@Gorlom:
im not familiar with any of the series so im not going to express my opinions about anything.. but this comment seems out of place in your argument. was Hokuto no Ken really crappy made or am i misunderstanding you completly?
("choppy" is that a bad thing or a good thing? i expect it to be a bad thing but seems to be a good thing from how your sentence is structured.)
Choppy is a bad thing. Hokuto no Ken's animation was really bad, consisting of a few well-detailed shots of Kenshiro moving slightly, pans of single cut-outs going across screen with blur lines behind said cut-out, and abstracts to depict violence (id est, we see black outlines exploding into a million pieces, rather than specific characters).
HnK reeked of low budget, shockingly so compared with other Toei productions of the time (Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon, Dragonball) and of later ones like the Digimon series.
Animation-wise, yes, I would say OP is probably better than HnK. But HnK has several pluses that elevate it above OP:
1. Detailled style, which sort of made up for the bad animation.
2. Full orchestral sound track.
3. "fresh" sound effects. I mean this to say, Toei recorded all of it's SFX in the 1970's and 1960's and the animation companies of the day used to share SFX. Toei is the only company that continues to rely heavily on these SFX from the 1970's. They were cleaner/original when featured in HnK, even if some of them sucked.
4. Few if any QUALITY stills.
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I'm not really asking for much, just for OP to look decent and not like Gundoh Musashi, Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni or the new Hokuto no Ken movie narrated by Washizu Iwao (the latter is filled with so much QUALITY it's almost cry-worthy).