Black Cat is about this assassin named Train Heartnet (hey, at least he escaped whoever named all the characters in Geass). Or wait, it’s about this secret bio-weapon disguised as a loli named Eve. Actually no, it’s about this bounty hunter dude named Sven. Oh, wait, never mind, I remember, it’s actually about the villain, Creed, who has a hard-on for Train. No hang on, it might’ve been about the organization that Train worked for, Chronos…
See, I’m writing all of this as if the abundance of disparate elements in the plot is a bad thing, but the thing is, the story started out with a ton of potential. The first four or five episodes do a great job of tying all these characters together in a sensible and, dare I say, a captivating manner. Seriously, the beginning of this show is excellent. It’s exciting and a bit dark without getting too edgy or angsty, the characters all have good synergy and play off of each other very well, and the pacing is near-perfect.
And then the timeskip happens.
I’ll try to be brief and not spoil anything here, but suffice it to say that a certain main character’s personality does a complete 180 after the timeskip, and virtually zero explanation for the change is given to the viewer, outside of occasional scattered hints that refer to certain events that happened pre-timeskip. This is unfortunately only the beginning, as the rest of the anime devolves into a giant mess of hastily-introduced and poorly-fleshed-out characters, a distinct lack of focus on core plot points that the initial episodes tried to establish, and a ridiculous number of plot contrivances that attempt to reconcile this lack of focus, to no avail. The pacing is haphazard at best and has all the grace of a one-legged donkey at worst. The only relatively consistent character throughout the show is Sven; everyone else undergoes obscenely rushed character “development”, which is really just most of the characters overreacting to major events and, much like aforementioned main character, completely flipping the script on their personalities and becoming the exact opposite of who they originally were. This isn’t even mentioning the staggering number of characters this show introduces. There are like 10 new villains that arrived on the scene halfway through the show, plus all the Chronos assassins and executives, plus the guys who were in charge of those 10 or so new villains I just mentioned…the list just keeps growing and growing, and almost none of them get any kind of proper characterization, let alone development. It’s as if Naruto or One Piece were to condense themselves into 25 or so episodes, and cram their entire casts and plot into that timeframe. It’s insane.
All that being said, the anime does have its good qualities. As I said before, the first part of the anime is very well done, and it constructs a reasonably compelling narrative while introducing a pretty solid cast of characters to drive it forward. The art and animation are also good, although the color palette was a little weird and off-putting at times. The soundtrack is fairly strong as well, and I am particularly fond of the opening theme.
Ultimately, the overwhelming number of flaws prevent this anime from being anything more than way below-average at best. In truth, the last three-quarters or so of this anime are straight up terrible in terms of execution. Still, though…I can only imagine how much more enjoyable this anime could’ve been if they had just stuck to the format the first few episodes had established. It’s a damn shame.
