Jujutsu Kaisen season 2 focused on the Shibuya incident arc which was absolutely nuts. I mean every episode was better than the previous, the action sequences and the fights we were gifted with were amazingly executed. The animation quality was definitely some of Mappa’s best work.
The pacing of the season, especially from the start of the Shibuya arc reminded me of My Hero Academia’s sixth season where each episode was just an all-out war, there were battles going on everywhere and each episode was action-packed right till the very end. Overall, the second season of Jujutsu Kaisen was amazing but I still do have my critiques, mainly about the plot. But before I get into that, how fun was the Gojo flashback arc?
Geto’s Origin Story
In the Jujutsu Kaisen movie, it was revealed that Geto is a former jujutsu high student who left at some point and became a curse user. Jujutsu Kaisen season 2 begins with a Gojo flashback arc where we explore Geto and Gojo’s close relationship and what made the former eventually become a villain. In the flashback, Gojo and Geto are already established as Jujutsu high’s two strongest sorcerers and they have a love-hate type of relationship with each other, similar to Zoro and Sanji from One Piece.
They are tasked with a mission to protect master Tengen’s Star Plasma Vessel so that the two can merge and maintain the barriers of the jujutsu sorcerer world. As always, things don’t go as planned as they encounter one of the most badass characters in the entire Jujutsu Kaisen series, none other than Toji — Megumi’s father. Toji catches Gojo by surprise and is able to nearly kill him, he then kills Riko (the Star Plasma Vessel) right in front of Geto then proceeds to defeat him and leave him for dead too.
Riko’s death was the first catalyst for Geto’s change in perspective because when Gojo brought her corpse in front of the Star clan children, they clapped and were overjoyed thinking that she had served her purpose. This lack of sympathy started to take root in Geto’s mind. A year later, he became isolated because Gojo had become even stronger and was now completing missions on his own.
Geto’s cursed technique involved consuming curses which meant he was also consuming their evil intentions which were also causing his mind to spin. He also went on a mission to exorcise curse spirits and found two little girl sorcerers who were imprisoned in a cage because the villagers blamed them for the actions of the curse spirits. Geto finally snapped and killed the entire village and rescued the two girls.
From here he began to really despise non-sorcerers and instead of protecting them he now saw them as the cause of all this evil because unknowingly curses were born from human’s feelings. His conversation with Yuki Tsukumo about destroying curses at the root-cause pushed him over the edge.
They did a good job of showing us how he gradually transformed into this evil curse user through his isolation, missions and what he was seeing around him like sorcerers dying and being treated worse than human. The depth shown was satisfying in his transformation and I even felt bad for him at times.
Jujutsu Kaisen’s Shibuya Incident
Back to the present, Jujutsu Kaisen’s Shibuya Arc was absolute madness. Gojo played right into Geto’s hand by going into the veil that was designed specifically for him. Although Gojo did get captured in the prison realm, we witnessed a couple of iconic Gojo moments like when he destroyed Hanami while fighting Jogo and Choso at the same time, not to mention trying to protect all the civilians too.
Another epic moment was when Gojo used his domain expansion for a mere 0.2 seconds and within the next 299 seconds while everyone was incapacitated, he killed 1,000 transfigured humans, reminding us why he’s the strongest sorcerer alive. There were interesting fights that were used as buildup for some of the most amazing fights I’ve seen in Anime. We saw Megumi and Itadori team-up to defeat a sorcerer while Nanami literally beat the crap out of Shigemo. We also got a great fan service moment when Toji was resurrected temporarily into another sorcerer’s body and basically destroyed Dagon inside his own domain.
One of the best fights in this season of Jujutsu Kaisen was Choso versus Itadori, the animation was crisp and the hand-to-hand combat sequence inside the restroom was amazing to watch. Another standout fight was between Sukuna and Mahoraga, again the animation was brilliant and the pace of the fight was unmatched.
These two heavyweights caused so much carnage that pretty much the entire Shibuya district was turned to rubble by the time they were done. It was also impressive to see someone or something almost go toe-to-toe with Sukuna and making him go as far as to use domain expansion to finish the fight.
Jujutsu Kaisen’s Shibuya arc was so intense throughout and you just never knew what to expect. I definitely didn’t expect major characters to end up gravely injured or even dead like Nanami. We are also left with question marks about Nobara, Maki and grandpa Zenin because all three of them looked dead when we last saw them. My only critique of the season is that they didn’t spend enough time to explain the plot and introduce new elements.
In the beginning of the arc we see Mechamaru battle Mahito, he uses simple domain to counter Mahito’s domain expansion and this was the first time this technique has been shown to us and it wasn’t clearly explained, yet this continued to be used by other characters later in the arc. The plot twist of Geto actually being dead all along and instead had his body and abilities taken over by another curse was definitely unexpected, at least for me.
I loved the twist but was still confused by it because in the end the curse says that he has many names and one of the names was of a sorcerer from the Kamo clan and is somehow related to Choso who believes he is Itadori’s brother. I found this all to be extremely confusing because nothing was clearly explained.
The way these things were mentioned made it seem like we were supposed to know about it already which doesn’t make sense. I’m an anime-only watcher so I’m not sure if these plot points were explained in greater detail in the manga but just watching the anime alone wasn’t enough for me to connect the dots. If there is a third season, I better watch an explainer video of season 2 to prepare myself.
