General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Berserk: The Golden Age Arc III—The Advent

Berserk: The Golden Age Arc III—The Advent (ベルセルク黄金時代篇III 降臨, Berserk: Ōgon Jidai-hen III: Kōrin; also translated as Descent) is a 2013 Japanese animated fantasy film directed by Toshiyuki Kubooka and produced by Studio 4°C. It is the third and final part of a theatrical trilogy adapting the "Golden Age" arc of Kentaro Miura's dark-fantasy manga Berserk, serialized since 1989, and it culminates in the arc's catastrophic climax, the Eclipse (蝕).¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Japanese release	February 1, 2013, distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures Japan¹
Runtime	107 minutes per JFDB and Movie Natalie; 113 minutes per Eiga.com, Filmarks, and Studio 4°C¹^•²^•³
Rating	Initially classified R18+ (under 18 barred); released theatrically as R15+ after edits, with some theaters showing the R18+ version²
Principal staff	Director Toshiyuki Kubooka; screenplay Ichiro Okouchi; character design and chief animation direction Naoyuki Onda; music Shiro Sagisu; theme song Susumu Hirasawa¹
Main cast	Hiroaki Iwanaga as Guts, Takahiro Sakurai as Griffith, Toa Yukinari as Casca¹
Trilogy scale	The three films total 288 minutes and 4,036 cuts; Arc I runs 82 minutes, Arc II 93 minutes, Arc III 113 minutes³
Source manga	Serialized since 1989; over 33 million copies in circulation worldwide²

Spoilers

Story

The film picks up after the Band of the Hawk has been expelled from Midland as traitors. Guts, having grown stronger through a year of training since leaving the band, rejoins Casca and the Hawk's remaining members as they set out for the Tower of Rebirth in the Midland capital of Wyndham, where Griffith is imprisoned on charges of treason.²^•⁴

The rescue succeeds, but the Griffith the rescuers find is unrecognizable: his tendons in both hands and feet have been cut and his tongue removed, leaving him no means of pursuing the dream that once drove him.² In his despair, the lost crimson Behelit, the "Egg of the Supreme Ruler," returns to him, and the Eclipse, an event said to occur once every 216 years, begins.² In the Eclipse, Griffith sacrifices the Band of the Hawk and is reborn as a demon; the film depicts the sexual violence he commits against Casca before Guts, a sequence that scholarly discussion of the trilogy has treated as a deliberate staging of the villain's transformed, perverted desire against the hero's consensual relationship with Casca.⁵ The Advent also shows, for the first time in animation, how Guts and Casca escape the Eclipse, setting up Guts's revenge quest.⁶

Production

The trilogy was a project to bring Miura's manga, long considered difficult to film, to the screen. Studio 4°C, known for Tekkonkinkreet, handled animation production, with Berserk Film Partners as the production company and Lucent Pictures Entertainment handling planning and production.¹^•⁷^•⁸ Beyond swordsmanship, armor, and weaponry, the production assembled supervisors on Western culture, including architecture, fashion, and food, to build its medieval-European-based fantasy world.³

The film combines 3D CG with 2D hand-drawn animation in a hybrid technique that director Kubooka cited as one of the production's points of interest.⁹ Susumu Hirasawa, an artist admired by Miura, composed the main theme song ("Aria"), while Shiro Sagisu, known for the Neon Genesis Evangelion scores, wrote the music; Kawabata Kaname (川畑要) performed the ending theme.³^•¹⁰^•²

Censorship and rating

The film's faithful, hard-edged depictions led Japan's film classification body (Eirin) to assign an R18+ rating, barring viewers under 18. After modifications, the film was cleared for theatrical release as R15+, and some theaters also screened the unmodified R18+ version.²

Reception and afterlife

Contemporary reception noted the mismatch between the flatter, sometimes stiff CG figures and the more fluidly drawn 2D principals, an effect some viewers found distracting; the film is often described as sitting at a transitional moment when anime studios were working out how to integrate 3D into a 2D house style.¹¹ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 93% Tomatometer score, though from fewer than 50 ratings.⁴ Retrospective commentary has been kinder: after the poorly received 2016 Berserk television series, Studio 4°C's trilogy came to be viewed more favorably, and The Advent in particular is often held to be the strongest of the three films.¹¹

Viz Media licensed the trilogy internationally, releasing it on home video in North America; the film later reached streaming, with a listed streaming release of September 1, 2017.¹²^•⁴ In 2022, for the trilogy's tenth anniversary, the three films were recut into a 13-episode television series, Berserk: The Golden Age Arc - Memorial Edition, which added scenes absent from the theatrical versions.¹³ The Japan Media Arts Festival selected The Advent among the Jury Selections of its 17th Animation Division.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026