The show (and I assume the manga as well) understands its audience perfectly. Teenage boys who want a powerful bad ass lead, with a harem of indistinguishable women. Dark Schneider is left blank enough so that the teens can project onto him and have a good time. He's a very effective Mary Sue with his endless dark magic powers that make him the most arbitrarily powerful sorcerer in a world where the magic system amounts to little more than laser blasts with a metal reference used as their invocation.
So it's bland and a bit repetitive, but what aspects of the show made it that way?
Story:
The world ended four hundred years ago, magical kingdoms sprung up and an evil cabal of wizards intend to conquer the world using the power that ended the old world. Insert Dark Schneider, our reluctant hero, have him fight the lieutenants and generals of this dark cabal one after the other, and voila you have the entire story of Bastard. There are few surprises along the way, and little foreshadowing of future events. This story format is very indicative of Bastard's origins as a weekly series, with little time in the original production being allocated to filling out the story. While this can make an interesting read week to week, when stories like this are adapted to other mediums later, the issues in their story structure become readily apparent when there isn't a week gap between chapters. Each episode feels identical to the last, and as a result characters start to blend together and their conflicts lose impact. By episode three or so the formula has been established, and just repeats ad nausea, becoming progressively more dull.
Characters:
Dark Schneider: A typical shonen jump edgy boy mary sue. He's an effective audience surrogate with little in the way of characterization other then some basic Shonen tropes. He's selfish, self aggrandizing and horny, overall a perfect reflection of a fourteen year old boy.
Yoko: The main harem girl. The joke is that she's horny for dark Schneider, but won't admit it to him. That's it, that's all she's got, and they do the tsundere joke every second episode.
Arshes: The secondary harem girl. Dark Schneider's old main love interest frkn his previous life. She's a half dark elf whom Dark Schneider adopted and raised, becoming her lover......... Ewww.....
Arshes' Generals: Two of them are girls who are quickly added to the harem after being defeated. I cannot tell them apart and it doesn't matter. The third is Dio. He's the best part of the show.
Beyond that, nond of the characters really matter much. Garra, Abigail and the other one are all standard mustache twirling one dimensional villains. They're all fine, but are not particularly memorable.
Animation:
This show is going for a Fraz Frazetta style, with the colour palette of the 80's He-Man cartoon. And overall it's fairly effective in evoking these influences. However the show is held back by two key issues, it's overall budget and its digital colouring. The show is cheap, with an overall reliance on static frames used to pad the run time, which results in a lot of fights boiling down to two opponents standing roughly twenty feet apart, yelling their spells while light effects are dumped on screen to give the illusion of animation. This issue, along with the uninspired digital colouring which leaves every shot looking flat and sterile, ensures that show looks drab and unenergetic compared to its influences.
World building:
The magic system is barely explained. It's mostly just spoken spells, some of which only specific characters can use, like Dark Schneiders Venom spell, but the limitations of these spells aren't explained. How magic and monsters came into the world after the attack of the God of destruction four hundred years ago is also not explored in any great detail, with orcs, goblins and etc existing solely for the narrative purpose of having cannon fodder to be mowed down by Dark Schneider with little consequence.
Was Bastard worth it in the end? It's definitely a product of its time (derogatory), but it lacks any real identity of its own that makes it stand out compared Yu Yu Hakusho, Dragonball, JoJo or any other title in Shonen Jump around the same time. It was alright background noise to have on while I was assembling furniture, but it's definitely not good enough to warrant sitting down and focusing solely on it.
