The next Dynasty Warriors spin-off is based on dark fantasy manga Berserk

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The series that inspired Dragon's Dogma and Dark Souls is getting its own hack-and-slash musou.

Koei Tecmo’s ‘Musou’ hack-and-slash series has gone in some unexpected and weird directions in the past few years with Gundam, Zelda and Dragon Quest spin-offs, which have been a great change from the annual Dynasty Warriors games they were pumping out recently. Their next new series to adapt into the 'killing tons of AI dudes' formula is just as unexpected, but such a great fit I almost can’t believe it’s happening: Berserk, a long-running dark fantasy manga and anime series. Koei Tecmo showed the new game off with an E3 teaser trailer, which you can watch above.

Berserk is really a no-brainer franchise for a Warriors game, because its hero Guts has spent the past 27 years the manga’s been running killing a lot of dudes with a very large sword. The series has only gotten a couple game adaptations over the years for the Dreamcast and PS2, but its influence has actually reached far beyond that. Capcom’s action RPG Dragon’s Dogma is heavily based on Berserk, to the extent that it had Berserk-themed DLC on consoles and a default character creator model based on Guts. Dark Souls’ director has also cited Berserk as an inspiration.

The Berserk musou teaser doesn’t tell us much, but it does tell us that the game will be out in 2016 for consoles and PC. And it’s probably going to be very bloody.

Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).