Jujutsu Kaisen: The Culling Game Part 1

In short, the only good episodes were EPs 1-2 and 12. For a new viewer, these are the only good episodes you should watch with the addition of EP 9. The rest are skippable and not only add nothing but deduct from the overall experience. For a complete overview of the story of the Culling Games, we are better off with the source material. So we have 3 good and 1 acceptable episodes out of 12. The rest are in terms of tonality and pacing, a complete joke. How did this happen? The more the season went on the more obvious it became that the director Goshozonoactually just took a massive spiteful shit on JJK in order make the 1st Part of the 3rd season his "artsy" directoral portfolio piece before fucking off from the studio after his contract expired. The weird "movie-like" angles, shots, the agony inducing "kill bill" scene, forced "funny" moments all scream of a pretentious wannabe creative millennial going rampant and just doing whatever he wants without any oversight. Obviously this makes the end-product feel like a disjointed mess, most notably in tone. Mappa has partial guilt by giving this animal full creative control rather than controlling him like during the 2nd Season (Shibuya Arc) . There should have been several other people next to him at all times to slap the pen out of his hand whenever he wanted to put his own bullshit in. At the very least the damage he has done is minimized to the 3rd Season 1st Part and the fans can have a directoral reset for the 2nd Part of this season.

Fight me on this, but what MAPPA has achieved with the third season of Jujutsu Kaisen outclasses not only Ufotable’s work on Demon Slayer, but also its own prior attempt at cinematic adaptation in Chainsaw Man season 1. The difference lies in approach. Ufotable excels at amplification. With Demon Slayer, what exists in the manga by Koyoharu Gotouge is often abstracted or compressed; the anime expands it into fully realized spectacle through choreography, lighting, and compositing. It is an elevation of presentation, a refinement of surface. But rarely does it challenge or reinterpret the underlying structure. MAPPA, on the other hand, operates as a translator rather thanan augmenter. With Gege Akutami’s Jujutsu Kaisen, there is little need to add. The source material is already dense to the point of friction. Pacing is precarious, information is overloaded, and action often borders on disorientation. These are not shortcomings as much as they are symptoms of a mismatch between medium and intent. Because the truth is, Jujutsu Kaisen in manga form has not fully met its own potential. Akutami’s strength lies in kinetic energy, in movement, escalation, and split-second decision making. These qualities resist the stillness of panels. What emerges instead is heavy exposition, abrupt dialogue, and action that can feel fragmented rather than fluid. This is where the anime becomes essential. Not as embellishment, but as realization. Season 3, more than any installment before it, understands this. It does not overwrite the material; it releases it. Moments that once felt compressed now breathe with intention and clarity. Maki’s arc gains a sense of cinematic inevitability. Megumi’s tactical thinking unfolds at the speed it demands. Yuji, often understated on the page, finally carries weight in both voice and motion. The result is not simply a better-looking version of the same story, but a more complete one. At its peak, the Culling Game arc reveals something else. Through its tournament structure, cliché as it may be, the world is forced open. Systems collide, rules are stress-tested, and the narrative gains a playground large enough to match its ambitions. It is controlled chaos, and in that chaos, Akutami finds a distinct kind of authorship. This is where i can make a comparison to Quentin Tarantino. Not in style, but in sensibility. A willingness to play within genre while simultaneously bending it. A rhythm that prioritizes tension, release, and sudden bursts of violence as punctuation rather than spectacle alone. A sense that the creator is actively engaging with the form, not merely operating inside it. By contrast, Chainsaw Man, despite being marketed as the cinematic anime of its generation, feels more constrained. Its direction is deliberate, even impressive at times, but also self-conscious. Where Jujutsu Kaisen thrives in momentum, Chainsaw Man lingers. Where one liberates its source, the other imposes a lens onto it. That difference is everything. At this point in the story, it feels fair to say that Jujutsu Kaisen has reached the peak of Akutami’s writing, not just because of what is being told, but because of how completely it is being realized. And in that realization, MAPPA has done more than adapt. It has uncovered the version of the story that the original medium could only suggest.

The show took a nose drive from low orbit to the bottom of the mariana trench, haven't seen a show deteriorate this severely since young justice. It is worse than berserk 2016 and OPM season 3, those 2 are infamous for bad animation but the music, tone, themes, pacing, story telling remain consistent, none of that can be said about JJK season 3 part 1, it's not only objectively god awful compared to seasons 1 and 2, it is the single worst season of anime I personally have ever seen -It's mostly filler, you can watch episodes 1,4 and 12 and not miss a single narrativebeat - ^ On top of being almost entirely filler, there are entire episodes where there isn't a single second of entertainment to be found, entire episodes where a character serves as exposition.mp3 to blabber on for 20 straight minutes without saying a single damn thing -Most of the established, popular, relevant characters get zero screentime, this is not hyperbole, literally not a single frame or even have their names said a single time - None of the events that season 2 culminated to get wrapped up or even mentioned - ALL of the characters involved in season 2 finale are randomly spread out with zero explanation, all the mercenaries, curse users, regular mortals caught in the crossfire, sorcerers, absolute nothingness, season 2 may as well not have happened for how irrelevant it is treated. - The tiny number of relevant characters who do get screen time get their entire arc rushed, there are multiple events in this part that are supposed to be tragic, but they happen with zero build up, zero dialogue so they have zero weight, zero impact and zero emotion, there are 30 second tv ad's that do a better job of evoking emotion than this season. - The animation is awful, constant intentional bad camera angles and lazy long shots in a paper thin attempt to try and hide the fact that neither characters or environments have any detail to them - The action sequences are appalling, yuji vs choso in season 2 or literally any fight in season 1 had more effort, time , thought, choreography and frames go into them then all 12 of these episodes combined -The premise, if you can even call it that is this " Geto had everything he needed to enact his plan with the culmination of the season 2 finale, but instead of doing it he has decided to start an arbitrary battle royale where irrelevant characters with no motivations, no personality, no backstory, no explanation at all for their participation, no explanation at all for their connection to geto, engage in said battle royale so that Geto can pursue a plan he already has all the pieces to complete" It's so piss poor, you could put a pen in the mouth of a comatose patient, hold up a pad to their face and the scribblings on the pad from their machine assisted breathing moving the pen would create a more developed and sound narrative.

