Forum - View topicREVIEW: Jujutsu Kaisen Manga Series Review
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ab2143
Posts: 870 |
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Yeah, Shinjuku Showdown was mostly bad
I’m enjoying Modulo more than the main series. It’s a shame it’s only short serialisation |
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2720 |
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I can't sympathize with your experience in the slightest. Whether it's the Shibuya Incident which paid off the series-long statement of Gojo's importance to society by showing it crumple into a tinfoil ball without him, showed exactly why Sukuna isn't Kurama and very much shouldn't be free, drastically altered protagonist Yuji's outlook on life, and set up plotting for future arcs, the character payoffs with characters like Yuji, Megumi, Sukuna, and Yuta, or the inventive and fascinating battles that trust the reader to think about unrevealed aspects alongside the characters, I simply had a vastly different and much better experience with JJK than you. I'm also really baffled by being unable to tell characters apart, as I can't think of any reasonable examples.
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tintor2
 Posts: 2705 |
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I think I had similar thoughts when reading the series. When season 1 was released, I was more interested in Dr. Stone since the characters' strategies when fighting were easier to understand and also creative since they avoided murders. Jujutsu feels like the author wanted to make Naruto but edgy as Akutami said he based Sukuna on Kurama who keeps laughing on Yuji's face while the "superior female character" Nobara even swears before being put in the fridge.. Even Sukuna feels like a boring villain cos the final arc lasts around 6 volumes. Compare Sukuna's final fight with other famous villains like Toguro, Meruem or Sensui and you have a big difference of length.
I honestly didn't care much about Jujutsu Kaisen until I learned of 0 and how the lead was voiced by Megumi Ogata for some reason. I found 0 more refreshing and easier to follow especially since Yuta's character arc was more outstanding. Sadly, his return in the final arc feels rushed as Sukuna downright faces every character on a ridiculous fashion that makes turns spoiler[Gojo into Himmel flashback mode.] Geto was also compelling but Kenjaku feels like twist that ruins any build up the flashback arc had as spoiler[it makes no sense to make him confront Gojo other than making him a surprise. Same with Kenjaku himself. After a comedy gag, Yuta just decapitates him. It feels like Akutami wanted glorify Sukuna and he was willing to ruin Gojo and Kenjaku in the process.] |
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LastPage 3
Posts: 291 |
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Completely agree with you. I don't know how someone can do a review of these parts of the manga and ignore all of these points. Also, it's ANN's usual disdain for deep lore. Maybe they could try finding a reviewer who actually can appreciate series like this and let them handle reviews for this series. I shudder to think what this guy would make of something like HxH. |
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Scion Drake
Posts: 982 |
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Thats the thing, I did not find many of these payoffs remotely satisfying. Megumi turned into the biggest bum on the planet, and basically had absolutely no agency in the final stretch of the manga. Sukuna turned into the worst kind of invincible villain, with grotesquely long fight scenes painfully extended by the narrative going above and beyond to hand Sukuna the keys to every victory possible to keep him alive. And thats on top of a great many, many wasted characters like Nobara. At a certain point it become a monumental parody of itself and a giant slog. There was attempts at deep storytelling, but the narrative had fallen apart to such a degree that it felt more pretentious than anything. |
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OH&S
 Posts: 314 Location: Sydney, Australia |
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Count me among those that were unimpressed after reading through to the end of the manga.
I didn't hate the Shibuya Incident but clearly wasn't enamored by it as much as everyone else. But outside of a couple of bright spots (how Yuji and Gojo were handled), the problems I have with JJK collapse down to two points:
5/10. The community memes were fun though. With all that said, I've been reading the currently serializing limited sequel series, JJK: Modulo, and that is so far fantastic for a limited series. Highly recommend that the reviewer read that on Viz/MangaPlus to wash the bad taste of JJK out of their mouth. |
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whiskeyii
 Posts: 2466 |
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I wanna qualify this with I’m not a JJK fan, I recognized pretty much from the word go that it wasn’t gonna be a series for me and passed on it. And it seemed like folks were pretty happy with the first season. But at least from my very casual outside-looking-in perspective, it feels like the general vibe is leaning more “the action is awesome, but the story just isn’t what I thought it was gonna be”.
