Jujutsu Kaisen: The Culling Game Part 1

KanyeQuest★ 7

I'm making this review after finishing S3 Ep 12, and while it was a great episode visually, I'm realizing more and more that I just don't feel invested in what's happening. Watching Yuta fight these new characters should've been exciting, but I couldn't bring myself to care about any of them. They feel like total strangers to me. Someone dies and I'm sitting there thinking, "Okay? Who even was this guy anyway?". It's like these characters showed up out of nowhere, fought for a bit, and then vanished without leaving any real impact (except for Higuruma). and I'm expected to be invested. I'm just not. Andthat's kind of where I've been mentally with JJK ever since Season 2 ended. It feels like the show I cared about suddenly became something completely different. There are characters from previous seasons who feel abandoned and forgotten. The thing that hits me the hardest is how suddenly the Culling Games just showed up. One moment the story is in this dark, emotional, meaningful place, and the next moment it's like the narrative flips a switch and drops us into this giant arc with random rules, random characters, random fights. Watching it as an anime-only viewer, it honestly feels like the Culling Games just spawned out of nowhere. No buildup, no emotional transition, just suddenly, "Here's the new arc, deal with it". It feels sudden and disconnected, like I'm supposed to catch up without being given the time to actually process anything. If I had to describe it with one word, it felt "disorienting". One thing that bothers me is that Yuji will not appear again until the end of Culling Games Part 2, and he is literally the main character. It makes him feel like such a weak presence in his own story, and I hate feeling that way because I really like him. On top of that, hearing people say that after the Reggie fight this is basically the last time Megumi will ever be useful just makes me feel even worse. Megumi had so much potential. Yuji had so much potential. Nobara had so much potential. Honestly, the whole main cast felt like it was building toward something meaningful. And now it feels like that potential was thrown away. It feels like these characters I cared about, these characters I connected with, these characters who mattered so much in the beginning are suddenly just pushed aside and forgotten while the story focuses on a bunch of new people I have no emotional bond with. It feels like a waste, and it makes me sad in a way I didn't expect. This all frustrates me because JJK has one of the coolest concepts in any modern anime. The idea that negative emotions manifest as curses is so interesting and could have led to so much depth. And maybe that is why I'm disappointed. Instead of exploring that, it feels like the story rushed into nonstop fights with characters I don't know, and because of that I can't connect to anything happening. I want to care. I want to be invested. But the story gives me nothing to grab onto. I can't force myself to feel something that isn't there. I'm giving it a 7/10, but if it wasn't for the creative art direction, fight choreography and animation that MAPPA did, it would've been a 6/10

_Bigwillyman_★ 3

In short, the only good episodes were EPs 1-2 and 12. For a new viewer, these are the only good episodes you should watch with the addition of EP 9. The rest are skippable and not only add nothing but deduct from the overall experience. For a complete overview of the story of the Culling Games, we are better off with the source material. So we have 3 good and 1 acceptable episodes out of 12. The rest are in terms of tonality and pacing, a complete joke. How did this happen? The more the season went on the more obvious it became that the director Goshozonoactually just took a massive spiteful shit on JJK in order make the 1st Part of the 3rd season his "artsy" directoral portfolio piece before fucking off from the studio after his contract expired. The weird "movie-like" angles, shots, the agony inducing "kill bill" scene, forced "funny" moments all scream of a pretentious wannabe creative millennial going rampant and just doing whatever he wants without any oversight. Obviously this makes the end-product feel like a disjointed mess, most notably in tone. Mappa has partial guilt by giving this animal full creative control rather than controlling him like during the 2nd Season (Shibuya Arc) . There should have been several other people next to him at all times to slap the pen out of his hand whenever he wanted to put his own bullshit in. At the very least the damage he has done is minimized to the 3rd Season 1st Part and the fans can have a directoral reset for the 2nd Part of this season.