Berserk and the Band of the Hawk takes the Golden Age Arc and the Hawk of the Millennium Empire Arc and runs them through the Dynasty Warriors machine. Omega Force developed it. Koei Tecmo published it. It came to PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita in Japan on October 27, 2016, and reached Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita worldwide in February 2017.
That is the shape of the thing. A manga about a man with a sword too heavy for any man, built on a genre about cutting through hundreds of enemies at once. The pitch writes itself.
The result does not. Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is a collaboration that never decides which half should lead, and the score reflects it: 6.7 out of 10.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Cutting Through Hundreds of Enemies
The Warriors series is built on a simple pleasure. You stand in a field. Enemies come. You swing, and the field empties. Berserk supplies the weapon for that pleasure better than almost any license could. Guts swings a sword the size of a man, and the game lets you use it.
The source material describes the fusion plainly. The action of cutting through hundreds of enemies is fundamental to the Warriors series, and here it is joined to the dark and gruesome atmosphere of the world of Berserk. That union makes acts possible that the series had not shown before: cutting enemies in half with the giant blade, and using Slash and Smash actions to break them or send them flying.
That is the best argument for the game, and it is a real one. The sword has weight in a way that a spear or a fan does not. When a swing sends a row of bodies into the air, the game is doing exactly what it promised.
The Golden Age Arc, Then a Jump
Berserk and the Band of the Hawk follows parts of Kentaro Miura’s manga. It starts at the chronological beginning, with the Golden Age Arc, and ends in the Hawk of the Millennium Empire Arc.
It does not follow the whole thing. The Guardians of Desire arc, which runs across volumes 1 through 3 and sits chronologically after the Golden Age Arc, is skipped. So is the Lost Children arc, the immediate follow-up to Guardians of Desire.
Those are not small omissions. They are the parts of the story where the manga’s horror stops being atmosphere and starts being argument. The game keeps the dark setting and drops the material that gives the darkness a point.
What remains is a march through the arcs that made Berserk famous, told in the order the game prefers rather than the order the page demands. A reader of the manga will notice the seams. A newcomer will not know what is missing, which is worse.
The Warriors Engine Fits, and Then It Doesn’t
Omega Force knows how to build these games. The studio has done it for years, and the systems here run. You pick a character. You enter a battlefield. You cut.
The problem is that Berserk is not a story about a battlefield. It is a story about a small number of people and what they do to each other. The Warriors engine is built for scale, and scale is the one thing Berserk has never needed.
So the game gives you hundreds of enemies to cut, and the hundreds of enemies mean nothing. They are not characters. They are not threats. They are a number that goes up. The manga’s violence lands because it costs something. Here it is a chore you perform to reach the next cutscene.
The atmosphere is right. The world is dark and gruesome, as promised. But atmosphere without consequence is decoration.
Guts and the Band of the Hawk
The game’s cast comes from the manga. Guts carries the giant sword. The Band of the Hawk gives the game its title and its first half, the Golden Age Arc.
Those characters are the reason anyone picks this up. The story they belong to is one of the most respected runs in manga, and Kentaro Miura’s work is the foundation the whole collaboration rests on.
The game treats that foundation as a set of stages. It moves you from the Golden Age Arc to the Hawk of the Millennium Empire Arc and asks you to fight through the space between. The characters arrive. The weight does not always follow.
That is the central failure. The game has the right names in the right places and still cannot make you feel the cost of what happens to them.
One Player, One Screen, One Perspective
Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is single player. It is played from a third-person perspective. There is no co-op, no versus, no mode where another person shares the field.
That is a choice, and it is defensible for a story-driven license. But it also removes the one thing that makes a Warriors game last past its campaign. These games are built to be played with someone else, or against someone else, and the grind is easier to bear when it is shared.
Here you grind alone. The campaign runs its arcs, and when it ends, the field is still there and there is no one to stand in it with you.
The Platforms and the Two Releases
The release came in two waves. Japan got the game on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita on October 27, 2016. The worldwide release followed in February 2017 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita.
The PlayStation 3 version stayed in Japan. The PC version did not exist there at launch. Anyone trying to place this game in the history of the license has to hold two release maps in their head at once.
That split matters less now than it did then. What matters is that the game arrived on four platforms across two years and never became the definitive version of anything. It is a licensed Warriors game, and it plays like one on every system it touched.
What the Score Says
The published critical score is 6.7 out of 10, drawn from an aggregate of 14 outlets. That number is the verdict, and it is the right one.
Here is what the 6.7 is actually measuring, in order of how much it matters:
- The giant sword. Cutting enemies in half with a man-sized blade is the single best thing the game does, and it is the reason to play at all.
- The atmosphere. The dark and gruesome world of Berserk survives the translation, even when the story around it does not.
- The skipped arcs. Guardians of Desire and Lost Children are gone, and their absence hollows out the middle of the story.
- The empty hundreds. The Warriors engine delivers crowds, and crowds are not the same thing as stakes.
- The single-player limit. No co-op means the grind has no company.
- The two release maps. A Japan-only PlayStation 3 version and a worldwide PC version that arrived months later.
The sword ranks first. Everything else is the reason the sword is not enough.
A License That Deserved a Sharper Game
Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is not a bad game. It is a game that got the hardest part right and the easiest part wrong.
The hardest part is the feel of the weapon. Omega Force built a sword that lands, and the Slash and Smash actions give it range and variety. When the game works, it works because a man with an oversized blade is doing exactly what the box promised.
The easiest part is the story, and that is where it fails. The manga is right there. The arcs are mapped. The characters are named. And the game still treats the whole thing as a corridor between fights, skipping the two arcs that would have given the corridor a reason to exist.
The verdict is 6.7 out of 10. That is a score for a game with one great idea and no plan for the second hour. Play it for the sword. Do not play it for Berserk.
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