And I think it’s totally fine to watch a show for its action scenes alone (I mean, it’s animation, why not appreciate the good stuff?) but I kind of wonder if the more fairweather/casual anime-only fans are going to wind up clashing with the manga fans a bit, because it seems to me that the JJK manga fandom kind of weeded itself out by virtue of just sticking around for the end. Anyone who was turned off by this style of storytelling probably abandoned ship, so you’re likely just left with the die-hards and a handful of outliers (the hate-readers, the wishful thinkers, etc.) I don’t think anyone’s wrong for enjoying how and where JJK wound up—if it’s your jam, it’s your jam—but I suspect Cormack’s perspective might be an early indicator of where a lot of anime-only JJK fans *will* end up in a decade or so. |
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dmanatunga
Posts: 125 |
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I feel like saying there is a disdain for deep lore is a misunderstanding the reviewer's complaints. As someone who dropped JJK at the Shibuya arc, I had similar feelings with the reviewer on how pages of the manga became devoted to explaining the different nuances in the cursed techniques. It began to feel like reading Wikipedia entries. Don't get me wrong though, I'm not trying to say that is inherently bad (plenty of American comics I have read where I enjoy the data-page here and there), but I also recognize that for most folks who enjoy the medium, you need a high-level of investment in the material to find those sorts of pages enjoyable. Or TL;DR view: For a medium where a common reviewer complaint is "Show, don't tell", it shouldn't be surprising if a reviewer gets deeply bored at loads of exposition dumps. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 7201 |
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A manga that 20 some odd years on is still very much unfinished? So by extension some of said lore isn’t finished either? |
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chrisb
 Subscriber Posts: 766 Location: USA |
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Why is it a thing in nerd media, especially anime, to over explain the fantasy and scifi elements? Most modern day action movies/games will have characters shooting barrels of gas causing massive explosions and no one really cares. Do fans of niche genres just expect more explanations to all the crazy on screen/page?
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MFrontier
Posts: 20003 |
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"The rest of them, though… I struggled to keep track of who they were and why I should care."
That Miwa and Mechamaru slander. |
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barran.nugraha
Posts: 25 |
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Honestly after Shibuya, other than small moments here and there, I also pretty much just going through the motion with JJK. Like I'm already here, might just finished it kind of feeling. Boy, Shinjuku Showdown, so many things to say most of them not good. Yeah, Gojo vs Sukuna was hype, but then turn to slog witb its extended talking heads commentary and ended in an annoying cop out that Gege couldn't even bother to show in full. IMO, it's another syndrome with many Reiwa shonen manga, big in scope, but not willing to take the time to let it all sink in and just rush through it. Kimetsu final arc IMO, also got hit by it and with a final battle just as a slog to get through. Oh well, here's hoping Kagurabachi won't be the same.
Last edited by barran.nugraha on Wed Dec 17, 2025 3:51 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Blaze_1013
Posts: 220 |
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I'm not as low on the Shibuya arc as the reviewer, but I do get their issue and I do agree the series drops off after it. My problem is that it spends the Shibuya arc killing or just side lining from the story a large chunk of the cast to that point. Not that anything is wrong with that on its face, but I never connected to the new characters the way I did the ones we had earlier. I still find it incredibly stupid that spoiler[Inumaki, whose power is speaking at you, just stops existing because he loses an arm. Like, I could be misremembering, but I don't think he took any more damage than that and I think he does one more thing from the rest of the story.] The technical aspect of how powers work also is a slog. From my understanding the official translation for the series isn't that good and probably makes it worse, but that doesn't change the fact that spending the amount of time the series does on how things work is not to its advantage. The revolving door that becomes the final fight and how spoiler[Kenjaku is just an afterthought] also didn't sit well with me even if parts of the finale I still found enjoyable. Still, I'm going to be watching the anime to completion to see if my opinions change and because I know if nothing else the visual spectacle will be impressive.
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FanGamer24
Posts: 305 |
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Yeah, Shibuya was definitely the start of a steep decline for the series. Yeah, it paid off a lot of plotlines up to that point, but it also killed off/sidelined the vast majority of the cast up to that point, and it never really recovered.
The culling games have some cool fights, but plot-wise wise none of it really ends up mattering in the long run and leads into one of the most ridiculously drawn out final battles I've ever seen. |
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LastPage 3
Posts: 291 |
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Megumi is really one of the most misunderstood characters in manga. He doesn't start having no agency by this stretch of the manga. He never had agency to begin with. He never wanted to be a sorcerer in the first place, he only became one because Gojo forced him. His sister got cursed and that gave him some motivation but that was in turn cruelly used against him by Sukuna.
Absolutely crazy statement when Culling Games set up the whole final arc. Even your beloved Modulo gets set up by stuff that happens in Culling Games.
Because it is fun. Constructing a detailed world and explaining how it's various elements would interact with each other is fun. It's the kind of fun you can only really get in scifi or fantasy. It's fine not to like this if it's not to your taste, but I wonder why people have such a problem with this. You don't see people complaining like this over day florid descriptions of personal drama in romance stories. |
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