Played Bastard!! - Utsuronaru Kamigami No Utsuwa by Seta Corporation for Playstation (1996).
Setting is basically a mix of Hokuto no Ken and Rance (or a Shadowrun on steroids). The protagonist, Dark Schneider, is a 400 year old supremely powerful pervert wizard. Yet, he’s still henpecked by his main waifu.
A curiosity of this series is that many characters’ names are heavy metal inspired (e.g. a spearman called Angus Young, a “worm magic” user called Ba Thory, a fighter called Yngwie von Malmsteen, etc.). Not to mention D.S. has a spell called “Napalm Death”… and one party member has a spell called “Blind Guardian”.
The game starts out almost as visual novel but soon becomes a full-fledged dungeon crawler (first person exploration and turn-based combat). Interdastingly many enemies come straight out of D&D handbook.
Exploration is important as it’s the only way to gain new equipment. There are a lot of party members (basically all important manga characters) but recruiting some may be elusive (and to get the “best” ending you need to recruit all – but there’s also a “hidden” alignment meter). Like in Suikoden it’s fun experimenting with different party combinations to wreck the enemies – all party members need to be around level 40/41 to unlock all special attacks and unites but getting that far is kinda overkill.
D.S. doesn’t need to be in the party, his four generals can easily take over for him once they are recruited (although the last two come a bit late). D.S.’s magic is mainly fire aligned which is not always useful.
Party members will often join, leave and rejoin later. It also happens that you lose almost the entire party members at the beginning of a chapter and you need to find them again. Party members are likable, there are a lot of interactions and skits (and furthermore, some deeply serious, thought provoking moments). Overall my favourite party members were Arshes Nei (by far the most powerful), Gara, Kai and Shella. In the beginning of the game D.S. gets an orb containing his waifu’s soul (a very powerful cleric) that levels up along with him and offers healing and support spells. It functions as an extra party member.
There’s a striking moment during fourth chapter where two characters will come to blows and depending on choices they will both be killed, both be reconciled or one be killed.
In the first chapter the game can be challenging when D.S. doesn’t have a very diverse party yet. In particular the two back-to-back bosses at the end of the first chapter can be hard, especially if one didn’t happen to recruit some very useful party members with powerful abilities. End-of-chapter bosses are always one of D.S.’s brainwashed four generals followed by a scheming god (you get to kill quite a few gods in the game, which feels badass). Bosses in general don’t have absurd amounts of HP and with the right party combinations (there are some very powerful unite attacks) they can be beaten in few turns.
D.S. can usually do a lot of damage with his spells but in order to cast more powerful spells he needs to be next to one or more party members who lose a turn that way (although certain powerful characters like Arshes Nei can target the entire enemy area on their own). Initially resources are not that abundant and blowing all mana on random encounters is a bad idea - there's a vampire party member called Dai Amon with a drain ability to restore the party's HP and MP but recruiting him fukks up D.S.'s alignment if you want the "best" ending.
The final dungeon contains some incredibly powerful enemies but your party is already so awesome at that point they just cut through them like a knife through butter.
The game’s first person exploration combined with the soundtrack make the game rather gloomy and incredibly atmospheric – felt like playing a Wapanese Battlespire at times.
Story wise the game starts with D.S. (and all other characters) having lost their memory and finding themselves in unknown location.
The plot is p. ingenious, as the strange world the characters find themselves in turns out to be D.S.’s mind (every chapter takes place in a fragment of his mind); the ancient gods’ plot is to take over his power. At the end of the game D.S. can choose to merge with the bad guy instead of saving his waifu, which leads to a “bad” end (even though he then becomes so powerful he can conquer the entire universe) – of course the “normal/good” end is far superior as the way D.S. ultimately destroys the final boss is the ultimate badassery . Basically he had crucified the four previously defeated gods to coerce them into destroying their master (who had been using them as pawns) to escape from their agony.
P. great game tbh, as good as Slayers (also a first-person dungeon crawler) and Lodoss game. The game is also quite long.
