Jujutsu Kaisen 2nd Season

The year is 2006, and the halls of Tokyo Prefectural Jujutsu High School echo with the endless bickering and intense debate between two inseparable best friends. Exuding unshakeable confidence, Satoru Gojou and Suguru Getou believe there is no challenge too great for young and powerful Special Grade sorcerers such as themselves. They are tasked with safely delivering a sensible girl named Riko Amanai to the entity whose existence is the very essence of the jujutsu world. However, the mission plunges them into an exhausting swirl of moral conflict that threatens to destroy the already feeble amity between sorcerers and ordinary humans.

Twelve years later, students and sorcerers are the frontline defense against the rising number of high-level curses born from humans' negative emotions. As the entities grow in power, their self-awareness and ambition increase too. The curses unite for the common goal of eradicating humans and creating a world of only cursed energy users, led by a dangerous, ancient cursed spirit. To dispose of their greatest obstacle—the strongest sorcerer, Gojou—they orchestrate an attack at Shibuya Station on Halloween. Dividing into teams, the sorcerers enter the fight prepared to risk everything to protect the innocent and their own kind.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Gojou, Satoru Main

Nakamura, Yuuichi Japanese

Itadori, Yuuji Main

Enoki, Junya Japanese

Fushiguro, Megumi Main

Uchida, Yuuma Japanese

Kugisaki, Nobara Main

Seto, Asami Japanese

Getou, Suguru Main

Sakurai, Takahiro Japanese

Nanami, Kento Supporting

Tsuda, Kenjirou Japanese

Ryoumen, Sukuna Supporting

Suwabe, Junichi Japanese

Zenin, Maki Supporting

Komatsu, Mikako Japanese

Inumaki, Toge Supporting

Uchiyama, Kouki Japanese

Okkotsu, Yuuta Supporting

Ogata, Megumi Japanese

Seshimo, Keisuke Producer

Kimura, Makoto Producer

Murai, Yuriha Producer

Yamazaki, Hiroaki Producer

Reviews

Dec 28, 2023

ZeroMajor12

Recommended

Before I begin this review, I have a confession to make. After Episode 18 had aired, I felt honored as my home country was mentioned in the anime while also slightly amused by the idea the author included it. Hearing 2 different VAs having a vacation in a different country other than the usually portrayed countries like the US, Italy, France, or anything else is weirdly soothing. And yes, this is where I admit that I am a Malaysian. Witness the honored one.

It's been difficult to approach Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 with an objective mind, given how it was produced with extremely tight scheduling (only ... a week before the episode had to be aired!), and the studio's reluctance to pay its staff fairly. When MAPPA's working schedule is this bad, it's almost impossible to fathom how something like Jujutsu Kaisen could still look so good, despite the simplified look and some awkward drawings during action sequences. The staff had to give 120% of their potential to push out the episode for us, devoted fans of Jujutsu Kaisen, and to satisfy the company's greed for mainstream attention. At this point, it's hard to determine which approach is appropriate, as praising it would justify the decision MAPPA executives made and later encourage more situations like this for its staff, while criticizing it would discredit the effort of the staff, later proven by the cultural impact and media edits fans have posted for this season.

The two arcs this season adapts, Gojo's Past Arc and the infamous Shibuya Incident Arc that had many leaks and spoilers from manga fans; were surprisingly handled pretty well for something that was rushed. Well, since the Shibuya Incident Arc took a delay after Episode 5 aired, and for as little time they made to create 18 episodes fully compassing it, it did not disappoint, to say the least. The magnitude of the fights JJK is known for has multiplied further. Not to mention, we see some of the best voice acting to compete for 2023. Honestly, it was difficult to choose who had the best voice performance between Enoki Junya and Shimazaki Nobunaga, since they put their heart and soul into their roles, not to forget about Gojo's VA though. Truly the perfect example of everyone using 120% of their potential.

If there's any actual criticism I could give for this anime, it's the storytelling. While the set pieces are pulled off really well, it's at the cost of some brainless plot conveniences. While the action sequences and the payoffs are great, the story's logic is idiosyncratic, like the previous season. It takes plenty of time to elaborate the power system and techniques used by different people alike, but then allows some characters to ignore that logic and then proceed to explain it in the most general way possible as if it would accomplish anything. This kind of shenanigans can be a real pain in the head for people who are looking for actual grounded shows. The author follows the system until they say that something needs to happen regardless of the outcome. Well, it just means you're going to see some plot armor here and there.

