Story revolves around a karateka, meguru, and him doing shooto/mma and his trials and tribulations. It's pretty realistic in it's depiction of training and real world physics.
Art is very crisp, clean and easy to follow and character designs are very sharp and defined too. If you've read Hiroki Endo's other masterpiece, Eden, you should be familiar with the art style. Since this is all about the fights, i'll go into extra detail concerning this. You can tell Endo knows what he's writing/drawing about. I was really impressed with his depiction of fights in Eden(Kenji's battles were some of the best i've ever seen in manga.. he's like the sammo hung/yuen wo ping of manga), and Endo's imagination and ability to convey it on paper are just as good here. As someone who follows MMA and does martial arts myself, i was impressed with just how accurate his art is. From armbars to hip throws to roundhouse kicks to sweeps, everything is portrayed realistically.
However, he doesn't babysit the reader, like some other fight manga would with paragraphs of theory explaining each move, so i don't know how easy it would be for those with no background of martial arts to get into, but i think the artwork is clean enough to enjoy it anyway, and the rest should be common sense since it's realistic.
Endo has covered boxing, JJ/BJJ, wrestling, kickboxing/MT, Judo, Karate, but i wonder if he will touch kung fu? I hope he does, since he has covered some traditional karate..
The most realistic hand to hand martial arts manga i've read to date. Forget Kenichi, forget Shamo and also forget Holyland(ok, holyland is decent), but this is just more realistic and all round more class.
