are enough and when the fights and soundtracks meld together it can get you hyped for a fight… as much as the models try to break you of it lol.

There is explicit scenes of rape and topics along those lines, less torture scenes that 2016 Berserk though. Still, if a person doe not want to see these topics, avoid watching since it has not changed and will probably become more prominent and dark as the show progresses.

Characters (main) – 3.5/5
Characters (sub) – 3/5
Enjoyment – 4/5
Visuals – 3.5/5
Music – 3.5/5
Story – 3/5