While passable as a gory, fun ride, I had really high expectations for this, owing to it being heralded as the best manga ever written by so many people. So far, at hundreds of pages in, we know next to knowing about the world. It’s a standard dark fantasy affair, underscoring violence to women as various drives for the male cast, and a literalization of the worst in humanity manifesting as demons and the occult. At the end, there’s one chapter on Guts’ backstory - finally - and otherwise its little more than population to one fight after another where there is no real stakes, since it is not believable that Guts would ever lose. Or even come close to doing so.

The artwork is quite basic, for my taste. The pseudo gothic Victorian setting flavour is never explained in the slightest, but it’s relatively interesting for character design. I’m sure it’s important, in terms of its influence in the medium, but that’s an importance placed as a macro perspective and not something I care about when consuming anything, even “classics”. I want a story that’s compelling and interesting, not just to see what was first (and therefore probably worse than things that iterate on it).