What Berserk video games are there?
Three games in twenty-six years, and each one is a different answer to the same problem.
How do you let a player swing a sword taller than the man holding it? The Dreamcast game wrote an original story around the question. The PlayStation 2 game, never released outside Japan, adapted the manga directly. The third handed the whole war to the makers of Dynasty Warriors. Between them they cover the series’ full gaming life: there has never been a fourth.
THE THREE GAMES
Dreamcast · PlayStation 2 · Warriors
Sword of the Berserk: Guts’ Rage · Dreamcast · 1999
Yuke’s, published by ASCII in Japan in December 1999 and by Eidos in the West in 2000. In Japan it carries a manga title, Millennium Falcon Arc: Chapter of the Flowers of Oblivion, but the story is original, written to sit between volumes 22 and 23. Susumu Hirasawa, the anime’s composer, scored it.
Millennium Falcon: Seima Senki no Shō · PS2 · 2004
Yuke’s again, published by Sammy in Japan only, October 2004 (a Korean edition aside). A straight adaptation of the Millennium Falcon chapters, volumes 22 to 27, with the densest polygonal Miura art of its generation. It never received an official Western release, which is why it anchors so many import shelves.
Berserk and the Band of the Hawk · 2016
Omega Force and Koei Tecmo’s Warriors treatment, Berserk Musou in Japan: October 27, 2016 at home on PS3, PS4 and Vita, February 2017 in the West on PS4, Vita and PC. It retells the story from the Golden Age to the Millennium Falcon, cutting between game scenes and footage from the film trilogy and the 2016 series.
JAPAN AND THE WEST
Who got whatThe Dreamcast exception
The first game is the only Berserk title of its era built to travel: full Western release, English voice cast, and an original story that asked nothing of the manga’s unfinished arcs.
The one that stayed home
The PS2 game is the collector’s gap in the set. Sammy kept it in Japan, so every Western copy in circulation is an import, Japanese text and all.
The music thread
Hirasawa scored both Yuke’s games as he had the 1997 anime. His “Forces”, written as the anime’s preview theme, became the sound Western players met first on Dreamcast.