Amathakathi

I don't like giving bad reviews.... and I appreciate that Black Jack is a classic character with a lot of variant media, but I will take this show on its own merit as I have not seen the others.

If you are not turned away by laughably fictional treatments, purposefully annoying sidekicks, emo main characters and a tired morality-based plot... then this may be for you.

I don't want to say a show is bad simply because it didn't uphold my suspension of disbelief which I put way too high to begin with, but as someone trained in medical practice and biomedical sciences... I was aghast. When they made up some kind of medical treatment and dismissed the fact that it makes no sense at all by calling it "experimental" or that it "somehow seems to be effective"... I was disappointed at best.

That aside I found the characters were too clichéd and irritating to make up for the garbled medicine (at least Dr. House's antics always keep me coming back).

I'll admit I may have not given it a fair enough chance - I stalled after 6 episodes. But I was tired of the patient-of-the-week format with some big moral ultimatum that routinely ended the same way.

On the technical side, the animation is crisp, clean and colourful, and the sound is good.

My only gripe is that the character design is extremely dated - this, I know, is because they have not updated the character design since the original, oh so long ago. A fan of the forerunning series/OVAs/manga/whatever else will no doubt count this as a plus, but as a newcomer, it got on my nerves, so I had to mark it down for that. Other newcomers will probably feel the same, but if I were to give the show credit for staying true to form it would not be unreasonable.