 There are some games where when you first sit down and play them, your immediate thought is what in the blue hell is this? Well, this is another action-manga-slash-anime that licensed its name and characters out to a one-on-one fighting game. We've seen this before with Dragon Ball, we've seen it with Yu-Yu Hakusho, and now it's Bastard, and Koku no Hakai-Shin. And right away, as you can see, this game looks freaking crazy. You've got two fighters floating in midair, throwing fireballs and ninja stars at each other while the ground scrolls beneath them with these majestic looking backgrounds zipping by. There's sprite scaling, there's a Mode 7 effect on the ground. This game looks incredibly impressive, and it makes an immediate impression. And hey, with a title like Bastard, it's gonna invoke some curiosity. However, if you actually want to play this one, well, uh, unfortunately Bastard is in fact a Bastard when it comes to gameplay. You fight from a third person over-the-shoulder perspective, and while that's definitely something different for the time, it causes all sorts of problems, because most of the fighting here is just, uh, throwing projectiles at each other. The Y button fires a shot that curves to the left, the A button throws one that curves right, X throws one on an upward curve, and B on a downward curve. It really just boils down to, if your opponent is to your left, hit the Y button. If he's hanging out to your right, hit the A button. If he's below it, B and above, hit X. It gets extremely monotonous, and it doesn't help that the controls here are incredibly finicky, and it's really tough to actually hit your opponent. It always seems like it's just a matter of luck. Like they just happen to move in the wrong direction as you hit the right button. So as a result, there's not really any real strategy here. It honestly feels like I'm playing some kind of baseball mini-game or something, and I'm Clayton Kershaw dressed as some kind of wizard guy, and he's throwing some curveballs and sliders trying to hit various targets. Thankfully, there is a bit more to the controls. Like if you hit the L button, your character will switch sides, and if you happen to run into your opponent, you can do a grappling move. If you double-tap the R button, you can do a special attack. For instance, Dark Schneider here summons a crappy fireball that you can control with the D-pad, as it kind of floats around and pesters your opponent doing a tiny bit of damage. It sucks. What you really want to use the R button for is to activate bigger attacks. What you're supposed to do is hold that button down while entering a button sequence, then letting go of the R button to activate. Like again, for Dark Schneider, while holding R, you can double-tap Y, and engulf yourself in flames, and then you just, uh, hope you get lucky enough that your opponent wanders by you and takes damage. Each of the six playable fighters has at least five button combos you can use, but jeez, these never seem to work, and again, if they do happen to work, you just have to hope you get lucky and your opponent unwittingly stumbles into you like an idiot. You also can't take any damage while trying to do a special move, so if you wander into a projectile while you're still holding R, your attack won't work, so eventually, you get frustrated and forget all about the special moves and stick to just trying to hit a moving target with a moving projectile while both the ground beneath you and the background behind you are all moving. I mean, I give this game all the credit in the world for being so ambitious and trying something truly different, but jeez, Louise, simple combat shouldn't be so disorienting and so frustrating. There's three different game modes here, Story Mode vs. Mode, versus a second player or the computer, and a Team Battle Mode, which is pretty much just a six-on-six gauntlet fight. The Story Mode has you playing as Dark Schneider, a once evil wizard who gets defeated and his followers are so distraught that they summon an ancient demon god which sends the world straight to hell. And now Dark Schneider finds himself as the good guy trying to save the world he wants to rule so badly. There is an English patch available to use if you want to play this game that way, and obviously the manga and even the short-lived anime go much further in depth, and I can't speak to how well this game represents the source material since I haven't seen it or read any of it, but the character portraits here are cool, the music is awesome, and like I said, this game certainly looks cool, at least at first glance, and there's also plenty of metal references here that I really appreciate, like how One Stage is named Metallicana, well, let's just hope it's mid-80s Ride the Lightning Master of Puppet Era Metallicana. So yeah, ultimately I would categorize Bastard as a novelty fighter, and you don't play novelty fighters for skill necessarily, the same way you would Street Fighter II or any of the SNK fighting games, instead you play them as a novelty, like Primal Rage or Clay Fighter. And yeah, Bastard is a hell of a novelty, this game looks amazing, it's just that the combat is incredibly clunky and frustrating, there's only six players to play as, and only six stages to play through, and there's not any variety in the game modes, so this game is ultimately pretty limited. But hey, if you love fighting games, there is a Game Facts move list I have listed in the description, so you can check this one out yourself. But as cool as this game looks, be prepared for a lot of headaches and frustration. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.