
a review by FAaijin

a review by FAaijin
Jujutsu Kaisen is... truly a manga.
I mean, what a let down of what it could have been. It had the potential to be a fantastic shonen, a next gen Bleach, but instead of learning from its errors, it just copied them all and made them worse. Anyway, let's review it in deep:
Worldbuilding-
It's ok, nothing special, but not bad either. The cursed energy and the cursed creatures are kinda easy to understand and pretty consistent over the story, they are not deep but it doesn't need it to be. The issue here are the special techniques. The unique moves every character use to be...well, unique, are a mess. Some techniques changes how they work over the course of the manga, just because it conflicts with how other newly introduced techniques work, or because it would be convenient to work in another way. At the end, you just don't know what anything does anymore, so you go with the flow of "it works". 14/20
Story-
Oh boy it started great, really great. I got engaged at the first chapter and got my expectations a bit high, not gonna lie. But the more I read, the more dissapointed it got. It even got what I expected, but not how I expected regarding quality. Little by little, instead of just showing what's happening, the characters or just a side note ends up explaining what's happening and what are we watching. So at the second half of the manga, we just get scenes with an over-explanation over it. You know when kids play like they got powers and they go by:
-"I throw my super destroying cannon!"
+"Oh, then I defend myself with my ever shield!"
-"But my super destroying cannon can overcome your shield"
Well, that summarizes almost every fight we see. So it's lazy writting, recurring to flashbacks and useless explanations mid-fight to understand what's going on, bringing old and new characters out of nowhere. 12/20
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The Character Development__
I really tought if this section was really needed, because there is nothing I can say. The development of characters are almost no existent. But like, no one seems to really learn from the things that happens, to learn how to overcome their own weaknesses and develop as a human being. And Itadori... he develops, but up to a third of the story. After the shibuya incident, Itadori seems to think about nothing, empty head, empty mind. Just the goal, the mission the characters have. Even at the end he seems to not have learned anything, just that he's not that goofy as before. But hey, Fushiguro, seems to learn something because he laughs at the end! ffs a side note even told us that Megumi just refused to keep living, but nothing shows us what changed his mind, just that it happened.
So the characters feels like a fill for the story, but they don't feel like real human beings, because they change to be a mindless, emotionless soldier. 6/20
The Art Style-
Another mess. I'm and artist and yeah, plenty of us pass through this kind of art style, realistic but sketchy. The thing is, that it doesn't really work for a manga. I mean, there is no clear vision of what is going on, plenty of scenes are messy and rough, hard to see what's happening. But hey, let's not be that harsh, everyone learns at their own pace, but- the basics, you cannot fail them. In cinema there is a law that you cannot change the angle of a character mid scene without a motive like, if A is talking to B to the right, then A should be shown from the left and B from the right, but not both from the same side, because it seems they are sitting next to eachother. Well, that happens plenty of times in the manga, in fights where your don't know where the character is or where is coming from. In the last chapters, there is even a scene where Itadori just punches Sukuna from the same side he is, making it weird because Itadori just came from where Sukuna was. And it tries to makes detailed scenes, but with that rough art style...well, you don't know which character is who or where are them. There is even a panel in which Sukuna supposedly makes a Black flash, but there is nowhere to be seen, just because a narrator showed it. So no, it isn't good. 8/20
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The Writting__-
I wish I could understand japanese (soon), so I won't talk about the election of words, because there has been issues with official translations.
But I'll talk about the explanations thing. Because really, it felt like reading the wiki but with drawings here and there, a completely mess. I don't need for a character to explain to me what's going on: If it's quite literal that we see a character happy, I don't need a explanation that he's happy. And when there is some unintelligible thing happening, then I don't need the explanation, I need more clarity so I grasp what's happening by myself, because my media literacy isn't dead. Most of the time is like text and visuals fight eachother for the protagonism. That's truly a letdown. 5/20
Overall is somewhat good, but as a manga... it feels cheap, lazy and not that refined. I really enjoyed the first half, I wanted to learn more, how it works, how everything would develop, but at the end it feels like a cheap copy of Bleach:
How the MC gains his powers, how there is a "secret" society that works against ghosts, how he has the power of a demon, how he grows as a fighter, how someone had everything planed out from the beginning, related to the good guys that seemed bad at first. Even the arcs feels kinda a copy, like the Shibuya arc with the Soul Society arc, and the Culling game with the last arc of the Arrancar Saga.
What I'm trying to say is that the whole unique personality that it had when the manga started, banished pretty fast when every major curse dissapeared and was just a Sorcerer vs Sorcerer war. And no, Bleach isn't even that good as it got pretty old, but at least it knew from the start how to do things.
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