Bastard!! Ankoku no Hakaishin

Bastard!! is, for the most part, so hilariously, inexcusably bad that it's actually good; essentially a parody on itself. Or rather, it depends entirely on your sense of humor!

Let's compile a brief checklist of the bad. We have:
* a cliche-ridden story;
* a nonsensical amount of injuries (and blood loss) casually sustained by characters;
* pathetic sound effects;
* character design that is both bad AND forgettable (wow!);
* ridiculous screenplay and over-the-top voice acting;
* vomit-inducing fan service and ecchi humor;
* overpowered fighters and magicians beating the crap out of each other with named trump-card techniques;
* the essence of MANLINESS furiously emanating from most of the male cast with not a single female around who wouldn't be in heat over this;
* ripping off the naming of characters/locations/abilities after rock/metal music bands after JoJo had already done it.

If you're easily entertained by any of the above, chances are you'll like it and perhaps even regard it as one of the most entertaining OVAs ever. It plays all of these tropes completely straight, not ashamed of itself in any measure, and this self-indulgent sincerity is what makes it so fun. Those with less-developed sense of humor will rather think otherwise. Really, if you fail to be amused by Bastard!!, you most likely won't enjoy it in any other way. It's still an outstanding piece of crap from any serious standpoint, and don't blame me for not warning you.

And in conclusion, just to prove how delightfully bad it is to those who still aren't convinced, here's my favorite quote from episode 2:

Yoko: What are you going to do?
(green slime starts pouring from walls)
Gara: That's right, it's slime. It will dissolve your clothes.

I dare you to come up with a better response. I double-dog-dare you, highbrow MAL readers.

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I love this anime because it was so bad that it was funny. It played on a lot of the usual cliches in a story and made fun of itself. I honestly thought that at some parts their lines were so obviously bad it was really funny. I also love how this anime points out that the hansom guy always wins. It kept me laughing. I'd recommend this for a laugh and something to watch on your off time since it's short.

Our story begins in a far future where the world has been through an apocalypse that spawned all sorts of strange and evil creatures, leaving human beings in a precarious position. Things have gone back to a feudal era where sorcery, sword fighting, and armor plating rule the day. Four warlords of chaos get together to break the seals that hold back a creature of ultimate darkness, and as the viewer knows, this can't be good. At the same time...Yoko is best friends with Rushe, a little boy who follows her everywhere. Little does she know that buried deep within Rushe is a secret weapon, the wizard known as Dark Schneider. When the warlords' plans come to the attention of the free world, there's a realization that Dark Schneider is the only hope of defeating the threat.

There's only one problem. Dark Schneider is a freak.

Nevertheless, when your kingdom is under fire from the most powerful magic known to man, you resurrect whomever you can. With Yoko's kiss, Rushe becomes the legendary Dark Schneider. Now he's not really happy about the arrangement, since he was essentially imprisoned for a very long time. Eventually, he figures, why not? He'd love to prove that he's still the most powerful being on Earth, and if that takes defeating some of his old comrades in arms, so be it. As long as he can get his groove on, he's happy...but is a rusty white-haired jerk of a warlock going to be able to handle the job?

Bastard! really is a fun show, at least through its first half. Things move quickly and the artwork is great in the first two episodes. The humor is fresh and invigorating, too. If nothing else, when things get a little tired past this point, that start keeps you going. Now the third episode shows a little bit of problems, primarily because the artistic style takes a big left turn. A couple of characters are hard to identify at first because of the changes! But that's something that can be dealt with.

However, the second half gets a little snoozeworthy. Here's where Dark Schneider takes on his foes in humongous battles. Now I'm all for great melees, myself, but these just get old quickly. There's just not enough excitement to them and no sense of real danger--if a hero cannot lose, then a half hour of violence is pretty worthless. Now there is a surprise at the end of the fifth episode that some might find shocking, but it is negated in the sixth episode. So, for the last 90 minutes, we get a little antsy, particularly because the humor and life starts to slowly drain out like the water in a tub where the drain cap doesn't quite fit. It's not terrible, but unfortunate.

There's also a very real problem in that much of the show's humor is based around something that didn't get completely translated. In the original version, the various kingdoms, spells, etc. were all named after different 80s metal and hair bands. Because of copyright issues, a lot of these jokes didn't make it into the official US release. My best recommendation is to watch with the Japanese language track where at least the names are pronounced correctly and you can get in on the jokes. I mean, the funniest parts of the show are things like the "Stryper defense"!

So what's my position on this show? If you like violent, humorous fantasy shows with long battle sequences, this is something to run out and get as soon as possible. If your tastes are a bit more refined, then this is a questionable pick. I wish that the show had stayed on the funny, likable, yet action-packed track it set for itself in the beginning. It's not bad, but it starts off better than it finishes.

