The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3: The Culling Game Part 1

A veil abruptly descends over the busy Shibuya area amid the bustling Halloween crowds, trapping countless civilians inside. Satoru Gojo, the strongest jujutsu sorcerer, steps into the chaos. But lying in wait are curse users and spirits scheming to seal him away. Yuji Itadori, accompanied by his classmates and other top-tier jujutsu sorcerers, enters the fray in an unprecedented clash of curses — the Shibuya Incident. In the aftermath, ten colonies across Japan are transformed into dens of curses in a plan orchestrated by Noritoshi Kamo, the most wicked sorcerer in history. As the deadly Culling Game starts, Special Grade sorcerer Yuta Okkotsu is assigned to carry out Yuji's execution for his perceived crimes.

Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3: The Culling Game Part 1 is based on the Jujutsu Kaisen manga by Gege Akutami. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

The premiere of season three of Jujutsu Kaisen is excellent until you stop and think about the character motivations. While a bit difficult to follow at times, the action animation on display is some of the best in the medium, and with plenty more fights set to come this season, Jujutsu Kaisen is on track to endure as the “sakuga” high water mark for the foreseeable future. The performances are affecting, the story is gripping, and I love that the team at MAPPA behind this anime is not only making JJK look good, but also distinct in this season premiere!

What was most striking to me about this episode wasn't just how good it looked, but how varied and creative the production team got with the visuals. Especially during Choso's fight with the Daddy's money POS Naoya, a lot was done to make a fairly forgettable fight from the manga more memorable. The cuts to black and white, the effective use of color and lighting to create a dark, claustrophobic atmosphere, and the rendering of Nayoa's super speed as a blue film-distortion effect were all inspired creative choices.

This elevated animation is used to great effect to drive home the emotion of these scenes. Yuji, trying to wash blood off his hands is a heavy-handed, but ultimately effective physical representation of the guilt that the character endures at the start of the season. Similarly, Yuji, Yuta, and Megumi's fireside chat is staged and blocked incredibly well, with the posing and positioning of each character further establishing how their words and actions affect one another.

My only issue with this episode is that I don't know if some of the inciting events or character motivations hold up under scrutiny. Yuta supposedly has to fake Yuji's death again to get what's functionally the jujutsu sorcerer government off of his back. Still, I'm pretty sure Yuta and Megumi could have just met up with Yuji and explained the situation to him. No one who matters in this show so far has been a big supporter of the jujutsu feds, and I don't think any of them can stop Yuta from doing whatever he wants. Yuta even says that this is the second time Yuji has faked his death and that the magic cops are likely to catch onto them soon, meaning their conflict was just an excuse to have two fan favorite characters fight each other. Also, Naoya doesn't really have any reason to fight Choso, even if he's a conceited prick. I feel like he's at least intelligent enough to realize that his best play here is to stalk Yuji until Megumi arrives and force the latter into giving up his claim as head of the Zenin family.

I understand that my digging into these character motivations might come off as nitpicking, but that issue only stands out so much with the rest of the episode being so hyper-polished. In a season with a lot of popular returning anime, this premiere puts Jujutsu Kaisen well in front of the rest of the pack. If it can maintain these visuals while also shoring up the writing a bit, Jujutsu Kaisen will have more than earned its status as the biggest anime in the world right now.

You should go into this preview of Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3 knowing where I stand with the series, because it's complicated. I really enjoyed the first season back when I covered it in 2020, and I adored the mini-arc flashback to Gojo and Geto's past that made up the first five episodes of Season 2 when it dropped in the summer of 2023. The fights were stylish, the characters were charming, and the crazy sorcerer worldbuilding made for an excellent blend of action, fantasy, and horror. However, when we reached the Shibuya Incident storyline that comprised most of season 2 — the arc that manga fans had been singing the praises of and hyping up for months — a bizarre thing happened: I ended up kind of hating it.

To be clear, the kickass fight scenes and thrilling, horror-infused spectacle were just as visceral and entertaining as ever; if nothing else, the Shibuya Incident episodes are not wanting for wild, intense brawls (even if the strain MAPPA was putting on its artists was becoming more noticeable than ever). Despite all that, though, the Shibuya Incident is where the pacing, plotting, and character development of Jujutsu Kaisen just completely fell apart for me. Battles became overlong slogs of meaningless, over-explained action between characters I either didn't give a damn about or couldn't understand the function of as they were being used in the story. The whole plot ended up spinning around in circles for literal months without ever reaching the simple emotional heights it was clearing with ease at the beginning of the season. I am aware that this is a controversial opinion, and that many fans still consider the Shibuya Incident to be an example of peak shonen action cinema. As for me, while I would have considered myself an ardent JJK fan back in July of 2023, I approached the new episodes of this third season with the same amount of dread that I get in my work as a teacher when my students all turn in a hundred essays to grade at the same time. Right now, watching Jujutsu Kaisen feels like work.

