Jujutsu Kaisen

WARNING: This review does contain spoilers for Jujitsu Kaisen. Major spoilers will be spoiler tagged. Minor spoilers are not spoiler tagged.

It has been quite an eventful year in the world of battle shounen manga. This year, two massive manga series from Shounen Jump, My Hero Academia and Jujitsu Kaisen have come to an end and both have caused a massive uproar following their endings. Out of the two, Jujitsu Kaisen (or JJK) was the one that I had chosen to catch up on when it was announced back in September that the manga was ending since for any of the faults I had with some story beats, I did have a lot of fun watching the JJK anime. While I certainly prefer some other recent battle shounen like Chainsaw Man, I did really like how JJK presented its very dark world and themes. I also really enjoyed the cast and thought that the power system was simple but elegant. So imagine my disappointment when, as the story went on, it started to feel like it not only wasted or ruined a lot of the core characters that I came to like, but it also all built up to an arc so awful that many of my previously positive feelings for the story and the cast feel wasted as a result.

The battle shounen power system in this world is known as cursed energy, which feeds off of negative human emotions like stress, fear, anger and grief. This cursed energy leaks out of most people and creates cursed spirits, which can harm or kill people. This energy can also be harnessed by a jujitsu sorcerer (or cursed user) to create these different cursed techniques that can be passed down through generations or it could be a cursed technique that is randomly gained. What I had liked about the cursed energy system before the Culling Game arc was that it was relatively simple. Yes, there were specific details on individual cursed techniques like Gojo's limitless cursed technique and Mahito's idle transfiguration, but generally speaking, you could just pick up what's going on pretty fast. This allowed the fights to have a simple flow to them that kept dialogue (and thus, blabbing about techniques and other dialogue) to a rough minimum. One of my favorite examples of this was the fight that Yuji and Todo had against Hanami where you just kind of marvel at how Todo is executing his technique to throw off Hanami throughout that whole fight.

However, by the time we get to the Culling Game arc, this is no longer the case. For instance, while I did find Hakari to be a really fun character, his gambling ability feels needlessly complicated. I get that it's set up that way cause the reward for pulling it off is insanely good, but there's just so many instances of the cast just explaining certain techniques or what's most likely going to happen. What was once a fast paced series started grinding to a halt sometime after the Shibuya Incident arc and the events right before the Culling Game arc. Yuta is another glaring issue when it comes to the power system. In a world filled with particularly OP characters, Yuta somehow manages to stick out. This is because These issues got a thousand times worse when we got to the final arc, Shinjuku Showdown. It felt like characters were throwing shit at the wall constantly just for Sukuna to shrug it all of anyways with more and more BS. Binding vows, which are conditions that sorcerers place upon themselves so that they could get desired effects, start to be seriously abused by characters like Sukuna to survive situations that they otherwise shouldn't. Beforehand, binding vows were used very sparingly, but Sukuna just starts fuckin spamming them in the last arc like its a damn aimbot. Dude is actually hacking, he should be banned. Also, reversed curse technique, which was previously a very difficult skill that only a small handful of jujitsu sorcerers were capable of doing (though special grade curses like Mahito could use it all of the time), became a technique that multiple characters could just...do now. This becomes especially egregious during the last arc, but ultimately, the last arc felt like it was bending over backwards so much so that the fight could be dragged out as long as humanly possible.

One thing I particularly liked about JJK up until the Culling Game arc was how much I enjoyed the cast for the most part. I'm not going to go over every single character, but I'll quickly gloss over the more notable ones. Yuji was kind of a classic shounen protagonist. Someone with a heart of gold and was very headstrong. He was someone who often acted on instinct, but he was also someone who was susceptible to self hatred, especially when things went horribly wrong (as it often did). The guy is a silly bundle of joy who also had a lot of his own struggles in relation to getting stronger and how Sukuna affected others. Nobara was another character I liked quite a lot, as her dynamic with Yuji was both hilarious and pretty sweet. She gives Yuji a lot of crap, but you can tell that she did see him as a friend and that she did value her own life beyond being a jujitsu sorcerer.

Gojo is this laidback and insanely OP character that ultimately shifts the balance of power between the jujitsu sorcerers and the cursed spirits. Behind that cocky attitude and cheerful demeanor is someone who is deeply frustrated with the authority figures in the jujitsu world for how short sighted and cruel they are and is someone who is looking to build up the next generation of jujitsu sorcerers. The Hidden Inventory arc (probably the best arc in the series) explored how Geto and Gojo developed their own separate mindsets as well as how these best friends ended up turning on one another.