Other than that, feast your eyes on some of the most action-packed sequences we have gotten this year. There are still some legitimate criticisms with people claiming the animation looks like fan art (they're not wrong, sometimes the art does look rough and unpolished), but the cinematography and choreography do not miss. It's so fluid that the impact of each of their force is properly registered and does not feel awkward (well, excluding a few scenes that took shortcuts like Episode 17). Taking into consideration the intensity and stakes this series has introduced further, the payoff is immensely satisfying, even greater than JJK Season 1's action sequences.

To summarize, Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 is a product of great talent that has been stretched thin by tight deadlines. We might never see a sequel of Jujutsu Kaisen that reaches this level of quality ever again, due to staff leaving MAPPA and never to be associated with it ever again. To me, it seems like the swan song of MAPPA's glory, as it all finally crumbles down for the people to see what lies beneath their facade.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Dec 28, 2023

Tkit

Mixed Feelings

Second season of Jujutsu Kaisen is truly astounding. It's incredible creative vision and ambition are only matched by disappointment coming from failures in achieving its enormous goals. To truly express my feelings about such a complicated piece of media I will have to go into spoiler teritory, but for now, until stated otherwise, I will avoid going in depth and assume you only watched the first season.

So should you continue watching Jujutsu after its long introduction you had to go through that is the first season? It is hard to say as the continuation of this story is very... let's say uneven in its strenghts. ... To help you decide let me start with what I enjoyed the most which is the combination of courage and passion put into this anime by a team of some of the very best artists in the industry. Despite massive challenges (that I will disscus in a bit) this show includes one of the most stunning and creatively impressive tv animation highlights I've seen in a long time, with incredible directing too. The team of very strong and different animators make this season of Jujutsu a compilation of many different styles and approaches animation can take, the scale of which is rarely seen. Sometimes a whole episode will be keeping a quality worthy of being shown in cinema.

Music was very fun with wide array of styles reaching some very jazzy places that I enjoyed greatly. Voice actors as always give their all in this series with many impressive performances throughout the show.

Story wise author shows some of his best moments with the first arc and many creative ideas throughout the rest of the season, but unfortunately here is where I will start complaining, with all of the ambition in mind it is obvious to me that plot is the weakest part of this show.

Lack of development for the many important characters is the most annoying problem. Even in the main trio only Itadori got sufficient level of development for me to care at least a little bit. Characters that are with us since a long time are still being neglected while new ones are being intruduced. Thanks to this problem author turns to a classic move of fleshing out a character right before his/her death, which I always hate to see, especially when they do it by having a long flashback. Antagonists are a very mixed bag. Sure Sukuna is great and I liked Mahito, but people like Toji or Geto are totally wasted which I will discuss in the spoiler section.

Fights are mostly badly written. There are few very notable exceptions, but mostly we are putting an established character against some random while the narrator is boring me to death with expositon about said random dude and his power. Rearly do we put two known, major and developed characters against eachother and sometimes when we do it turnes out to be badly handeld (I will get to it later). This is very annoying when some of the biggest fights in this climactic arc are between someone we know and some new or uninteresting dude. Many of those fights feel like being here mostly for show with not much being achived.

Power system is convoluted, and thanks to the aforementioned narrator we often are just informed of what everyone can do taking out any mystery about some of those uninteresting opponents. Conveluted system also gives the author an opportunity to often get his characters out of tough and interesting decisisons like with Gojo who ended up breaking a rule to his ability just because he is that good.

I don't really get what this series is trying to tell me. With no strong theme and lackluster plot, story of Jujutsu is just not very appealing to me.

Now let's talk about the production problems and tight timelines, resulting inconsistency in quality can either be very annoying or fascinating depending on you. Sure it is sad that those amazing artists didn't get to achive their vision thanks to corporate greed, with many frankly ugly moments in the series, but it is very impressive to see what they managed to achive after getting to know a little about what kind of problems they had to face. I would love to see a documentary about how we even managed to get what we did.

