Charles, the apostle from the PlayStation 2 game

The second Berserk video game was released for the PlayStation 2 on October 7th, 2004, exclusively in Japan. It had some pretty enjoyable gameplay, but instead of a completely original story like for the Dreamcast game, it took place between volumes 22 and 27 with a story that was very liberally reworked to accomodate the video game medium.

Charles' story

While he didn't create an entirely new setting for the game, Miura did contribute an original story that runs parallel to the rest. It features Charles, a boy apostle whose power is to create illusions. He was holing down in some dilapidated mansion in the middle of nowhere, but because Guts and Casca disturbed him, he ends up following them until he and Guts eventually face off while in the Qliphoth.

Miura commented at the time that it wasn't meant to be part of the canon, but just a fun "what if" scenario that explores Guts' fears and insecurities towards his former comrades. Concretely, that means you get to fight against your deceased friends as they blame you for going against Griffith and say they were happy to be sacrificed. It even involves an illusion of a sane pre-Eclipse Casca, and culminates with Guts fighting Griffith himself on the Hill of Swords.

Eventually Charles gets cornered, and once confronted with the fact his sister is dead (whose shadow always lurks behind him), he transforms into a giant butterfly for a final fight. Then you move on and fight Slan (because you're in the Qliphoth, remember). To be honest the way it all goes down in the game feels a little clunky and repetitive to me, but if you squint you can easily make out Miura's original idea for it, and it's pretty neat.

Some unique artwork from Miura

Anyway, the point of this post is that Miura drew a shikishi of Charles that I'm showing you here, but unfortunately I've only got a tiny picture of it from the game's long defunct website. He also painted a portray of Charles and his family that appears in their mansion, which I'm adding some pictures of as well. Unfortunately that's the best look at it you can get, screenshotted from the video cutscenes. The image also exists among the game's textures (see above), but its resolution is unfortunately quite small. Those were the technical limitations of the time (the PS2's native output resolution was 480i).

Maybe it'll be included in a future artbook at some point down the line. One can dream. Anyway, while I'm at it, I'm also joining a picture of Charles' apostle form and one of his beherit (with a "pale blue" color!) at the top of the article.

P.S. "Charles" is pronounced the French way, シャルル (SHARURU), with a soft SH sound at the beginning and without the S at the end. Bet you're glad to know that!