A new season is supposed to be a fresh start, however, and I even did JJK the courtesy of skipping the recap portion of the Execution movie, because I knew that a less coherent retelling of the events of past seasons would just put me in an even more sour mood. I remember where we left of well enough, anyways: Most of the show's best characters are either dead or trapped in the Lament Configuration's Pokéball dimension, Psuedo-Geto is wrecking shit all over Japan, and our good friend Yuta from the Jujutsu Kaisen 0 movie is one of the folks who has been assigned to whack Yuji on account of the insane bloodbath that took place in Shibuya. So, where do we go from here?

The answer seems to be “Towards a lot more flashy action sequences that will dazzle the senses without doing much in the way of telling an interesting story.” Now, don't get me wrong, I am perfectly aware that animation is the art of giving life to stories and characters through the magical illusion of motion, and I believe that plenty of art that exists in either the second or the third dimension can get away with being cool just for cool's sake. We're damned close to fifty episodes into a television series that has been on the air since the COVID lockdowns were in full effect, though, so I don't think I am being unreasonable in expecting a little more substance to go along with all of Jujutsu Kaisen's undeniable style. It's like the Good Book says, folks: “Man can not live by sakuga alone…”

Thankfully, near the end of the first episode of Season 3, Jujutsu Kaisen picks up steam a little bit, because that's when Yuta arrives with his best friend Rika and makes his acquaintance with Yuji at long last. We're still far from the realm of prestige drama, of course. Still, given the show's terrible habit of throwing random jobbers into the plot for no good reason, it's difficult not to rejoice a little bit at the mere presence of some characters that the story has bothered to develop somewhat. That JJK 0 can so easily and viciously take Yuji out makes them out to be excellent rivals for our hero, even if the series is quick to reassure us that Gojo already made sure to secure Yuta's help as an ally, not an enemy. Honestly, the fact that Yuji is teaming up with some familiar faces again to pursue a goal that might actually give this story some forward momentum is enough to, if not win me over, at least give me hope that this third season of JJK might not be as much of a massive letdown as the last one was.

Jujutsu Kaisen has returned, and while it's pretty nice to have it back, my feelings on the series coming into the new season were a bit mixed. While I really liked the first season of the show and the way it mixed magic high school battles with some solid social commentary on all the bureaucracy of modern Japanese society and how it fails young people, I was a lot more divided on the second and how it ultimately became one giant string of fights that left me feeling a little burned out on top of unceremoniously killing off a couple of my favorite characters. The Culling Game arc, which is set to be covered this season, was also when the manga's story started losing me, so while the anime might improve my opinion of it, my expectations going in weren't very high.

Thankfully, I can say that for the most part, I had a good time with this first episode. With this picking up immediately following the events of the Shibuya Incident, it was good to see parts of this opener have Yuji trying to process all the deaths he's indirectly responsible for, and while watching him literally trying to wash the blood off his hands is a much more blunt way of depicting that than I'd like, it does at least give us an idea of where he's at mentally. Unfortunately, this isn't where a lot of the episode's focus is, and the fights take priority as Yuji and Choso (who's still following his “little brother” around, I guess) have to fend off pursuers from Jujutsu society with orders to assassinate the former. To the team at MAPPA's credit, though, those action sequences look really good, and even taking into account that this episode debuted in theatres, I was still impressed by how cinematic the presentation was. However, I hope that any attempts to maintain this quality won't come at the expense of the animators' health.

Besides following up on Yuji, we're also fully reintroduced to Okkotsu, who has seemingly been tasked with assassinating Yuji but turns out to actually be a double agent, as well as Maki's brother, Naoya, who quickly establishes himself as a misogynistic dirtbag looking to take over the family in his dad's absence. Both make for entertaining threats, and I'm thrilled that the series doesn't waste too much time pretending to frame Okkotsu as a villain, since, going off of Jujutsu Kaisen 0, there was never any real chance he would turn against Gojo.

Fun as a lot of this was, though, some of it was let down by Jujutsu Kaisen's tendency to over-explain things. It's annoying enough when this occasionally breaks the flow of a fight, but it's even more egregious when the rules for the titular Culling Game appear on screen as a massive wall of text. Even considering it was like this in the manga too it still feels like a poor way of handling that as opposed to some form of narration or visual aid (this isn't even taking into account that given how inconsistent Crunchyroll is about adding on-screen text for English audio tracks, there's a non-zero chance any dub watchers will be left in the dark on all this entirely), and it just felt really awkward in how it was implemented. Jujutsu Kaisen's need to be overly detailed can sometimes work against it as much as it works for it, and while it was able to avoid leaning towards the latter for this premiere, I hope it can maintain that balance for the rest of the season.