If I had to describe JJK this season, it would be like that girl who is so insecure about her lack of personality and depth that she decided to put on an ungodly amount of makeup to compensate. This season of JJK is one of the worst seasons of any shounen that I’ve ever seen. It is rare for a high-budget show produced by a reputable studio like Mappa to be this atrocious. Watching this show is a literal assault on all of my senses. Episode 3 is by far the worst episode that has ever been produced by any studio in recent years. The entire episode featurescharacters standing around explaining the “rules” that are so mind-numbingly convoluted that I tuned out of the show completely. The exposition is not even done in a cool or unique way. They flash black text on a white background that occasionally moves, shift angles, and switch colors from white to black. Absolutely riveting stuff. I swear, One Punch Man season 3 has more animation than this pathetic excuse of an episode. At least, the animators can catch a lunch break or two before slaving away on another slopkuga episode. Speaking of slopkuga, I gave up on learning about the rules in episode 3 and hope that maybe the fights could be fun, just to be hit with another atrocity committed by Mappa, this time to animation in episode 4. After watching Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc and seeing its meteoric rise to mainstream success, I felt that something was very wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but now I understand. Mappa this season has adopted the chaotic mess of the sakuga action in that movie and applied it to most of the action sequences for this season of JJK. The action is so incomprehensible that it is nauseating to watch. The constantly changing camera angles, characters defying the law of physics and launching themselves into empty subdimensions, overuse of effects and impact frames, and character posing for no reason while fighting make every fight virtually indecipherable and cringe-inducing. It's like they make fights to get clipped and views on TikTok. The reason why iconic anime fights like Asuka’s fighting against the angels or Spike Spiegel vs Vicous are so well-loved and talked about is that they are not only easy to grasp but are also well-executed with a lot of careful attention to details and choreography in every frame, not this visual hellscape. On top of that, in later episodes, they do exposition in the backdrop of several fight that contains pseudo-intellectual garbage the author found on Google or convoluted explanations of their powers. It is a literal stinky bukkake of visual and audio noise. One thing I have to give props to them, though, is that this animated abomination has given me several seizures to pass through it quickly. Thank you, Mappa. For the OST, I couldn’t think of anything more off-putting than a jazz-rock fusion, happy-go-lucky soundtrack with a harmonica section on top of somebody murdering an entire clan of people. Maybe it’s just me, though. The only saving grace for the OST is the OP and ED, but mostly because of my predisposition towards J-rock, and some of the dramatic tracks are relatively well-composed. In the last episode of the series, they even try to insert the OP track in the middle of an Avengers Assemble moment with a PowerPuff Girls-inspired transition to conceal the fact that most of the fight was composed using PS3 CGI graphics. A shounen with bad characters and power systems is a failed one. Power system is one of the core concepts of a shounen, and this show can’t even do it correctly. Everything has to have a one-page set of special rules and conditions. The author didn’t know how to make actual interesting abilities that have simple to understand gimmicks, but creative utilization like Nen, so he resorted to adding convoluted and artificially complex mechanics to all of the powers. He also loves to insert random numbers and nonsensical jargon into their power to make them seem “cool” and “interesting”. As for the characters, Maki is terrible now, that’s great. In order to turn her into a Fushiguro clone and make her exude “aura”, they decided to make her kill her entire clan. Maki hates the clan because the orthodox, or whatever, is evil for killing her sister and causing her and her sister to choose to exact violence against EVERYONE IN THE CLAN. Because turning her into an irredeemable, hypocritical, and vengeful killing machine is surely gonna make me sympathize with her struggle. Higuruma is the only serviceable character in this show. In my interpretation, he basically wants to protect the weak who couldn’t defend themselves against the unjust law system that forces them to admit to false charges while protecting big corporations. During his fight, he wants Yuji to deny the claim against himself, but Yuji is earnest about his weakness. Higuruma wants to protect the weakness that humans possess to bring the light of truth to an eternal world of darkness filled with corruption and avarice. He wants the rules of the culling game to be about protecting the weak. That’s a pretty decent character. However, I have a hard time understanding him because he’s talking while flinging doo-doo at Yuji, and the narrator lady keeps on rambling about absolutely nothing. His characterization is so buried deep within the exposition, legalese, and fight animation that I legit couldn’t make out what this character was about, even after rewatching it multiple times. I can only infer after pausing and slowing down the episode. Everyone else is forgettable or cringeworthy. Their dialogues are unnatural, filled mostly with just exposition. This show is trying so hard to be unique and quirky that most of its characters are caricatures. The jokes are unfunny, and the comedic timing is so awful that I want to give them a pity chuckle from time to time, but I can’t even muster the strength to do that. Also, have you seen some of these character designs? Some of these outfits are hideous-looking. I wonder if I am watching JJK or those horrible avant-garde fashion shows. In summary, my complaint for this show not only stems from it being horrible, but it is also a symptom of a much bigger crisis approaching the anime industry. New shows are going to slowly get turned into the next Hollywood or Blockbuster superhero films because Mappa is pumping out slop every season while overworking their animators, masking it with their budget. I want them to make shows simpler and focus more on substance instead of style.