Try watching Trigun. Haven't read the comics yet, but the show was friggin' awesome. It was somehow short, only one series of twenty-six 25-minute episodes, but that's just very high quality stuff, a classic of the 90s, I'd say. From your list of criterias, everything fits: no tentacles, cool fight scenes, not too complex of a story, no weird stuff (except from the main character's backstory and his origins, which can be argued over as being "weird" or not).
The story revolves around Vash the Stampede, a tall, blond-haired wanderer in the sands of the planet Gunsmoke, in a distant future. The public opinion of this guy is very negative, portraying him as a cold, calculative murderer, a destroyer of cities, a monster able to shoot down multiple dozen men without breaking a sweat. This caused a 60 billion double-dollar ($$60,000,000,000) bounty to be placed on his head, and the planet's most fearless bounty hunters, renowned gangsters on parole, small-time thieves, escaped convicts, to go after him, hoping to receive the reward. However, some of them aren't looking for the enormous reward, but for revenge, or even redemption.
The problem is that this public opinion is wrong, and is the result of overexaggerated rumours and word of mouth. Most of the time, he's at the wrong place at the wrong time, and gets involved in a handful of situations to prevent innocent from being harmed, or is forced to use self-defence to avoid getting killed. Even though he tries to stay anonymous as much as he can, the aforementioned situations often result his cover getting blown to pieces, and every bounty hunter, thief, contract killer, sheriff, armed civilian in the area going after his sorry ass.
This is grounds for lots of narrative, backstory, and fast-paced high-octane shoot-outs.
For more information, try checking out the IMDb page (the show was rated 8.7 out of 10, which is pretty good): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251439/
