Berserk and the Band of the Hawk Clang.

Berserk and the Band of the Hawk from my point of view is one of the best sleeves and reminds me of that dark age in which Electronic Arts was dedicated to adapt The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. It is an adaptation of the work of Kentaro Miura to the extent that the events are similar to the manga, all the characters have the same name and the same appearance as the source and are repeated some of the most famous images and scenes of this epic interminable, but his interpretation of Berserk is a superficial one. As musou it is, believes that in the core of this manga there is not an idea about the destination, the human condition, the identity or a study of one of the most interesting characters that manganime has given, but wafers, swords, blood, gore The clock always gives the time of the cakes and, with a bow of his weapon, that tool too big and heavy for someone to call it "sword", Guts can burst dozens of enemies. In the manga, that moment when he kills a hundred men marks the culmination of his career and forges his legend, but in this game if the count drops one thousand corpses per battle it is probably because you are doing something wrong.

I find myself thinking about how well maps fit when making an analogy: they are empty scenarios of substance but full of enemies that come en masse not to kill you, but to die. The game prints a false sense of the whole, like making us believe that we are a small part of something bigger and that we have to be attentive to all fronts, but we are here to kill very hard and a lot, and that is all that is done. beginning to end Move forward, kill people, unlock the next route, kill, advance. It's a summary of practically any action game, but Berserk and the Band of the Hawk applies it with the simplicity of a title two generations ago and such a lack of tact that its artifice becomes clear from the beginning: this is not so much a adaptation or a representation of the manga as a summary interrupted occasionally by scenes of multitudinous action. Rather the other way around.

To Caesar what is of Caesar: those massacres satisfy. They satisfy not by depth or challenge, nor because the different types of enemies are interesting or force to rethink the approach of the battle. No, they do not satisfy because of their intelligence or exquisite design or because, when I make my way through that army and emerge victorious against all odds, I feel good. Satisfy by the figures, because Guts gives a saber or Schierke casts a spell and the corpse counter adds another twenty to the list, because the frenzy bar reaches the limit, press a button and hit even stronger, with special effects and noises even higher, because being surrounded by hundreds of enemies, launching your final attack and seeing how all those idiots are now corpses takes out a basic part of me that does not ask for better but more. More death, more people, more numbers. It's eating from a bag of potatoes because they're there and they do not taste bad; They serve and satisfy you, and you have nothing better to do with your life. You feel good because, over time, you forget that the Berserk armor poses a danger to the physical and mental health of Guts and that every time he uses it is because there is no other remedy and chooses to risk losing his head to save the little that It fits. The Berserk armor is the shortcut to kill even more and faster, with hardly any damage, like putting tricks and going crazy. It is something that suits you.

But outside of that, Berserk and the Band of the Hawk does a disservice to the medium and its source. That parallelism with the old Electronic Arts does not come from being an adaptation, that of those there are good ones, but the definition that has this game of "cinematic" is, literally, to put pieces of Berserk: The Golden Age. that arc ends and the game runs out of films to go to, the party ends and we return to static conversations and basic representations. Follow the script, but without spirit, and omit arcs, characters and moments to focus only on what matters, which is to answer a simple question: "When will they be silent these heavy so that I can get involved with the world ? " Guts wanted to escape from his life, to know nothing but wave his sword, but Berserk and the Band of the Hawk live happily within those confines.