Look at it this way.
If you completely remove the fight between Guts and Serpico, not a single thing in the storyline changes. If you remove the fight with the Troll nothing changes, if you remove the fight with that giant thing from volume 30 nothing changes, if you remove the water creature nothing changes, and so on and so forth.
In that sense, most of the stuff that has happened or is happening is expendable and doesn't advance or help the storyline at all.
There are degrees of course but if you removed, say, either of the first two figths between Guts and Griffith, or the fight against Zodd (arguably), or the fight against the 100 men, the story suddenly falls apart because the fights actually served a purpose, as opposed to just being a showcase for the Berserk Armor or how strong Guts is.
Of course, we have idiots like Arngrim that worry about the little details and are incapable of looking at the big picture but hey, you guys should keep trying!
PS: I asked Starnum to unlock the thread.
I felt it was locked out of a personal bias against it.
I could make a really long, detailed post about just how wrong you are, but you never read them anyway, so why bother? Anyway, I'll try to keep this brief, so maybe you can even follow it. First, there would be an effect on the story if any of those fights were removed. To take one example, if you remove the Guts vs. Serpico fight, you loose Serpico finally coming to terms with the fact that Guts will put Farnese in danger, his jealosy over Guts having a greater influence on her then he does, and his fear that Guts will one day kill her.
If you look back to the golden age, it's nice how you highlight all of the
most important fights for your comparison. How much would change if we removed, for example, the battle to take the castle Adon was guarding (not Dourderay, the little castle where they snuck across the river), or one of the other battles whose purpose was to build up the characters? Answer: not much by itself, but collectively those battles served to create, define, and develope our characters, and these battles are doing exactly the same thing. And any number of those battles seemed designed to "show how strong Guts is".
P.S. the fact that you don't even read all the arguments showing why you're wrong, really makes it seem as if you can't even defend your own position very well, and are basically just in a funk over having to wait so long for each chapter.
? Guts needs farnese like Griffith needed guts. im confusing myself on my own crazy theories 
