Jujutsu Kaisen Review

The best stretch is very good. Akutami builds cursed techniques as contracts with declared conditions, and the Shibuya arc spends seven volumes cashing those conditions in across a city sized battle where the outcome repeatedly turns on a rule stated chapters earlier. The cast is the strongest asset, because the students are funny and specific, Gojo is a genuine pop culture creation, and the series is willing to kill people readers care about without ceremony. Then it unravels.

The Culling Game introduces dozens of participants and abandons most of them, several major fights are decided by exposition dumps that explain a technique after it has already won, and the final arc resolves the central conflict in a manner that reads as fatigue rather than design. The art compounds it, since Akutami's later fight pages are frequently hard to follow, with backgrounds dropped and impacts illegible. Reader scores fell measurably during publication, which almost never happens to a hit on this scale. What remains is a brilliant middle attached to a beginning that promised more and an ending that delivered less.