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Bastard!!, or Basutādo!! Ankoku no Hakaishin, has been localized as either ‘Bastard: Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy’ or ‘Bastard: ‘The Destructive God of Darkness.’ Despite Dark Schneider being the definitive example of a hyper-masculinized, power fantasy—the series is a satirical deconstruction of this archetypal, over-powered, fantasy character. *Parodical in its nature (similar, in the display of overt masculinity, to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure), Bastard!! is a balls-out, seinen epic that is unabashed about gratuitous violence and the blatant sexualization of its characters.
*In the redrawn volumes of the Bastard!! manga, Kazushi Hagiwara adds Haruhi Suzumiya and Mikura Asahina from Suzumiya Haruhi no Yūutsu, as well as Rin Tōsaka and Rider from Fate/stay night, to Dark Schneider’s harem.

—Story/Characters

The story begins when the Kingdom of Metallicana is attacked by the Four Lords of Havoc; the high priest of the kingdom then asks his daughter, Tia Nōto Yōko, to give her *first kiss to a younger boy, Luche Renren, because he is the vessel for an indomitable being, known as Dark Schneider.
*The summoning of Dark Schneider requires a kiss from a virgin.

The rest of story in the OVA is comprised of (1) enemies of the Kingdom of Metallicana or (2) enemies that have a bone to pick with Dark Schneider. The relationship between *Darche and Yōko is slapstick, starting out with him creeping on her and her acting like a defiant prude to him—the power dynamic between the two of them is similar to Inuyasha and Kagome Higurashi from Sengoku Otogizōshi Inuyasha, Darche and Inuyasha could easily over-power their female counterparts but, instead, are constantly belittled by them. The other heroines starkly contrast Yōko’s defiance because characters, such as Princess Sheila and Arshes Nei, are completely infatuated with the Dionysian being named Dark Schneider. Many of the character development in the show is built around Darche being an unstoppable force of nature.
*Darche is Dark Schneider’s nickname.

Characters, like Ninja Master Gara, are typically seen as anti-heroes, but not as insufferable as the supposed hero, Dark Schneider—given his promiscuity and tendency to cause collateral damage. Unlike Kei and Yuri’s massive amounts of debt in Dirty Pair, the most Dark Schneider has to pay back is a *¥500 coin that he promises to return to Yōko in OVA 5–6.
*Bastard!! has a medieval, fantasy setting but takes place in a futuristic, post-apocalypse world, like Fist of the North Star, so there are remnants of modern-day society that exist within their universe.

To add to the absurdity of the series, Bastard!! has a couple of scenes in the OVA, where the characters COMPLETELY break the fourth wall to clarify to the viewers that they know they are characters; it’s like watching a stage play. A note-worthy example of this is in OVA 5, when Gara is fighting a cyclops and states that he can’t just kill an enemy off-screen, then looking at the camera, says, ‘Watch this!’ Dark Schneider has a meta monologue in OVA 4, when he rants, ‘*Diamon[d], you bloodless fool, you forgot the most important rule of combat! You’re the ugly, macho bad guy! Everyone knows that the macho bad guy can’t win, especially when he’s fighting the exceptionally handsome and popular main character!’
*The English script changed the names to avoid a lawsuit from the musicians, but the villain mentioned above is named King Diamond—named after the Danish metal singer.

The last episode of the OVA stops the story abruptly, the anime was originally intended to have eight episodes but was reduced to six. Originally, it was supposed to finish up the arc with a battle between Dark Schneider and Kall-Su, but instead concludes with Dark Schneider defeating Abigail.

—Technical

The animation and the character designs look really clean, for an OVA from the ‘90s. The director, Katsuhito Akiyama, is famous for directing Bubblegum Crisis, Gall Force, El-Hazard, and Macross: Do You Remember Love? With that résumé, it’s no surprise that the Bastard!! OVA is beautiful.

With the visuals, I was particularly stricken by the realism in the facial expressions. There would be an intense action scenes and then the camera would zoom in on the face, and woah, the scene was instantly more immersive than before! The visceral scenes, such as Gara impaling himself through the stomach or Dark Schneider ripping his own heart out, were framed impeccably as well.

