are there any good real martial arts anime (i.e. not dbz.. thats not martial arts that a combinations of wooshing sounds synced to alternating black lines, and buff guys getting serious cases of constipation) out there? somthing that focus on martial arts but doest get carried away with stuff like super powers...
The street fighter movies are cool. Especially the alpha one. Can't say if the tv shows are good though.
Well now since we are barring special moves that would bar out Street Fighter right. Well not really there really isn't a special move used untill late in the series. So I would suggest Street Fighter the Series hell the Ken vs Vega fight is worth the whole damn thing.
Streetfigfter series is good but I think that there were to many eps.
For fighting anime I heard Hajime no Ippo (boxing anime) is very good and to save the best for last: GRAPPLER BAKI!!!!!!= the greatest fighting anime I know and very high on my favorites list. I'm half way the first series now and I am hooked. Very realistic fighting (main charrecter actually loses some times), VERY cool charrecters (Long is pure evil so far) and it's just action packed(a new battle in almost every ep. so far and every opponent has his own fighting style). I'll give a little spoiler, in the first ep. Baki takes on 100 opponents and gets knocked down after knocking out 37 of them. Most awasome opening ep. I have ever seen.
I could rant on and on about how awesome I find this series but there is one negative issue: the subs on the MI sets are not very good so far. The first two eps are the worst subs I have ever seen but it gets better after that. It's not that bad because there is not that much dialoge needed to understand the series and the fights don't suffer from Kenshin syndrome (one blow, five minutes talking etc.).
Anyway Lord Melkor, if you can stand bad subs than look no further, this is what you are looking for.
Yeah Grappler Baki is pretty badass but the subs are like "whoa, i'm glad i'm in this for the fighting and not for the verbage." The subs are in one word, shitty.
I would suggest Yawara if you can find it. It is about Judo.