Fist of the North Star Review

Hara's rendering is the reason this survives. Musculature is built out of dense crosshatching that reads as weight rather than decoration, faces are carved rather than drawn, and the confrontations are staged with a stillness that makes the single moment of contact land like a struck bell. Buronson's structure was widely copied because it works: rival schools with codified techniques, a villain given a funeral oration that makes his defeat feel like a loss, and a hero whose grief is stated once and never whined about.

The wasteland is thin but coherent, and its visual language went on to furnish everything from later Jump titles to a great many video games. The problem is length. The series reaches its natural ending with Raoh, delivers one of the finest death scenes in the medium, and then continues for years through the Land of Shura and a succession of new strongest men who exist because the magazine wanted more. Those volumes are a straightforward decline and reader scores reflect it. The first two thirds are canon and the last third is a warning.