I was impressed with the -Pioneer- English dub for Bastard!! Steve Blum as Gara, Daran Norris as Dark Schneider, Wendee Lee as Tia Nōto Yōko, and Mary Elizabeth Glynn as Arches Nei were particularly pleasing performances. It sounded as though they enjoyed playing their respective roles; I’m sure, for a voice actor, the character of Dark Schneider would be a blast! Arches Nei’s Japanese voice was good, too; her seiyū, Rei Sakuma, was Peorth from Aa! Megami-sama!
NOTE: Gara’s seiyū, Tesshō Genda, is famous for voicing characters, such as: Optimus Prime in Transformers, Rei from Urusei Yatsura, Duke Tōgō from Golgo 13, Raou from Fist of the North Star, and many more!

—Theory

When I first began to look into Bastard!!—there were glaring similarities between it and Berserk. Initially, I thought that *Kentarō Miura must have grifted a lot from Bastard!!, but upon deeper inspection, I have a theory that Kentarō Miura might be one of Kazushi Hagiwara’s pseudonyms. Here are a few comparisons with their bodies of work, as well as facts about their personal lives:
*There have already been a lot of parallels between Berserk and Guin Saga, its predecessor, so it wouldn’t have shocked me.

-Similarities Between the Artists-

• Both titular series began in 1988: Berserk: Prototype and Bastard!!

• Both series have have seven word titles that begin with a ‘B,’ as well as alarmingly similar stories, designs, and characters.

• Both have similar beginnings: Both began as high school students and didn’t progress into a collegiate program, although Hagiwara is noted to have graduated from *Tokyo Designer Gakuen College.
*Essentially, a technical program.

• Both Berserk and Bastard have had periods of an extended hiatus throughout their publication.

• The only major differentiation are their names and birth dates: Kentarō Miura was born on July, 11th (1966) and Kazushi Hagiwara was born on April 4th (1963). Three years apart. If you add up the numbers in their birth dates, you get Kentarō Miura (93) and Kazushi Hagiwara (90), which is suspiciously three digits apart despite their birthdays being on different months and days. I think that Kentarō Miura is a cleverly created noms de guerre, used to differentiate Hagiwara from his past with schlock comedy and hentai.

-Similarities with Stories and Characters-

Warning: There will be spoilers for Berserk in the segment! You have been warned!

• Berserk’s Guts and Casca/Bastard!!’s Gara and Arches Nei: Gara and Guts look exactly alike, and Arches Nei looks like a long-haired, elf version of Casca. Much like how Griffith and Casca had a close relationship, prior to meeting Guts—Dark Schneider and Arches Nei had a close relationship before meeting Gara. Dark Schneider even adopts Arches, like Griffith did, after he rescued Casca, who was sold into slavery. Arches Nei sees Darche as her savior because she was ostracized from the elf tribe that she was staying with, just like Casca used to see Griffith as her savior. In OVA 6, Gara disembowels himself to save Arches Nei… doesn’t that sound similar to Guts cutting off his arm to save Casca, at the end of the Golden Age arc?

• Guts’ Demon Armor/Dark Schneider’s Seven Jewels of Judas Priest: (1) In Bastard, Dark Schneider activates the Seven Jewels of Judas Priest to become stronger than the world’s Demon Kings but risks destroying his soul by using them, not to mention that it’s incredibly painful for him. (2) After realizing that he isn’t a match against Femto, Guts acquires the demon armor which grants him the strength of a demon but, in return, devours his body and destroys his conscience because of the demon spirit inside of the armor. Suspiciously similar.

• Foil Relationship Between Guts and Griffith in Berserk/Foil Relationship Between Gara and Dark Schneider in Bastard: In Bastard’s continuity, OVA 3 reveals that Gara has always worked incredibly hard to be strong but the over-powered Dark Schneider beats him easily, not just him, Darche leisurely takes out all of the kingdom’s enemies. Griffith and Dark Schneider both have long, silver hair and are very sexually promiscuous. At the end of OVA 3, Gara looks pained at how easily Darche defeated him and Yōko even pesters Darche into admitting that he could have ended the battle sooner. It was reminiscent the the many scenes in Berserk, where Guts feels inferior to Griffith. Another similarity, is that in the Bastard manga, Satan reveals to Dark Schneider that he is the anti-Christ and that he will lead demons and mankind in a war against God and his angels; compare to Griffith‘s plan for world domination, comprised of demons and humans.

Disclaimer: This is just a theory, there is no actual proof that Kazushi Hagiwara and Kentarō Miura are the same person but there’s enough of a similarity to justify speculation.

Overall, Bastard!! is well worth the watch: it’s gritty, has a heavy metal aesthetic, and throws a wrench into the tiresome, over-powered-male-protagonist stereotype, that is still valid today, in the isekai era of anime. Bastard!! shares many of the same plot devices as Berserk and Guin Saga but does not take itself seriously, at all. I give Bastard!! a 7/10 and a hard recommendation for anyone who’s looking for something out of the ordinary.

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