The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Berserk of Gluttony

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Fate Graphite has never tasted real power. Born with the magical skill Gluttony, he constantly hungers in a way that can't be satiated, and has been shunned and looked down upon his entire life. One day, while working as a gatekeeper for a noble family and fighting a trespassing thief, he discovers Gluttony's true power: when he kills someone, he devours their skills and feeds his gnawing hunger at last. In that grisly realization, Fate is awakened to his true potential.

Berserk of Gluttony is based on a light novel series of the same name by Ichika Isshiki and fame. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

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Richard Eisenbeis
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One of the things I like to see most in anime is taking a trope and playing it completely straight—and this is what Berserk of Gluttony's first episode is all about. All kinds of fantasy anime lazily use a video game-like magic and level-up system. If you kill monsters, you get experience points. You get experience points, you level up. You level up, your stats go up—and you get special skills.

The issue here is that the very idea is backward when you think about it. The idea of levels and stats was created as a way to mathematically quantify the powers of fantasy adventurers in a game system. That concept isn't supposed to exist within the fantasy world of the game—like the characters don't go around asking each other their level or what their charisma score is. If a fantasy world's magic system was based on your skills, level, and stats, then it could easily create a society like the one we see in Berserk of Gluttony.

For such an unnatural magic system to exist, it would have to be due to divine intervention. That would logically mean that whichever skills you received at birth were chosen by god—and a hint of your destined role in life. This idea leads to a very clear delineation between those who have good skills and those who don't. Those with the best skills become Holy Knights—with seemingly free reign over the entire population. Then come those with useful skills—either those suited for adventurers or a specific trade. Lastly, we get people like Fate who have “useless” skills—who are doomed to be abused until they die.

So what we have here is the story of a man who, by chance, finds that his useless skill is an overpowered one. Rather than being related to food, Gluttony is a skill that lets him steal the stats and skills of anyone (or anything) he kills. While he has every reason to use his newfound powers to get revenge on those who abused him, he instead wants to be like Roxy, the single noblewoman who uses her power to responsibly help the common man rather than abuse them. The question is, can he and Roxy both hold onto these ideals in a world so corrupt by its very nature? Well, we'll just have to tune in next week to find out.

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Rebecca Silverman
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“Holy Knights” is a misnomer in this series. In this first episode alone, we see three holy knight siblings abuse the hero physically and emotionally, and then, at the end, a villain kidnaps a little girl to be a “plaything” for that same order of knights. Maybe they once were above reproach, but by the time poor Fate Graphite gets his head into the cobblestones on the regular, they've fallen very much. That's probably meant to indicate the state of the story's world, and while it isn't subtle, it does do the trick. Fate may be nothing of a character thus far, but when you choose between “nothing” or “evil,” I know which one I will pick. Of course, there's also the one holy knight who lives up to the name, Roxy Hart, thanks to whom the soundtrack to Chicago is now running on a loop in my head. Roxy is the only person who's kind to Fate and presumably one of the harem of lovelies he will accrue if the opening theme is to be believed. Throw in a named, talking sword, and you round out the unsurprising cast for this venture's introductory episode.

“Unsurprising” is perhaps the best way to describe Berserk of Gluttony, although that doesn't mean it isn't good. Fate's thus far luckless existence is due to his unusual skill, something that (as we all know) people are born with. Fate's skill is “gluttony,” and as far as he knows, it just means that he's always hungry. Upon killing his first bad guy, however, he suddenly gets a message that his skill has activated, and the next thing he knows, he's got a few new skills on his inevitable stat screen. It turns out that “gluttony” isn't about filling his belly but consuming the skills of those he kills. He's a glutton for magic and power; the food is probably just that the Vlerick siblings don't pay him enough to eat. It's a decent bit of misdirection, and the fact that Fate doesn't immediately go on a murdering spree to become powerful would seem to belie the whole deadly sins naming scheme that's waiting in the wings; his new talking sword, after all, is named Greed. It's all very rote, but it's executed with just enough aplomb to make it at least a little bit interesting.

