Maybe if someone has no idea about anything in the manga....
I agree with shin that the anime was kinda slow and little heavy on dialog....i thought fights and the overall concept was cool...but at the time i wanted more fighting,gore,etc....
It wasnt until i read the manga that i could appreciate the anime....reading the blackswordman arc really opened your eyes to what guts was dealing with before you even meet griffith.
To me,the relationship build up in the anime made more sense....because miura was showing how deep griffth fucked over guts,caska and the BotH.
Guess what im trying to say is my 1st watch i didnt know how important guts and griffith's stories had to be fleshed out.
I never understood why they just didnt animate it from the start of the manga instead of skipping the 1st arc.
What first arc? They did use some of it, the Snake count is part of the "first" arc,aka the blackswordsman arc.
Then there's just the stuff with Slug count which can easily be placed afterwards.
But make no mistake, In the timeline the first arc is the Golden age arc, it's just Miura being fancy and having the story start with a flashback. I personally liked that they didn't properly introduce the God hand in the anime early on, unlike the manga during the fight against Slug count. They kept things pretty much secret, only hinting a little about the God hand which imo works.
You don't want to know everything from the start. Honestly it sounds more like nitpicking than anything else.
Also lol about the dialogues, considering that they're taken from the manga, word to word most of the time I find that funny. And I think most people don't understand what the Golden age is about. It IS mostly about the relationship between Guts, Griffith, Caska and the rest of the BoTH. It's not so much about the magic stuff, or the hints about the Eclipse. Even if you read the manga first, nothing can prepare you to the absolute mindfuck the Eclipse is, not even after you see all the stuff with Zodd and Wyald. You can guess that it's something unnatural, monstruous, but to actually see Griffith go ahead with it, and sacrifice all the BoTH, and see them die it's just too much. Nothing can prepare you for that.
I understood the relationship between Guts and Griffith without the first chapters of the blackswordsman arc, who btw doesn't explain it. You can only guess that Guts in hunted down by demonic forces, and he in turn is hunting them down, culminating with him meeting Femto again. But there's no given explanation at that point about why Guts hates the God hand. That's where the Golden age arc comes in.
The rest of the chapters with Slug count etc only establish how fucked up Guts character is, since he was pretty violent in the first chapters. And we get more of the lore explained, with demons, behelits and sacrifices getting showcased. It doesn't at all explain all of the relationship between Guts and Griffith, it slightly touches upon it but you can't comprehend it without the rest of the Golden age arc.
So in that regard the anime managed to do the manga justice, by fleshing out that relationship which is essential to understand Guts' actions when he becomes known as the blackswordsman.
What I do understand though is how it can be seen as misleading. Since in the manga there's a bunch of chapters that shows all the gore and horror associated with demons, it's easier to guess what kind of manga we're dealing with. The anime not so much, many people I've known who watched it really loved the medieval setting, and the fights etc, but they were rebuked by the dark fantasy/horror elements that came later on in the anime, with the eclipse. Maybe that's what you meant.