Should you watch season two? I would say most likely, but if you have problems along the way take a similar approach as one would in museum. This show made history and history while important doesn't have to be always pretty.

Now time to get into detail with my more important problems, first one is with Geto and the bad structure of this whole story.

If you, like me after watching Jujutsu zero assumed that Geto is dead and surely the one in the first season must be an imposter than chances are that the first half of this season will be very frustrating and will fail in many of the goals it is trying to accomplish. In the whole prequel arc I didn't care at all about Geto, problem which would be easly fixed by placing said arc at the begging of the story. This would also make Jujutsu zero a much better story. Unfortunately while the first arc impressed me the most it wasn't free of flaws as the fall of Geto himself felt very rushed and didn't convince me at all. Toji also feels wasted, with his only contributions being a power up for Gojo and a push towards evil for a dead soon to be antagonist.

Let's talk more about Toji and Megumi. Their fight was one of the biggest let downs of this season. We basically got nothing out of our protagonist who didn't even realize he was fighting his father. How do you screw this up?! This by all means shoud have been one of the best moments in this series. While we are talking about the big characters Kugisaki and Nanami turned out to have practically no arcs at all. Sure Nanami had his epic anime rage against some random, but I don't care. Nanami got basically abandoned by the author in favor of developing Itadori, which I despise as a decision. To be honest woman in this show have always been disappointing either being just a variation of your typical smirki personality or underdeveloped and forgettable like the blue haired Gojo fangirl. While we talk about Gojo I also have to say that I really don't get the hype about the most prideful and unchanging character in this series, but that is me just ranting at this point.

I haven't even talked about the many abandoned plot points. That will either be forgotten or reintroduced in the distant future, making me wonder why set things up like politics in the Zenin clan in the first season or other things like that when we barly even touched the subject.

I hoped that if you enjoyed Jujutsu Kaisen you won't come to my home and murder me in sleep as I've seen some very devoted fans of this show. Enjoy your show, know that I enjoyed it as well and have a great time.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Dec 28, 2023

Infamous_Empire

Not Recommended

So this is what it’s like to watch a series crash and burn in real time…

Jujutsu Kaisen is an interesting beast of a series. When it first hit the mainstream anime community in 2020, many immediately took to praising it as one of the best Battle Shonens to come out of modern Jump, in spite of the fact that, in many other people’s eyes, it had yet to do anything all that notable or special to set itself apart from the competition. A big part of this was, of course, manga readers hyping up what the series would eventually do later down the line, and ... the rest was anime-onlies who were either blinded by the sakuga or engaged with the idea of what the series *could be* rather than necessarily what it actually was at the time.

Regardless of the reason behind the hype, it was undeniable to many people that the show had potential. Sure, it might not be anything too special now, many people said, but if it executes its ideas well and lives up to the expectations the Manga readers set, then it absolutely could become one of the best modern Shonens.

And that’s where this season comes in. Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 is the series’s attempt to cash in all its hype, the moment where shit hits the fan and it truly becomes the series everyone says it could be. Or rather, to put it more accurately, Season 2 is when the show *tries* to do that, but ends up failing, falling down several flights of stairs, and ruining most of what made it entertaining in the first place.

Breaking it down first, it’s almost necessary to talk about the season in terms of the two parts which it was broken up into: the 6 episode Hidden Inventory arc which constitutes the start, and the 17 episode Shibuya Incident arc which makes up the remainder of the season.

The Hidden Inventory arc isn’t exactly anything too special, but it’s easily the best part of the season. This is some of the most tightly focused and plotted writing in the series, with its relatively short episode count being well-complemented by its small cast. As a flashback arc detailing Gojo’s Past, it succeeds well enough, adding a layer of nuance to the character which expands on what had been previously hinted at regarding him. It retains the first season’s sense of goofy charm while managing to be relatively more serious, and is generally rather well-directed and animated on top of that.

This isn’t to say that it’s perfect, of course. The last stretch of the arc especially shows signs of rushing as just 5 episodes isn’t quite enough to fit the many emotional beats the arc tries to hit, leading to several parts of it falling rather flat when it comes to elements which don’t deal directly with Gojo’s character arc.