Mostly, that comes down to Fate himself. His first instinct is to be good and kind, possibly due to Roxy's influence, but mostly, he's just out there trying to make enough money to survive. His first thought when he gets paid is that he can finally eat some meat for the first time in years, so if he manages not to be corrupted by his power or the thrill of getting revenge on the Xellos-lookalike named Rafale, he could be easy to root for. It doesn't look like much artistically and still has many of the stale tripes of RPG-style fantasies we've seen too much, but I think this may turn out to be better than it seems on the surface.

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Nicholas Dupree
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You know, it just doesn't feel like preview guide until we get at least one ugly, mediocre fantasy series based around stats and skills. Sure, Ragna Crimson wasn't exactly inspired, but through its double-length premiere, there was never so much as a single pixel of a status screen. Thankfully(?), Berserk of Gluttony is here to be the lazy, poorly animated pablum we need to fill out the seasonal charts.

Seriously, there's nothing here you haven't seen before. While it's not an isekai series, Fate Graphite (good lord, that name) has just as much personality and identity as your average world-hopping melvin. Just because he doesn't know what a video game is doesn't mean his universe doesn't still function like one, building its entire system around quantifiable stats and skills like every other one of these goddamn things. The entire premiere is built around showing how miserable his life is as a poor have-not with no cool RPG skills until it turns out he – of course – has a super special skill that will allow him to become the MOST powerful in no time. He has a kind and powerful (but not TOO powerful) girl who's nice to him and a trio of sociopathic bullies who abuse him at his lowest and are secretly child-torturing villains who presumably lick knives in their spare time. It's as amateur and hacky as you can get.

It also looks pretty bad. Character designs are just busy enough to be challenging to animate with any fluidity, yet are as uninspired as anything you'll see in this genre. The animation is choppy and stiff, and I'm sure they reuse a few cuts from the two goblin attacks. The animators are probably grateful that the character who talks with Fate the most is an inanimate sword, so they don't have to add in lip flaps. This is about as mediocre as a TV production can be without active melting, and if that's what our first episode looks like, there's no real hope for the rest of the season. Not that anyone needs to sit through more of this anyway – if you've seen any of the other countless “cheat skill” shows in this niche, you could easily predict everything that happens from here. Save yourself the time and check out The Eminence in Shadow instead.

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James Beckett
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Berserk of Gluttony isn't an isekai anime since it doesn't involve any world hopping or reincarnation for its main character. However, the show still bears all the exhausting hallmarks that big down many of these cheap adaptations of modern fantasy light novels. We've got an incomprehensibly bland main character who could never hope to live up to the absurdity of his name (“Fate Graphite,” because why the hell not?); the fantasy setting of the story is indistinguishable from the thousands of generic, old-fashioned RPG worlds we've seen over the years; and, of course, the world operates on the literal video-game logic of stat menus, system voice-overs, and named skills that all would all fit comfortably in the world's most anonymous open-source role-playing rulebook. It also looks pretty bad most of the time, so it can't even get by on its looks.

What's worse is that I can name at least one tiny but significant tweak the story could have made to give it some semblance of personality. Based on what I learned during the Trailer Watch Party and the show title, I assumed that our boy Fate had to eat his foes to gain their powers when it turns out that all he has to do is kill them with his magic-talking sword. Lame, lame, lame. The show even still tries to put the burden of secrecy on Fate because his skill defies “divine law” for some reason, but imagine if Berserk of Gluttony had the stones to give its protagonist an interesting conflict to struggle through, instead of going through the same old power fantasy motions. If Fate's only means of becoming strong and respected in the world were to resort to acts that the people around him would understandably find repulsive, that would at least give the plot something to go on, especially if Fate eventually had to decide about taking on human foes.

Alas, there doesn't seem to be an ounce of courage or originality anywhere to be found in this one. Despite the edgy font of its stupid video-game stat menus and the fractionally “darker” aesthetic of the setting, Berserk of Gluttony makes an utterly imperceptible first impression. It's more disposable junk food made to keep the perpetual motion machine of the industry churning along, and I would bet money on it being entirely forgotten long before the fall season ends.