OP Sequence
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Summary:
Train Hartnett is the legendary assassin called Black Cat who works for the Chronos organization. His partner is Creed Diskence, a man with a taste for blood and death. In the same city, there is a bounty hunter by the name of Sven Volfied. He’s tracking a corrupt politician, Lib Tyrant, with a high sum on his head. Sven is currently pretty broke, but luckily gets some free food after he helps a waitress with some unruly customers. Still following his target, he infiltrates a celebration party. After getting into an accident with a drunkard, Sven is cleaning up in the restroom when he sees Lib walk by with his bodyguards. Sven’s right eye can briefly see the future (when Sven doesn’t have on the eye patch), and Sven gets a vision of Lib’s death. This vision comes true when Sven returns to the main party after a run-in with one of Lib’s bodyguards. He sees a man move lightning fast through the crowd toward Lib and then shoot Lib in the back. Sven follows Train outside, and tries to stop him, but their conversation is interrupted by a giant boomerang. One of Lib’s bodyguards also chased the Train outside and he targets and hits Train’s cheek. Train catches his boomerang, and then uses it to pin him against a tree. Sparing him, Train simply walks away from the scene, with Sven following soon after. We see Creed appear from the darkness and smash the boomerang into the bodyguard, killing him. Sven later learns from a store owner that the assassin he met is one of the Chronos Numbers, specifically number 13: Black Cat. Meanwhile Train, who has returned home, remembers seeing his dead parents when he was a child and all of the death that his own hands have brought. He is awakened from his memories by a girl singing from a nearby rooftop.
ED Sequence
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OP: 「ダイアの花」 by より子
ED: 「ナミダボシ」 by パピーペット
The OP is decent fast song and the OP sequence shows a montage of the entire cast in action. The song and ED sequence are very cute, with the ED sequence showing various characters in cat form. I’m not very familiar with either Yorico or Puppypet, but I don’t find either of these songs very memorable.
What the heck is this…?
I was looking forward to seeing the Black Cat anime, having read a large part of the manga. But I really was not prepared for all of the changes that they made for this animated adaptation. For starters, they moved the beginning of the series to before Sven and Train had met when Train was still part of the Chronos Numbers. They also already show a lot of the big players of the story in the first episode, including Creed, Eve, Sephiria, and Saya. They do hint that Creed and Train fight over something in the 30 seconds before the OP starts, so I guess it’s possible that this is all flashback.
This episode is basically original material with the main characters and their stories basically the same. In the manga, the first chapter starts with Train and Sven already a sweeper (bounty hunter) team. Train’s past arrives in flashbacks that occur a lot later. What they’re doing in the animated version is rewriting the timeline so that everything happens relatively close to each other. I’m not very happy with this way because the manga’s plot is already fairly strong, so there is no need to change the order that the events occurred.
Fujiwara Keiji voices Sven very similarly to how he voiced Hanamoto-sensei in Honey and Clover. Whether that fits the character remains to be seen. Train only gets a smattering of lines, so it’s hard to judge how well Kondo Takashi is doing. The only other person who got a significant number of lines is Miki Shinichiro as Creed, and he does a pretty good job sounding evil and lunatic.
I’m pretty split on this series. I want to continue to watch it in the hopes that it’ll get better and merge with the manga storyline, especially once Eve permanently joins the cast. But the combination of a not so impressive first episode and an incredibly busy Thursday schedule makes me want to not blog this. It all depends on if this gets better in the coming weeks or not.
