Disappointing. I thought after the last three amazing volumes, we‘d be at peak Berserk again, but seems like we aren’t. The couple of pages with Griffith were (of course) still great and the best thing about this, but we didn’t see much of it, as we did not see of Guts or his internal conflict or the Skeleton king or anything else that is interesting about this series.
Instead, we’re concentrating on the side characters again and it’s starting to fuck me up. I HATE Puck and I just want him to finally die, sorry not sorry. I took a look back at the first volume, and the difference is more than huge. Puck was an actual character in there, there was care put in his dialogue and how he was drawn, there was more to him than stupid unfunny tonally inconsistent fourth wall break jokes. The other elf is just as terrible. I haven’t seen a single scene yet they made somehow better and where I would have missed them but countless of scenes they absolutely destroyed, especially dramatic ones. 
I don’t care too much about the witch and the monkey kid either. None of these serve any purpose here instead of wasting time that could have been spend in developing the interesting parts of this series (OF WHICH THERE ARE SO MANY!!). Lady Farnese and her half brother are fine, not as interesting as weirdly many people pretend them to be, but I don’t mind them. 
The thing is, if this is a try to rebuild what the Band of the Hawk was, it failed. If there was another Eclipse right now and all these characters would die, I wouldn’t be sad, no, I‘d probably cheer - most of them were nothing but gimmicks anyway. 
I very, very much hope that the series is not going to stay like this. There are so many interesting things going on, how Griffith regains power, the conflict between him and Guts, the conflict between Guts and himself, the conflict between Guts and Cascar, the conflict between the Skeleton king and the God hand and the fate of Midland - but no, I have to read THIS.
Sigh.