Dark Schneider is back again
Warner Bros. Japan has announced that the BASTARD!! -Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy- anime series will receive a second season. Set to premiere on Netflix later this year, key art and a trailer for the new season were also posted on Netflix Anime’s official Twitter account.
The first season of BASTARD!! -Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy- debuted on Netflix on June 30 of last year. A second set of episodes released on September 15, bringing the first season up to a total of 24 episodes. A new adaptation of Kazushi Hagiwara’s original manga that started in 1988, the series tells the story of the sorcerer Dark Schneider and his destructive adventures in the fantasy kingdom of Meta-llicana, populated by multiple other metal music references.
Now it has been confirmed that the anime series will receive a second season. Formally titled BASTARD!! -Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy- Requiem of Hell Arc, Netflix’s trailer shows that the story will pick up two years after the conclusion of the previous anime story. It was also confirmed that the staff from the first anime would return for the new season, and new cast members were revealed: Takuma Terashima as Joshua Berahia, Sho Hayami as Nils John Mifune, Junichi Suwabe as Yngwei von Mattström, and Koji Yusa as Zion Sol Vanderverg. These news updates, along with a celebratory illustration from Kazushi Hagiwara, were posted to the anime’s official website.
The Netflix series, of course, is not the first anime outing for BASTARD!! The manga previously inspired a six-episode original video anime series released between 1992 and 1993, which was a fixture of anime home video releases of the era. The manga series itself has also continued irregularly running all the way up to 2010, with Hagiwara completing 27 total collected volumes. Technically it hasn’t even reached a point where it is considered finished, with the series still set on ‘indefinite hiatus’ since that point in 2010. The manga was previously licensed by Viz to release in English in North America, though the publisher only got through the first 19 volumes before canceling their release. Thankfully for fans of Dark Schneider, they’ll have another way to follow the action when the new season of the BASTARD!! anime premieres later this year.
