<p>Souten no Ken is... Not great. </p><p>Had to come somewhere and vent. I am a long time Hokutonoken fan, since the 80's. Used to borrow the Japanese editions from a friend, follow along with the pictures and then have her translate the lengthier bits of exposition for me. Owned a couple copies myself, plus the eventual Viz releases. Of course, nowadays the manga and anime are commonly available fully translated into English and I have watched and read through the series several times. First found out about souten no ken when I saw it in a Japanese bookstore. Even bought the first two volumes (I speak and read just a little Japanese). But I never really gave the series much of a try until recently. And I just finished the series in scanlation a few days ago. </p><p>All respect to the hard work of the scanlators. I appreciate their efforts. But man, what a disappointment the manga was itself! The humor seemed to repeatedly fall flat for me. For example I found Kenshiro's constantly shoving 3,4,5 or more cigarettes into his mouth at a time to be ridiculous to the point that it would take me out of the story. And speaking of the story, I found the whole Qing Bang backstory to be completely boring. I never became invested in it at all. In fact, the series never got good for me until the final couple volumes when it was all about the history of Hokuto, Zong Wu and the initiation ritual. Having said that, I wasn't happy with what they did with the Hokuto mythos either! </p><p>I mean, no Nanto??? At all??? Instead we get a half dozen other Hokuto styles when the whole thing that made Hokuto unique was that they had one style and one successor (as opposed to Nanto which had 108 with 6 "stars")! I was able to forgive the existence of Hokuto Ryu Ken in the original series because it was basically the evil version of Hokuto Shinken and still only had one successor. But now we get Soka Ken, Sonka Ken, Kyokuju Sei Ken, Seito Gekken alongside Shin Ken and Ryuka(Ryu) Ken! And what's worse is that they all were rather poorly defined in both history and their respective abilities. And what was up with Ryuka Ken? No demonic angle. Very few similarities to how it was portrayed in the original series. Not the same at all. </p><p>Continued... </p>

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