Where SnK soars is its fantastic artwork. The artist/creator of Hokuto no Ken, Tetsuo Hara, is one of the most artistically talented manga artists. He does not disappoint in his vivid, imaginative layouts and provides great detail in how he draws every character or setting from panel to panel. His two strongest elements are his composition and, as you'd expect, drawing big muscular men as well as petite sexy women, as is the style of Hokuto no Ken. It's a massive improvement over Hokuto no Ken from the 80s and it never falters, maintaining its excellent quality from beginning to end.
The composition is particularly great when you see certain characters, such as the typical one-shot villains towering over Kenshiro, the protagonist, or other characters. This is taken to absurd extremes with the character of Zhang Lieshan, an actual giant who takes the series' constant size-warping and turns it into a hilarious in-joke as he refuses to acknowledge his giantism and will punish any of his minions who do. This character epitomizes the best of this prequel of Hokuto no Ken: self-aware, funny and brutal. Other great characters I enjoyed are Wu and Du.
The main character deserves great credit too, if you felt that the original Kenshiro was too bland, Kasumi Kenshiro is a nice change of pace as he gets plenty of comedic segues that made me laugh almost as hard as Zhang's antics. You wouldn't expect this series to be so funny, but it's one of its greatest positives for entertainment value. This series also has its fair share of side characters, but they are fairly hit-or-miss. The mafia characters at the start are good, but when the series gets into the later parts it goes downhill.
Plot wise SnK has a promising start. Kasumi Kenshiro moves back to Shanghai after hearing about the death of his friends and lover. He finds himself embroiled in a bitter mafia feud and has to rebuild his clan up from scratch, fighting off all the evil criminals who have taken over in his absence. This is very good stuff, and the best of the series is when it focuses on this part of the story, but it gets sidetracked many times. Early on this isn't as much of a problem, it moves at a good pace, but by the end it slows to a crawl and I found myself skipping through entire volumes to finally see the end.
It's speculated that due to publishing issues, the ending was rushed and it certainly does not provide a satisfying conclusion. I personally feel that the story mostly comes to a halt before that as all the villains have been exploded and all the non-dead villains already became protagonists. There's little else to achieve without throwing more family members of protagonists into the flames for Kenshiro to get motivated.
My problem when it comes to Hokuto no Ken and Souten no Ken is this obsession with a very specific idea of "manliness" that ironically makes some of the manliest villains into outright cowards but then glorifies irredeemable villains because they know martial arts. These handpicked villains are all murderers, rapists and horribly violent before they meet Kenshiro but get a second chance because, in some cases, the heavens demanded it. This may sound like a nitpick, but really this is the whole essence of the story once you reach the ending, and it is a fairly bad one. The lore is only teased up until this point but takes centre stage and... I can't say I like it very much. I almost would advise to just skip to the last volume once the Du Tianfeng arc ends, it is that poor.
The failing of this manga and why it isn't great nor remembered as fondly as HnK is the pacing is awkward at times and the fights are fairly hard to follow. It has plenty of emotional scenes and tearjerkers, but it becomes very predictable the further on you get, as at no point can you truly believe the protagonist can lose. This is okay to see the villains' fun antics, but then it becomes more protagonist versus other protagonists and that is just dull. The villains at least get whole volumes of glory before they predictably bite it in a few chapters, but these good vs good battles really kill any momentum the story had built up.
Overall I enjoyed this manga plenty despite its flaws, as it has some of the best arcs in the franchise. The reason it gets some flack is for the various "manly" fights between Kenshiro and at first intimidating, but eventually fairly watered down villains who aren't in the least bit fun, and the story goes completely off-the-rails. Still, it has great art, and besides the ending there's no bad stretch that's too long that it's intolerable. A strong recommendation for big fans of Hokuto no Ken, and if you haven't read or watched HnK, what are you doing here?