Now you might be thinking at this point that this seems rather more positive and good than I was making it out to be at the start of this review. Well, that’s because the real problems with the season come in its second, much larger part, the Shibuya Incident.

Shibuya starts out fine enough, mostly in how it picks up the momentum from the Hidden Inventory arc to fuel its first major fight and kick off the events of the arc. However, this is immediately lessened by the fact that that fight then proceeds to negate half of the emotional core of the Hidden Inventory arc in the first place, retroactively ruining a perfectly good arc for the sake of a cheap shock value reveal.

This bit of less than stellar writing is then followed by the onset of the rest of the arc, which is practically a nonstop series of fight scenes. And here’s where a huge problem rears its head: most of them don’t really matter.

Firstly, the show’s rather lean worldbuilding becomes a detriment here. The Jujutsu World as it exists is essentially a vague sketch made up of generic shonen worldbuilding tropes which the audience has no investment in. This was fine in the first season, where the stakes were generally character-based and the overall world took a backseat, but as Shibuya’s stakes are inherently grounded in the series’s setting, this starts to become a detriment to the audience’s investment.

This would also likely be fine if the character writing within the arc was competent enough to carry the series like it did in the first season. However, here we come to another problem: the character writing in Shibuya takes an utter nosedive. This problem is rather multifaceted, so let’s break it down a bit.

Firstly, the fights don’t really progress anything meaningful regarding the characters. Half of the fights in this season are against random one-note mooks whose only notable feature is their special ability. Consequently, there’s no personal stakes involved for any of the characters, and they have little-to-no development coming out of them. This arc’s episode count could be cut in half and pretty much nothing would change considering how inconsequential most of the fights are. This isn’t helped by the insane cast bloat, as the show constantly throws even more underdeveloped, one-note characters at the viewer and hopes that they might care about at least one of them.

Secondly, the series’ fights lack any sort of flair or personality. A big part of the appeal of the show’s first season was how simply fun the cast was in terms of their interactions and how their lovably distinct personalities shined through in their fights. However, as this is the “serious” arc, characters are not allowed to show personality or any interesting unique characteristics while fighting. So instead we get an indistinct gray sludge of generic, forgettable fight after generic, forgettable fight which is lacking in both style and substance, carried only by the efforts of the animators.

How does a writer keep the audience engaged in such an aggressively uninteresting slog, you ask? It’s quite simple, really: cheap shock value! You see that character the audience generally likes? Arbitrarily kill them off! Sure, their potential as a character hasn’t even begun to be tapped into and the audience barely knows them since you’ve spent so little time actually developing them, but if you make it sudden enough, you might be able to deceive the viewer into thinking it’s good writing!

Oh, what’s that? The viewer isn’t quite emotional yet? Just shove a flashback in the middle of their death scene and spend half the episode on it! Shoving all the character’s actual depth into the very end of their screen time, literally right before they’re dead, is *totally* a legitimate substitute for writing an actually compelling character. And, just to make sure the audience gets the point, give the character *another* flashback at the start of the next episode, just beat the audience over the head with what they’re supposed to be feeling, that’ll totally make them think the show is actually emotionally meaningful and not just boring crap.

Repeat some variant of this formula a couple times over, and you’ve got yourself the Shibuya Incident experience!

Now, of course, some might say that even if the show isn’t well-written in the slightest, it’s still very well-animated, so you can just enjoy it as turn-your-brain-off fun. However, even that approach has its problems due to the series’s consistency issues. For every genuinely great-looking fight, there’s another that’s ruined by flat shading, messy storyboarding, and the show’s ludicrously boring color palette. And even if you can look beyond that, the show’s attempts to shove emotions down your throat consistently ruin any attempt you might make to turn your brain off. It’s rather hard to just take in the action sakuga when half the episode is taken up by a boring flashback.

Overall, Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 can best be summed up in one word: Edgy. The season discards all of the potential it once had in favor of an “I’m 14 and this is deep” experience where an incoherent combination of black & red color palettes, random horrific imagery, and arbitrarily killing off characters passes itself off as good storytelling. It’s the most disappointing direction the series could have possibly taken, and easily one of the worst anime experiences of the year. Unless you’re an edgy teenager or a rabid sakuga fanatic, avoid this season like the plague.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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