I watched all of the 2026 Fist of The North Star remake, and actually? It was pretty good

I’m passionate about the classic battle manga/anime Fist of the North Star (Hokuto no Ken). I’ve been mesmerized by its perfect blend of post-apocalyptic grime, absurd violence, and sweeping kung-fu melodrama since I discovered it as a kid, and my love for it has never really waned as I got older. Kenshiro remains my heroic ideal: kind to the weak and merciless to evil.

So like most fans of the series, I was deeply disappointed by the early trailers for a TV remake of the manga that was animated mostly via stiff 3D models that looked as immobile and dead-eyed as Shin’s favorite doll. On this very newsletter I suggested that if this was the quality of the product they were going to put out— in an age where classic titles are getting very impressive remakes— maybe it was better not to put anything out at all.

Though I love Fist of the North Star—perhaps because I love it— it took me a little while to actually watch the first episode of the remake. Following the “start with action from the first second” rule of TV anime, the show cold opens with a teaser of the coming battle between Kenshiro and Shin.

It’s a terrible way to open because it immediately hits the viewer with the most disorienting elements of low-end CG animation: stiff poses, choppy motion that disorients the viewer, and that cheap feeling of a TV show that doesn’t look half as good as a video game. A limp opening sequence follows, recasting the classic’s characters into one of those copy-pasted “every anime ever” sequences you see online with a surprisingly generic theme song by Alexandros. I can’t blame people for dropping this two minutes in, because it honestly looked pretty dire.

But I kept watching the episode, and you know, I didn’t hate it at all. In fact, I thought it did a good job by the original manga. I watched the show every week and finished the season. Call me coping, but I’m actually positive overall on the Fist of the North Star remake.

The Gamesoft Robo Fun Club is a solo labor of love that depends entirely on paid subscriptions from readers to exist. If you enjoyed this piece and you'd like to see more, I'd love to see you become a regular or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers get exclusive posts and keep me fed. Thanks for reading the pitch and hope to see you subscribe!

The intent of the remake

The Toei 80s TV version of Fist of The North Star is a legitimate classic of the medium. (You can watch it in its entirety on Crunchy right now.) Is it uneven? Sure; long-running vintage Toei series (like Dragon Ball Z or One Piece) usually are. But a lot of what’s endured about the series comes from that animation: the music, its stylistic flourishes, the voice work. Akira Kamiya’s performance as Ken, from the murderous low tone he uses with villains to the falsetto shouts he lets out in battle, is unquestionably iconic, and the rest of the voice cast is similarly stacked.

The Toei FOTNS anime is not page-to-page faithful to the manga— it sticks a season’s worth of ridiculous filler battles against foes like vampires and tanks between Ken and his first major foe, for example— but it nails every moment from the original story that really counts. And it swings big, cranking the melodramatic tone of the manga up even further. (The 80s film, in retrospect, is an experiment in just how big they could go.) In the manga, the above scene is just three pages. In the anime it calls for a song. And they’re right; the moment deserves that. You can argue that the Toei series wasn’t totally faithful, but you can’t tell me it wasn’t inspired.

Like the current wave of remakes of old series, the 2026 remake is explicitly trying to match the manga, practically using the pages of the comic as its storyboard. The color palette matches the digitally colored art that Tetsuo Hara draws today, and the direction noticeably quieter than the Toei version. It’s literally darker, too: the sky indicates that it’s almost always dusk or night in this post-apocalypse.

It’s not actually a big surprise the series uses CG if you’ve been following other animated adaptations like the unforgivably ugly Fist of the Blue Sky TV series by Polygon Pictures: I would speculate that the author (Tetsuo Hara) might just like CG, and simply finds it a style match to his work despite how bad it can look in motion. And for better or worse, the characters in the remake TV series look like Tetsuo Hara characters (while the characters in the Toei version can look wildly different depending on who was directing that week).

(Related: there already were some beautiful 2D-animated remakes of the best parts of the series that more closely match the manga, in the form of several 2000s theatrical films. The films make their own unnecessary changes and retcons, but this again throws the relevance of the 2026 remake into question.)

About the animation

The remake uses a blend of 2D and 3D animation, favoring CG models for action scenes and using 2D cuts where emotion is called for or when a human body is brutally mutilated. (Gorehounds note that the explosive deaths from the original manga are not censored in this remake; appendages and viscera go flying in a way that reminded me of vintage Koichi Ohata splatter.)

When considering the animation in this remake, I cannot help but think of Orange’s 3D Trigun series. In Stampede and Stargaze, the characters emote almost excessively: Meryl’s rubber-faced reactions and pratfalls are reminiscent of a Disney princess. There is absolutely no stiffness or plastic-doll feeling in these series, because the characters are animated to look like they’re living and breathing. The show blows right past the uncanny valley and forces our minds to unconsciously believe in the characters’ existence.

Even video games will have idle animations of the characters standing still and breathing, specifically so that the illusion of life doesn't break down. Most of the audience willing to watch a CG anime will have played a video game or two, and they know something feels off when they see it.

