Review of Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2

If you could go two or three years back in time and ask me what I think about the future of shonen my answer would probably be pretty excited. Ufotable had their hands full working on demon slayer, MAPPA managed to get their hands on both Chainsaw man and Jigokuraku, completeing the "dark trio". There was fire force, JoJo, Dr Stone, Black Clover and many others. To put it bluntly, it was an exciting time. Sadly, most of these projects didn't exactly turn out all that well. Chainsaw man came out to a lukewarm reception in the west but massively underperformed in Japan and theless is said about Jigokuraku the better. I think we can safely say that the whole "dark trio" was a complete flop. JoJo was stuck adapting by far the most hated part in the entire series and the Netflix release managed to kill even the small amount of hype the season had. The Black Clover movie was OK I guess. Dr Stone and Fire force exist, although who still watches them is a mystery to me. Even demon slayer managed to finally shit the bed with the Swordsmith Village arc. All of this, combined with the fact that I am simply getting too old for this shit resulted in me getting really tired of shonen. With all of that in mind, you can probably imagine that my expectations for the second season of Jujutsu Kaisen were quite high. Afterall, this would surely be the show that would break me out of my apathy and reignite my love of the genre. There is absolutely no way MAPPA would disappoint me three times in a row, is there? Well, it's a bit complicated.

The second season starts with the Gojo's Past/Hidden Inventory arc (no idea why they decided to rename it). Because all of the second season's hype was centered around Shibuya, I expected it to be the boring setup we had to go through before things really kicked off, yet I was pleasantly surprised by how good this arc was. Young Gojo is great as always, Geto was surprisingly well written, Dio steals the show as always and, most importantly, team 7 is nowhere to be seen. Even the artstyle change worked much better than I anticipated. Because of how good the first arc was, I have blissfully little to say about it. It's a solid piece of shonen and it was fun to watch.

Now with the first arc out of the way, we can finally get to the real meat of the second season, the Shibuya Incident Arc. This was supposed to be the arc to outshine everything that came before and everything that will come after. The hype was immense. The arc started strong with two big introductory fights setting up the arc. After that is done, the pacing takes a big hit. It feels like they tried to stretch the material far too much, and so we ended up with some filler in the middle. There are still some good scenes, but they are besprinkled indeed with much boredom. Case in point, you have the absolutely stellar scene where Nanami beats up the blonde twink, yet the rest of the episode leaves much to be desired. The pacing only gets better once the disaster curses and more importantly Sukuna make their entrance. Sadly, before we are even done with the pacing, another much more serious problem emerges from the woodwork. The production.

It's not exactly a secret that the production of this show was a complete clusterfuck. With staff quitting left and right, we had the rare opportunity to se a company completely implode in real time. Talking about the situation is obviously a bit difficult since most of the sources are in a language I can't speak, and they can't really be verified since NDA is a thing, so before I even get into it, I want to make it clear that you should take everything I am about to say with a huge dose of salt. I also want to make it clear that I don't blame the production staff for any of the problems. If my personal interest in corporate court cases has taught me anything, it is that assigning blame in the corporate sphere may be one of the most fruitless tasks ever conceived and even if that weren't the case, I highly doubt that these guys are high enough on the totem pole to make these decisions. So how did it all go wrong? After the success of the first season, Toho decided to greenlight the second season and gave MAPPA a full year for production. If that seems like a reasonable timeframe to you, that's because it is, but MAPPA decided to piss away half of the time by allocating the JJK staff to work on Chainsaw man (that show really turned out to be the gift that keeps on giving) instead of letting them take the head start. Half a year after schedule, the production could finally start, but after a while they run into another problem. MAPPA had poured a subsential amount of money into their new movie named Maboroshi and there was absolutely no way they were going to make the deadline. Because of that, they once again reassigned a sizable portion of the JJK staff to fix that mess. Sadly, I couldn't find a single source stating when exactly this reassignment happened, so I have absolutely no idea how much time was wasted on that shit but if I had to take a guess, I would say a lot. On a side note, the movie absolutely bombed. Because of this whole debacle, the staff are overworked and completely overwhelmed with impossible deadlines. This causes many of them, including some big names, to start publicly complaining about the whole situation. After all of this shit, combined with several delay requests being denied, many members of the staff threaten to walkout after episode seventeen. The walkout does happen, although at a much smaller scale than previously anticipated. And that's pretty much it.

Now that I have explained the background, I can finally get to how all of this shit affected the show. To put it bluntly, the animation is incredibly inconsistent. It is painfully obvious that the animators were forced to choose which episodes to actually complete and which ones to leave half-baked. This results in a show that can look absolutely great in one episode and utterly atrocious in the next one. This leads to some characters getting absolutely shafted since they have their big moments in these episodes. I really want to stress just how much of a drop in quality there is. The first episode of the Dagon fight looks like it was animated in PowerPoint. The first episode of the Mahito fight is mostly spent on characters slowly walking and standing in place. Both the Dagon and especially the Mahito fight get much, much better, but the first episodes were simply unacceptable. On the other hand, there are episodes where you honestly can't tell that there was any production trouble at all, like the now famous Fraudkuna vs Jogoat. And then there is the already mentioned episode seventeen, which gives us the fight between Sukuna and Mahoraga. This fight serves as a perfect microcosm for the Shibuya arc as a whole. Its hype as fuck, with great action and many memorable scenes like the domain expansion or the Mahoraga chadwalk. It is also blatantly unfinished, with layers upon layers of effects failing to hide it, and at points completely incomprehensible. The direction was also a complete mess, with Mahoraga constantly switching size between scenes. There is also a completely misplaced scene with Yuji in the first half and the ending blasting fucking specialz over a guy having a meltdown has to be one of the most unintentionally funny scenes that I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of these. I still cannot believe that they aired it in this state. The worst part about this whole thing is that I can clearly see a great episode hidden underneath all of these problems. The domain expansion was still cool as shit with Mahoraga reaching with his arm towards Sukuna, but then I unpause it and Mahoraga moves at like five fps. I mean on some deep emotional monkey brain level, I still very much enjoyed the episode, but I try to make these reviews as objective as possible and when using any sort of objective metric the episode (as well as the entire arc) doesn't fare well.

The second season had the potential to absolutely mog the first one and cement its place as the undisputed peak of the whole series. Sadly, if I had to describe it now, I would call it the first season's savant cousin that still manages to completely blow it out of the water in some aspects but as a whole, leaves a lot to be desired. I have absolutely no idea what rating I should give this mess so I am gonna pull a game journalist and give it a 7/10. Afterall, I think I outlined my problems with the show rather well, and I hope you understand where I am coming from. The score isn't exactly all that important. In fact, as of writing this review, this season has got an aggregate score of 9/10 (8.92 to be exact), which I hope we can all agree is a completely absurd rating, but I guess normies gonna normie.