Were never going to get a worthy Beserk adaptation. This is something that fans of the manga have just come to accept after God knows how many years of waiting. The 90s anime really wasnt all that bad but it was a slideshow even for time period and the Golden Age films were an unsettling mix of decent hand drawn art and horrid CG not to mention they just retold the same story that weve seen adapted twice now. The Golden Age arc is effectively a prequel to the rest of the Berserk franchise so have twenty years where nothing but that was adapted is incredibly frustrating especially with a series that has as strong and beautiful a piece of source material as Berserk does. Berserk 2016 takes the terrible CG from the Golden Age movies and makes it the main focus. There are smatterings of hand drawn art mixed in but never enough to offset the CG and just enough to remind you what this new series could have been. Were finally pushing past the Golden Age arc into the core Berserk story but the studio took a massive liberty with the source material and condensed about 400 panels into just five minutes of animation to accelerate the story to where Guts first encounters Farnes and her group of knights. This is the Black Swordsman arc which serves to introduce us to the broken and desperate postEclipse Guts and like I said above is cut to about 5 of its original content. From this point more large changes from the source come at a rapid pace. The entirety of the Lost Children arc one of the most emotionally powerful arcs from the manga is completely cut with the story accelerating to Guts being captured at Farnes camp. There is also an anime original but Miura directed episode that fills that gap between the camp and the beginning of the Conviction arc that is decent and introduces us to just how damaged Farnes really is but is still tragically low quality compared to the source. Its at this littlelessthanhalfway point that the adaptation really starts to step it up and make you mad at what youre given. The Conviction arc is more or less extremely well adapted as in true to the source in its entirety its just adapted into complete garbage. Aesthetically Berserk 2016 is about as bottom of the barrel as it gets for the CG portions. CG movement is jerky and unnatural models pop jarringly out of the average backgrounds and the texturing is incredibly lowfidelity. They try to emulate Miuras hashingbased shading by slapping a halfassed version of the effect on top of the 3D models and it does nothing but look incredibly stupid. The small amount of 2D hand drawn art is actually decent but nowhere near the quality that Berserk deserves. The sound design is also particularly terrible which is a shame because the VA and music are both actually pretty alright. Everything about Berserk 2016 is just a massive letdown and is even moreso considering the studio seems to really wants to adapt the source into animation faithfully outside the strangely accelerated start but obviously does not have the budget or talent to do so. Im not sure what has to be done for Berserk to get the high quality anime adaptation that it deserves but Im convinced that it must be fucking impossible. Go read the manga dont waste your time with this.