Black Cat

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Black Cat at its worst is a typical action manga chock-full of unoriginal characters and plot devices, but at its best an enjoyable series in which those unoriginal characters are endearing, the plot devices are familiar enough to seem almost nostalgic, and the story as a whole flows well (for the most part).

Story: The core story is quite interesting, though it often takes the shonen staples of "I'm gonna fight you just to prove myself" and "I suddenly got so much more powerful" and "I'm the only one that can stop the bad guy." The story is fun and even suspenseful beyond those occasional nuisances. ...

Art: Black Cat also reminds the audience it's shonen by featuring a lot of guys with spiky hair. Train Heartnet's features are adorably catlike. In case you're not sure who to root for, the good guys look nice and bad guys are usually quite ugly. Nothing about the art itself really jumps out at the reader beyond some of the action sequences, which are nicely drawn. Unlike many other shonen, I actually found myself understanding what had just happened in any given fight.

Character: Characters are not this series' strong point, at least not as far as originality goes. Everyone has seen these characters before at some point, they just looked different and had different names. Train is your heartless assassin-turned all-around nice guy who is also a bounty hunter. Sven is the self-proclaimed gentleman sidekick with some kind of trump card in his fighting ability. Eve is the ridiculously powerful child who's been genetically altered and initially had no emotion. Creed is the guy who has a disturbing obsession with the main character and a vendetta against the world who inevitably decides to rule it over as a god.

That being said, the characters are faithful to their unoriginal archetypes. They rarely do anything unexpected, unless that's their intended personality.

Enjoyment: In spite of the perceived recycled characters and storyline, Black Cat is quite enjoyable. There's plenty of humor interspersed throughout and the characters, to their credit, are diverse enough where a reader could pick one he/she really really likes and cheer them on over the course of the story.

Overall: Black Cat is criticized for not being too original, but that's not really its intention. The idea is to create an interesting story with characters that have been tested and proven to work on an audience before, and besides, if Black Cat were to happen to be the first anime anyone saw, they wouldn't necessarily know the difference. This is, in the end, a worthwhile series for action fans.

In a lot of ways, Black Cat is a quintessential late 90s/early 2000s manga. Its style and characters feel so indicitave of its era. I understand that this is kind of just saying that Black Cat is pretty unoriginal and not particularly special, but it still has good qualities. The characters are pretty good here. None of them really have impressive arcs, but their relationships and dynamics are usually well done. Sure, some side characters didn't entirely live up to their potential, but the characters are overall a net positive for the series.

I think what really holds this series back is the worldbuilding and story. ... The worldbuilding in particular is just kind of odd. It's pretty simple at first. There's bounty hunters called sweepers which are generally independent actors, Chronos which is an assassin organization, and this new bad organization called the Apostles of the Stars. Really though, we never get much of a sense of location, most places look the same and all. I also think the power systems here are very scattered. There's these nanobots which just let people do whatever, the villains and no one else has these magical powers called Tao, it simply feels very poorly thought out, which is a shame because series like Undead Unluck and Fullmetal Alchemist have linked their power systems and themes together very well. This manga mainly just uses it as an excuse for action, which is fine, but the action itself isn't necessarily great.

To some extent, the loose plot makes sense. The manga is about the main character Train's pursuit for freedom in life, so forgoing a tight plot in lieu of simple, fun adventures is a pretty good idea. Leaving aside the fact that the later story abandons this idea for a more conventional serialized tale, the writing itself can feel very poor at moments. Here's an example: At one point, the main villain Creed has a mancrush on Train and wants to kill his partner out of jealousy or something. So he has these Nanomachine bullets that will allegedly make people mutate into a chimera-like being or something. However, due to reasons, Train gets hit by one of the bullets. Creed goes to mourn the impending death of his true love, but Train just turns into a child. This causes some issues, but eventually Train returns to his original age, and due to the bullet, he also has a new powerup. Yes, because of the bullet Creed very deliberately decided to use for the purposes of hurting someone and making them mutate and lose their mind, Train gets a superpower with no strings attached when all is said and done. This is stupid, and this kind of writing is a little too common in Black Cat.

So while I'd love to say this is a good manga, it's pretty average at the end of the day. I think a lot of people would enjoy it though. If you like manga from this era, you'll probably like this. 5/10, pretty close to a 6.

Black Cat

I saw the anime adaptation of this manga for the first time in 2008 and I liked it as one of my first anime. I watched this series again 2 years ago and was mostly disappointed, especially with the rushed ending.

The only thought that occurred to me, why not read the manga to see how the series would really end? Curiosity is the death of the cat

The manga begins quite differently than the anime in that the 2 protagonists are already a team and many events from the anime are only part of the background. How the other characters are added is practically the ... same.

The plot of Black Cat is very simple, offers practically no twists and turns, so it is linear and monotonous until the end. The problem is, the manga was "somehow" still likable up to Chapter 60-70, until then you were at least entertained by the characters, along with their everyday bizarre experiences. As soon as all the fighting against the opponents started, the manga drifted in a massively disastrous direction.

First and foremost, almost all supporting characters and opponents are empty, boring, and irrelevant, their entire existence did not help the plot any further, whether 50 chapters were used for their fights or not. In addition, there are terribly poorly written dialogues for elementary school students on the level of "We are comrades, that's why we fight against you" "We will kill you because world domination is ours" and that's how it went. Under the typical Shounen principle, Black Cat enjoys by far one of the worst possible implementations of all.

Not even the skills were really explained, which was just one of the minor issues. In the end, however, all clichés were worked off from A to Z, all fights ruined and everyone had so much plot armor that they could probably fight Superman and Darkseid with it and would even win because they believed in their comrades.

To be honest, I can't believe that the simple, personable first 60 chapters are from the same manga as what came at the end.

The drawings were mostly above average, apart from the choreography and the surroundings, there it fluctuated again and again from ok to good.


When it comes to characters, I can't really name anything worth mentioning, because there was simply nothing. Only Train and Eve had some personality, Eve probably the most. But that didn't matter later anyway.


In the end, I'm still happy that I read the manga, so I've cut off one point of my nostalgia. However, the experiences I made while reading this manga are definitely something I don't want to remember.