The first half of the story was actually pretty enjoyable, even if very standard. Heroic Rebels overthrow the Evil Emprire, but it's done well and had some suspenseful moments and likeable characters. Falco is one of the more impressive adversaries for Ken and their final duel was good fun. If the story ended at that point, I would have given the story an 8.
However, after this climactic battle at around episode 10, the plot suddenly totally changes track. There is no sense of continuation at all; the main character literally just goes off to a new island where the author has found thin reasons for Ken to massacre everybody. Hence, my low score for the story.
But, naturally, the most important part is the fighting. Is it any good? Just like the original Hokuto No Ken, there is plenty of footage of Ken making grunts explode (literally), which can get monotonous fairly quickly. However, the named boss enemy fights were usually well animated; Ken vs Han in particular, I thought was the best fight in both series combined-extremely gritty and violent. It was disappointing that in some of the fights, they resorted to a less realistic fighting style with faux force attacks instead of martial arts, which I felt ruined those fight scenes.
As for the sound, most of the tracks are nothing special, but there are a few music moments. "I Kill the Fight" during Ken Vs Han was awesome and contributed to that being one of the most epic fights.
So in conclusion, the story starts off pretty decently and will keep you interested until the first big showdown, although after that you may need a lot of willpower to get through the filler. Most of the fights are nothing special, but, Ken vs Han and a few others will hopefully make you feel that you haven't been wasting your time watching this old series.