Massive spoilers for Hidden Inventory:

There's a lot of characters in JJK, so I'll just sum up a few more characters. Nanami is this absolute unit who takes nonsense from nobody and is committed to getting his job done, even though "work is shit". While the guy is a rather standoffish and blunt, he does believe that the adults should be the ones protecting the younger sorcerers like Yuji. He's someone who is also very dejected over how the jujitsu society treats its own sorcerers, but he ultimately decided to continue his work in that society because he did want to help people. Nanami was my personal favorite in the series because I found that he really struck a balance between being a funny straight man to everyone else's antics (particularly Gojo's) while still maintaining his sincere care for the students and his friends.

Maki is another really cool character who is treated like garbage by the Zenin clan due to her lack of powers as she has the same heavenly restriction that Toji had. Like Toji, she's very skilled in martial arts and the usage of cursed tools, though not to the same level as him. As a result, she's far more hands on when fighting curses and other fighters in comparison to the rest of the jujitsu sorcerers (with the exception of Yuji ofc). It's really fun to watch her fight as she seeks to prove that she can be a big shot sorcerer in spite of the Zenin clan (including her sister Maki). There's a few other characters I would like to go over, like Megumi and Sukuna, but I'll save them for later.

The Shibuya Incident arc, which starts right after the Hidden Inventory arc, is where shit really hits the fan, as scores of background characters are slaughtered by curses like Jogo, Mahito, and Sukuna. While the arc starts off in a very lighthearted way, the arc quickly starts to go off the rails. The cast are in the worst position that they have ever been in as it becomes clear that jujitsu society had relied too much on Gojo and his godlike powers to deal with threats that pose as much risk as Mahito and Sukuna. In many circumstances throughout the arc, our heroes are saved by the skin of their teeth or by circumstances that they couldn't have possibly predicted. For the most part, the Shibuya Incident arc was a rather solid way of taking the story in a darker direction and certain fights like Jogo vs Sukuna, Sukuna vs Mahoraga, and the rematch between Yuji and Mahito were all very well done. Having said that, certain fights like Yuji's fight with that cricket curse felt super dragged out for no real reason. I also have some serious issues with one particular death.

Despite some issues with the Shibuya Incident arc, I still had a lot of fun with the story and I enjoyed certain parts of the story afterwards like how Maki grew much stronger following that arc. However, the Culling Game arc is where the story really plummets in quality overall. While a lot of the arc is still pretty fun, and I do really enjoy certain characters that are introduced like Hikari (who has a really fun energy to him) and Higuruma (a lawyer who develops a really cool ability), most of the new characters are nobodies who are only really there to have cool fights in this killing game Kenjaku set up to mass produce jujitsu sorcerers. The result is a lot of cool fights, but ones that feel far more inconsequential in comparison to the fights that took place beforehand. I also have to emphasize how much of a slog the story became after the Shibuya arc. The Culling Game and Shinjuku Showdown take up about half of the entire 271 chapter manga. The arcs beforehand were much shorter and the story was good at balancing its lighter, more comedic side and the darker, more brutal aspects of the world. These last two arcs by comparison are far slower and don't have that same fun energy that the arcs before them did. There are some major highlights that do explore the cast, like Yuji vs Higuruma and Maki vs Naoya, but many of them, like Yuta vs some other guys, feels like they're just there for the spectacle, which is fine and all, but before, it felt like there was more than just the spectacle, ya know? Before, it felt like there were a lot of stakes and emotion behind the fights, especially the ones Yuji had against Mahito, but now? Now it felt like there was a lot of padding with all of this yapping about character powers and the fights felt like they were just there to pass the time.

I didn't hate the Culling Game arc or anything per se. I found it kind of disappointing, but I still had fun here and there, and as mentioned previously, I did really like Hikari and Higuruma. However, the same cannot be said about Shinjuku Showdown. Shinjuku Showdown? More like Shinjuku Letdown! Holy shit, this arc was abysmal. What the hell even happened here?

Massive spoilers for Shinjuku Showdown below

To make a long story short, Shinjuku Showdown was probably the most disappointing thing I have had the displeasure of reading from beginning to end. Sukuna felt like some kind of Saturday morning cartoon villain with no backstory or any real intrigue by the time it took place. The characters all felt wasted as they either died in an anticlimactic way or many of them were just pushed to the side. Nothing about the ending really inspired any satisfaction from me and all I'm left with a disappointing slog from a story I previously had a lot of respect and admiration for. For what its worth, I would still recommend the story up to the Shibuya arc. After that? There's not too much I would really recommend beyond some stand out moments. I have no real intention of disparaging Gege as a writer or anything like that, but it feels like he got lost in the sauce, and that is a damn shame.