Bai Yu Lung’s father mysteriously disappears one night, and for 10 years Bai searches for him in vain. Finally, he decides to head to the far northern part of the country with the hope that he can find a clue in that region. There, he falls in love with a beggar (Cheng Pei-pei) and they continue the search together.

Raised to be a righteous martial artist, Yuan kicks off the story proper by finding a cave containing a skeleton, a treasure map, and a manual teaching him the Golden Snake style. Obeying a request hidden in the manual to give a portion of the treasure to the Golden Snake’s old girlfriend, Yuan begins to seek the woman out – on the way solving the riddle of the Golden Snake, and how he came to his end.

Harum is a fearless man of the people who comes to Bagdad to avenge the murder of his father and meets Krairuzan, a princess disguised as a commoner, working against a plot by a band of evil schemers trying to do away with her father, the Caliph. She gives Harum a golden sword which, in his hands, makes him invincible. Harum uses the sword in the name of justice and is doing quite well until a duplicate sword is placed in his scabbard during one of his off-guard moments, and he winds up in chains.

Guts, an immensely strong sword-for-hire, has little direction in his life, simply fighting one battle after the next. However, this all changes suddenly when he meets and is bested by Griffith, a beautiful and charismatic young man who leads the Band of the Hawk mercenary army. After Guts joins the Band and the relationship between the two men begins to blossom, Casca, the tough, lone swordswoman in the Band of the Hawk, struggles to accept Guts and the influence he has on the world around her. While the two men begin to fight together, Griffith continues to rise to power, all seemingly in order to reach his mysterious, prophesied goals. What lengths will Guts and Griffith go to in order to reach these goals, and where will fate take the two men?

A moving, nostalgic portrait of the men behind the golden age of chanbara (sword-fighting dramas and films) that goes behind the scenes of the distinctive film genre for which Japan is most famous, with dominant performance by real-life kirare-yaku Seizo Fukumoto.