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Let me be frank. Black Cat is one of my all time favorite manga's. I love the three main character, I love the artwork, and I'm a sucker for "guy saves a young powerful girl" story trope. It's just pure adventure and fun.

The anime on the other hand is a grave injustice to it's source material. Lots of things were cut out of the original manga and a lot of characters/villians/story arcs were either removed or changed. The ending was extremely rushed where as the manga had a cool buildup and showdown at the very end with a decent emotional payoff.

Stick to the ... manga folks. Please.

Spoilers in the review

This manga jumped the shark hard after the time skip arc. This manga started off decently. While it had One Piece vibes all over it, it was still a fun and entertaining adventure manga, filled with our band of heroes going on an adventure every arc. Each arc gave each character their backstory and interesting villains featuring opposing guilds with unique abilities, while also contributing to the overall plot.

However, things changed once the heroes defeated one of the strongest dark guilds and the author felt that the fairy tale power level was too damn high. So he wrote in a time ... skip and started doing a ton of fan service. The fan service was there from the beginning but it felt as if Lucy's, the main character, bare ass was in almost every chapter.

Also more prominent in the later chapters is the amount of ass pulls the author does which become increasingly unforgivable after the first few times. One of the worst offensives is when a main character dies to save someone, and another character reverses time just enough to where that character doesn't die. The amount of "Because their my Nakama!!!" = +100 to power level is so overdone that even One Piece had the decency to scrap that after their time skip.

Overall, a fun, lighthearted adventure/fantasy manga ruined because the author got popular. I don't regret dropping this manga because all I hear are bad things about it now (Erza vs her mom).

Does this anime bring anything new to the "trapped in a fantasy world" trope? Yes. Is it well executed? Not really.

This anime tries to emulate the tabletop RPG style rather than the MMORPG world. This is done very well in the first few episodes where the characters struggle taking down even one goblin. However, as the episodes go on, the show doesn't give us anything to connect with or a drive to know more about these characters or world. Here's what I mean:

If anyone has actually played a game of DND there is a few things that are needed to create a successful, fun, and ... challenging game:
1. Good World-building and Lore
2. Interesting Characters with backstories, goals, and motivations
3. A main antagonist that is a threat to the our heroes

In this anime:
1. The world-building in this anime is terrible. We see where our characters live, a bar, and the main character's guild which has one person in it. We don't get to see characters interacting with townspeople unless it's for bargaining or exposition. It's extremely bland, for an anime that does worldbuilding better, look to an anime like Log Horizon.
2. The characters start with no memory of there past lives, so there goes an interesting backstory. Their only motivation is to live and fight more monsters. We never actually see the party training, all we get are exposition dumps or cuts to the next scene/episode about how they have improved. Instead of watching characters sleeping or fishing or cooking, why don't we have a few scenes of characters training in their respective guilds, or looking at new equipment in the stores, or talking to NPC's to get to know the surrounding lands.
3. While the monsters in this anime are not your typical dumb monster, there is no imminent threat that imposes on our heroes. Let me give you a good example: Konosuba has the Devil King. We never see the devil king and for the majority of the time our characters never seem to even care about him but we as the audience know that their is a threat to our characters.

Overall this anime fails to emulate the type of world it's trying to be like. It's slow, boring, and a tough watch.