JCC Fist of the North Star

Fist of the North Star is easily my favorite anime/manga right after Saint Seiya and is the only reason why Zatchbell didn't win 2nd place. It has many themes associated with Shonen such as friendship,sacrifices good vs evil,etc but is much darker and far more gorier! At least for the first main half of the story (especially in the manga portrayal), the story has quite a lot of shades of grey in it particularly once the biggest villain of the series Raoh is introduced.

When I mean gore, I'm talking about superhuman characters taking on hordes and hordes of malevolent thugs and gang and make their heads explode and slicing their bodies pieces to pieces! The animated adaptation works around avoiding censorship by showing exploding bodies with a flashy light to hide out the details. Though there are still moments where exploding blood is openly visible as red and the series doesn't censor out other brutal things lke beheadings and cutting a saw into someones skull in two. Really a lot of fun action!

The fight choreography against the major villains are easily up there as some of the best in anime/manga to the point some battles (I won't put names because they will spoil the story) directly inspired Akira Toriyma when he was writing Dragon Ball Z and drawing out the scenes!

Not to mention Kenshiro is perhaps the most BADASS protagonist I ever seen in all of anime/manga and easily contendor for top 10 fictional badasses. I'll leave you the joy of watching the first episode to see just how ****ing awesome he is. The main villain Raoh also is just as badass as Kenshiro and he is easily my favorite villain in anime/manga and frequently makes top 10 list as both most badass and greatest anime/manga villain.

In addition there is a whole host of other badass characters both good and evil which I will avoid spoiling.

This series isn't all about fighting either; even though it is infamous for brutality and bloodbaths, it has some of the richest character development in fighting Shonen and one of the most intriguing manga universes. The story has so much moments of heartwarming and sacrifice that will leave you inspired and Kenshiro is easily one of the best role models in all of fiction not just anime/manga.

I highly recommend it if you never heard of it before!

Specifically start with the 1980s TV series because much of the production quality such as the voice acting and musical score (although I must warn since it is old the animation is quite dated but the rest of the elements namely the music and onscreen portrayal of special attacks more than makes up for he old animation).