Short little game with goofy voice acting but better than people give it credit for, it's crazy how well it recreates the atmosphere of Berserk, i liked the story cause it feels just like an arc of the manga and i liked how the villain and his wife mirrored Guts and Casca.
The gameplay is alright, the sword feels pretty good but i feel like it should oneshot every base enemy for it to be really the Dragonslayer, the bouncing off walls can be annoying but positioning can prevent this and the charged and jump attacks aren't affected anyway, but really you're supposed to use the unarmed moveset or your other tools, my favorite of them is the damn arm cannon, it feels good like a cannon should.
Bonus points for using qtes in an inventing way cause succeding or failing a qte changes the part of the level you're gonna face.
The lives system is pretty annoying though, i used savestates ngl.

Surprisingly bad, i mean, i enjoyed some of it, but not only plays very janky and the level design is garbage, but the history, being written by miura and all, is a masive mediocrity, is more or less a combination of the lost children arc and some plot points from angels of desire from black swordsman, but with massive exposition dumps and very poor substance in actual history content, only great part when guts got in the town with the mandragora people, beacause it remembered me of the themes of escapism in lost children with the priest that said those people were happy being monsters.

Also, its me or the zodd fight feels like a prototypical dark souls fight? I mean, the fact that he can crush your ass very easily, you have items that regenerate most of your health and you need to carefully attack him in his openings to win... Really cool stuff is this design was intentional.

But yes, the game is bad, expected a decent repetitive hack n' slash like the ps2 game, but no matter how low your expectations for this game are, it really sucks.

It's the first Berserk game to be released, and honestly, despite being the only one to have an original story, it's bad.
The gameplay consists of "run to the end of the hallway, see if the door lets you finish the level. if you end up running into an open door with nothing happening, slaughter everything alive, then proceed again. fight a boss maybe. repeat until end credits". That is also paired with the combat where your huge sword hits every wall (which while is pretty obvious to why doesn't nake it a good design choice) until you fill your DT and it doesn't. The items also never felt like being of any use, you will only be healing yourself with elf powder to tank more hits, the rest were pretty much pointless.
The story itself felt like it's just one exposition dump paired with the devs going "oh, remember this thing from the manga? we have it here!". Because of this it never truly offers anything new and unique to the world, the whole conflict and themes are essentially Lost Children arc, minus the bug loli. Zodd appears out of nowhere just to remind everyone that he exists and to have one fight without bringing anything of value to the narrative, the behelit is pulled out of the ass at the last moment just to have yet another underwhelming boss fight. And the cover art girl is here to do nothing and gasp at the ongoing events.
The only good thing here is the soundtrack, and the fact that thanks to the fan retranslation I didn't need to sit through the horrible English dub.

Marginally better than the Musou kusoge we got on modern consoles. It's interesting how the story is canon to the manga because it really fits with the overall themes, Susumu Hirasawa composing for the game also made the atmosphere a lot better than it had any right to be.

It's weird how they made a devil trigger mechanic that makes the sword go through walls, which is the game's biggest impairment, it's like you're playing dark souls stuck with the heaviest load and constantly fighting on hallways. In a way it's realistic, fighting as a giant, heavy armoured guy with a large hunk of metal as a weapon would stop any combos as soon as he did a full swing against a wall, but realistic doesn't mean fun, and the fact that they build a mechanic that lets your sword be empowered and go through walls makes me think that they realised that this would be cumbersome, but didn't feel like redesigning the game around it. Would be good for you to press a button to release it since often times it activates against the last enemy and you're burning bar while just walking around.

At least it's 3 hours long so whatever inconveniences in the game won't bother you for long but whoever designed that level with the mandragora running sequences should get a carrot shoved so far up their ass that whoever takes it out and manages to listen to the painful screams of the game dev should consider him a real life mandragoran.

Protip: Hit Zodd until he dies.

I wish I could praise the care that’s been taken into replicating Gut’s moveset, from the way you have to consider the space you’re fighting in, lest your sword bounce off a wall, to the almost-juggling you can perform by sliding into enemies and then attacking, but it would all be disingenuous. Really, just mash “A,” heal as needed, hope that your rage mode triggers, and (if needed) use your mega buster. It sort of flattens the difficulty curve for combat once you realize that’s the strategy for the the game, but I almost want to say that’s the point: shirking most of your arsenal in favor of the most efficient (and brutal) approach, embodying Guts's single-minded ferocity in the process.

Or maybe the game is a repetitive mess of killing the same few enemies over and over, I legitimately don’t know.