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.