In a crucial scene in the Fist of the North Star remake, villain Shin taunts Ken by showing him Yuria, Ken’s kidnapped betrothed, sitting on a throne in his post-apocalyptic complex. Something turns out to be wrong with Yuria, though, and when Ken runs to her after the battle, it is revealed that the “Yuria” before him is a doll Shin had made in her image. A flashback reveals that the real Yuria could not bear life with Shin— his endless killing and plundering, in futile efforts to buy her love— and took her own life rather than allow him to continue.

This is a tough scene to adapt. To complicate matters, even in the manga the doll inexplicably emotes slightly when Shin "kills" it to enrage the oblivious Ken, so you're breaking reality one way or the other. But in the manga, you have no reason to believe that the “Yuria” shown on the page is an artificial object until the big reveal. She’s drawn just like everyone else, after all, and the comic book is a medium of stills. The Toei version simply cheats, showing “doll” Yuria clearly move her eyes and mouth on her own. But in the remake, Yuria is visibly a dead-eyed, expressionless doll in almost all of the shots that she appears, in 3D and in 2D. (She still emotes when killed; faithful to the manga.)

The weird thing about it is, everyone else kind of looks like a doll too, in this version. I wonder whether a first-time viewer would immediately pick up on the doll thing, or whether they would chalk it up to this show’s 3D models. When Kenshiro marches up the stairs to Shin, his aura boiling with rage, he somehow manages to look a bit like a doll himself.

2D TV anime and 3D TV anime aren’t the same

You get a couple of decent action scenes out of this approach— the feeling of bone-crunching impact is there the first time Ken takes out a crew of mohawked raiders— but you get a lot more uncanny valley nausea. The first episode bottoms out when Ken and Bat meet in jail, as Bat starts delivering exposition while Ken lies on the floor.

I kept thinking to myself during this show that what looks normal and saves money in 2D anime— namely long still shots of characters for dialogue— stands out as robotic in CG. The longer they stay there, the more robotic it looks.

Here’s a still from Liar Game, a particularly low-motion series that’s composed almost entirely of characters delivering exposition over still shots. But nobody would think of this still as particularly lifeless: long used to seeing these types of shots, our brains give the still the benefit of the doubt. It moved convincingly enough before, so it’s alive.

That doesn’t apply to these 3D models. Here’s a reaction shot from the Fist of the North Star remake. Bat's kind of semi-frozen, and his face stretches out in shock but it looks weird because there aren't any keyframes to the gesture; his mouth just kinda stutters open. The shadows don't do him any favors either. It's not a still, but it's the kind of shot that would be in a 2D show. And he doesn't look alive.

I mentioned Orange’s work already, but the 2D/3D hybrids that work best are the ones that weave the CG in, rather than slamming back and forth between styles. There’s a lot of CG in the battle scenes in Sunrise's recent Samurai Troopers sequel, but the high-quality cel-shaded style blends in seamlessly with the thick, dark lines the 2D majority of the show already uses. It’s legitimately hard to pick out as CG even when the CG characters speak to each other during a fight. This remake, on the other hand, shifts back and forth between 3D and 2D cuts in a way that’s especially jarring early on.

As the show goes on, it seems to use more and more 2D art, and the remake begins to resemble the show we were all hoping for when it was first announced. We can hope that future seasons continue in this direction.

The material remains strong

The thing is, it’s still Fist of the North Star. That is, it’s a straight adaptation of a five-star classic manga. I didn’t stop watching it, because dammit, these stories are good. The first TV season covers the early part of the manga before the over-arching story (famously worked out on the fly) is completely settled: after dispatching Shin much sooner than expected, Kenshiro wanders from one village to the next, avenging villainy as he goes. Ken bulldozes through a rogue’s gallery of weak but memorable foes for exactly as long as their gimmicks will last. Evil spartan army dudes, one dude who’s 40 feet tall, little clawed gremlin dudes, another dude who turns himself into steel: all sorts of weird dudes roam the apocalypse of 19XX. Along the way Kenshiro meets another heroic martial artist, Rei, and the world of kung-fu melodrama— and foes that stick around a little longer— that will eventually take over the series starts to truly take root.

Kenshiro’s voice actor (Shunsuke Takeuchi, who from his credits appears to specialize in voicing big galoots) turns in a superlative performance as an iconic character, nailing every point of the character’s emotional range. You’ll especially notice him during the flashback to Ken’s fateful scarring by Shin: you’d think they were actually stabbing the man in the recording booth.

(The less said about the shoddy, garbage English dub this series got, the better. Absolutely don’t watch it this way, not even for laughs.)

This season ends with a tease appearance from the first of Ken’s previously unmentioned brothers, the loathsome Jagi, signaling the first major shift into the real story of the series. As a fan, these well-worn characters are old friends to me. It’s genuinely exciting to think of the stories coming up and getting to experience them all over again. (And before you say it, season 2 is confirmed, and the show's actually doing really well on Amazon.) Even if Fist of the North Star fans– and indeed the creators– have had more than enough chances to do that.

(Fist of the North Star: Hokuto no Ken – yes, that is the official title of this remake– is streaming on Amazon Prime.)