Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3 Episode 3 was an episode that I expected to get a lot of conversation immediately after airing, and not for particularly good reasons. As of publication of this article, the episode on Crunchyroll is sitting at 2.8k dislikes — this is in comparison to Season 3 Episodes 1 and 2 which each have around 600 dislikes. This episode was representative of one of the most notable aspects of the Culling Game arc in comparison to prior arcs of Jujutsu Kaisen: its complexity. The Culling Game, from the outset, went viral on social media for its abundance of rules and the way that they were communicated to the audience. Within the first couple of episodes shown as part of Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution, the rules of the Culling Game were simply flashed across the screen in a movie theater. The rules themselves are far too much text to read in the time they remain on screen, and with no ability to pause a movie in theaters, I imagine even those who had the opportunity to watch Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3’s first two episodes early had to either refer to a wiki page or wait for the official release to understand the Culling Game’s rules in detail.
The anime is no stranger to complexity; one of the many things that Jujutsu Kaisen has in common with series like Hunter x Hunter is the allowance of techniques with a lot of different rules, restrictions, and special conditions. I can recall there being numerous jokes and memes about how complicated something as quintessential to the series as a Domain Expansion was (don’t worry, those only get more complicated too). And, now that the main group of characters are splitting up to progress different goals in different locations, the required bandwidth to follow what’s generally going on is going to increase for the entirety of this season.
That being said, was the presentation of this complexity done well? I actually think it was. Since Season 2, Jujutsu Kaisen has added a certain visual flair to its longer explanatory or expository sections that accentuates the dialogue and creates a sense of motion alongside it. Tengen’s voice actor, Yoshiko Sakakibara, also serves as the voice of the narrator of the series, which speaks to Tengen’s broader role and also explains why some of better done narration heavy scenes in Season 2 were done similarly well in this episode. I think the combination of visuals and important context in dialogue made this episode a good and important one even if not filled with the flashy sequences of Episodes 1 and 2.
On Dialogue and Complexity
One thing I want to state outright is that while this arc is complex in comparison to prior Jujutsu Kaisen arcs, I don’t actually think it’s all that complex. At the very least, if the current rules and layers of things are too much for you, I think you’re going to have a bit of a bad time with what’s to come. Where I think the presentation of the rules falls a bit short isn’t in their overall makeup, but rather the density (in terms of rules / time). Let’s compare for a moment this arc to another arc: Hunter x Hunter‘s Greed Island. In that arc, what I think was done comparatively well was a combination of three things: (1) rules and restrictions were introduced gradually in ways that felt organically yielded from the actions of characters on screen, (2) the characters within the series didn’t immediately understand what was going on either, and (3) details about what you can do with the power system were being exposed during the same period of time when the audience was already primed to watch the main characters learn more about the power system.
In comparison, I think Jujutsu Kaisen sort of dumps the rules on the audience in the beginning and then lightly reminds them of the rules as time goes on. It does so after the “learning” periods of the series have long passed. By the time of the Culling Game, the series is already remarking (via Choso) how Yuji has reached a remarkable level of skill in cursed energy manipulation and has clearly surpassed the stage of learning the basics — in other words, the “learning” phase of the series for its characters has passed. And the characters on screen are able to easily digest the bulk of the information being provided to them, removing the opportunity to have them reminded about rules as a proxy for the audience.
This isn’t the anime’s fault by any means; the original manga had a similar problem. I think that the anime did a quite good job with what it had to work with barring making any sort of major changes from the source material. The style of visuals on screen feels like a more buttoned-up version of showing Subway Surfer gameplay below a TikTok video and is reminiscent of the visual accompaniments I first recall seeing in Season 2 Episode 13. Details about plot progression are slowly shown to the audience like bulleted lists on a PowerPoint presentation and they soften what would otherwise literally be an episode of 100% talking. I think a lot of the hate toward this episode is because it lacked action in comparison to the meme-inspiring sequences of Episodes 1 and 2 of this season, and also because Shonen watchers really just hate to sit and listen sometimes.
Looking Forward for Jujutsu Kaisen
What I think makes this episode strong is the strength of the foundation it sets. Some of this opinion is only possible because I’ve read the manga, but genuinely the only reason some of the highs and stakes of the Culling Game are possible are because of moments like this that lay out the groundwork for what is a long and very storied arc of the series. There are also a lot of lore and meta implications about the world of Jujutsu Kaisen, the connections between fate and Cursed Energy, and how key figures like Toji and Gojo relate to that flow of destiny. Conversations like those led by Tengen accentuate the otherworldly and almost mythological significance of things that, for us the audience, mostly are memorable as incredibly badass fights. I think it’s important for the series to have a chance to re-familiarize the audience with the broader context of these things and re-stablish the positions of things in the narrative.
Looking forward, I think that Jujutsu Kaisen anime watches writ large need to definitely get used to episodes like this, or at least more dialogue-heavy scenes, because more are definitely coming. I think the anime would do well to incorporate more of the visual aids used this episode in future episodes as reminders of the rules to the audience. If they do that, I think the populations general reluctance to read won’t be as much of a barrier as it probably was for this episode.
Episode rating: 7/10
Images via Crunchyroll
© Gege Akutami/Shueisha, JUJUTSU KAISEN Project
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