Jujutsu Kaisen

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Jujutsu Kaisen seriously surprised me. After finishing Season 1, I couldn’t wait for more, so I picked up the manga—and ended up flying through it way faster than I thought I would. I’ve never really been into manga before this, but something about JJK just clicked with me. The story gets darker, the characters go through hell, and it never stops being exciting or emotional.

Yuji’s journey hit me especially hard. It’s not just about fighting curses—it’s about carrying pain and still choosing to move forward. He loses so much, and the way that weighs on him feels real. There are moments where he completely breaks ... down, and honestly, it’s rough to watch. But that’s what makes him such a strong main character—he feels human. He’s not just strong physically, he’s emotionally complicated, and his struggles don’t magically disappear. They build.

And he’s not alone in that. Characters like Megumi, Nobara, Nanami (god, Nanami), and even the villains all go through their own arcs. Some of them made me laugh out loud, others actually made me stop reading for a second just to process what happened. No one’s safe in this story, and it means something when things go wrong.

The fights? Easily some of the coolest I’ve seen. It’s not just flashy moves—there’s real strategy, power systems with rules, and that “oh no” feeling when someone’s outmatched. The way curses work, the Domain Expansions, all of that—it's creative and fun to follow. And the art? It might look messy sometimes, but once you get used to it, it hits hard. The chaotic style kind of adds to the feeling that nothing is really in control.

Even with all the intensity, the series knows how to be funny without killing the mood. That balance between serious and silly is something not many stories pull off this well. One chapter can leave you smiling, and the next might completely wreck you.

I didn’t expect to love this manga as much as I did. And maybe I’m a little biased since this is the first one I ever read—but even if it wasn’t, I’m pretty sure it’d still rank high for me. If you’ve seen Season 1 and are on the fence about diving into the manga: do it. It only gets better, wilder, and way more emotional from there.

I generally have enjoyed the series from being a non manga reader for the first two seasons of the anime and it does seem the arc after the 2nd season is not as good, the final season really drops in quality and is not that enjoyable to watch. The series hurts from having almost 300 chapters and the lack of worldbuilding really appears in the last arc because of how long it is and this is where you would get flashbacks of the characters to understand them better for the characters that have been kept mysterious and they dont get those flashbacks, making those characters ... feel 2d and less purpose. The fights are outstanding and the series is consistent with the idea of each fight being significant with there being a loser and a victor and repercussions for the loser. It makes the series as a first read feel a lot more intense and interesting because you really want that character to win because well if they lose, it may be catastrophic for them. The power system is cool enough to make sense but some characters are made too strong and the only way for them to be defeated is to get hoed and it makes it feel less deserving for the victors and lowers the fun of the fight because those characters dont get to go all out. One character was foreshadowed heavy and we all saw it coming but didnt want and they still made it that way and that also made the fans really not like the end of the series. Back to the final arc, in most action mangas, the main character becomes the strongest or is the strongest in the world of the series. Well the main character does not reach that point and in fact probably has 4 other people stronger than him by the manga ends. The abilities other characters get are a lot more cooler than what the main character gets and the problem with the abilities he gets is the guy who wrote the story probably realized that the main character was strong but not strong enough so they kind of just throw a bunch of abilities on the main character all at once when the mangas almost over and because they arent even cool, its really underwhelming when there was so much hype for when the main character would get those abilities. This series really had the potential to be a 9 and for the first 3 arcs, the mangas pretty damn good, it just slowly falls off from there to the end. If you just want people throwing hands and people getting jumped with a cool power system and dont care about a story or about the world the characters live in, then this series is it. If I had to rate the arcs, it would be 8,10,9,8,6 and is why I decided to make it a decent 8 overall.

It pains me to say it, but this manga got popular off of Mappa's flashy art style, hot male characters and fan service. None of which even is in this manga.

You can tell this is the first big project by this author. His inexperience makes it very obvious.

This manga starts slow, painfully similar to any other Shonen. It's nothing special. Then Shibuya Incident arc is incredible, beautiful and so so interesting, and then it's a nothing burger till the end. Its author shows no respect for any character or structure he has put in place, disregards all logic and mostly does whatever the heck ... he wants just because he wants to. He also seems to be so painfully aware of his fanbase, because every and all decisions seem to be done just to shock it. It's almost like he was toying with the reader, just for the sake of it.

He owes all his success to Mappa's brilliant season two, because if there's a big reason why JJK is this popular, it's because of the fan service, not because of whatever he thought he was cooking, story wise. The fan service overshadows the characters he himself created, mainly Gojo Satoru (and his relationship to side character, Geto Suguru)*, being probably the only good thing to come out of this mess. It seems like he hated how strong he made Gojo because every single fight Gojo finds himself in shows him having trouble he shouldn't be having at all, logically speaking. Getting sealed? Don't make me laugh...

*I have to say, even though the Hidden Inventory arc has a lot of issues structure wise, making it absolutely not perfect by any means, it truly does make you long for how good this manga could've been. The potential is truly all there.

As another review said, this manga makes you feel just a tad smarter than you actually are, because out of all the theories being made online as the chapters were actively coming out, not one of them was worse then whatever crazy direction JJK ended up going. Every second spent reading the chapters past Shibuya was painful for me and all the people around me who were also reading them at the same time.

There's much more to say but I will limit myself to a general overview of this manga. The absolutely incredible, massive and devastating wasted potential of this series is truly what upsets me the most. For this reason, I can't help it but go with the lowest score possible.