Black Jack ONA

Between Black jack (OVA), Black Jack (TV) and its sequel Black Jack 21, an handful of movies, some special episodes and even spinoff like Ray The Animation and Young Black Jack, this one is a strong contender as the worst Black Jack adaptation so far.

There is a lot to say so I'll be starting with its good points, it tries to stay faithful to the manga stories and the minor changes are made so it can make stand alone episode in pretty short formats. That is a considerable feat by itself as it's one of the early ONA, internet was still slow and couldn't handle ... big files. To put a comparison, earliest ONA called Kakomareta Sekai made 3 years before this ONA serie lasted 30s and was taken down due to bandwidth issues.

The seyiuu for Black Jack is Akio Ohtsuka as in every other adaptation and is doing its best despite being the only one doing professional work here, feeling bad for pointing it out but it is Pinoko's seiyuu only work as a seiyuu and you can understand why. It's unfortunatly more than bad and could be used as an exemple of what not to do.

The sound design and musics are pretty diverse and while not having originality they are of pretty good quality and though there is no audio mixing it's not unpleasant to listen to, it fits the scenes and stories pretty well but will sadly leave you no strong memories.

The animation was made really bright and with fewer angles, mostly because it was put together on an early computer but it also prevented getting too much loss in quality from lower quality as a secondary effect. Nowadays nobody would bother watching it beside at its best quality, 480p. It may hurt some people but it's not that as bad as the wonky animation making it look like a nintendo ds cutscene.

What saves it from being plainly bad is the quality of Black Jack itself, the originality of stories and the characters of a genius surgeon getting hard operations and out of the ordinary solution brought by Osamu Tezuka who had a doctorate of medicine back then is something that could hardly be imitated by anyone else.

Now, is it worth watching it? No. The Black Jack (TV) serie released a few years after adapted the same stories with a lot more qualities. If you want to watch Black Jack for the first time the OVA serie from 1993-2011 is your better choice.
Nowadays there is absolutely no reason to watch this one and this is probably why it is so hard to find but maybe you'll be able to make an opinion for yourself!