JUJUTSU KAISEN

Culling Game continuationFormat not announced · Release date not announced

MAPPA's heavy, kinetic action animation paired with one of shonen's most tightly-designed power systems (cursed energy).

Synopsis

The Anime Lad

A teenager with abnormal physical stats eats an ancient demon's severed finger to protect his classmates, which is how he ends up sharing a body with its owner and enrolled at a secret school for exorcists. Cursed energy runs on negative human emotion, which makes the monster problem a renewable resource. The fights are fast, the rules are consistent, and the show moves like it's late for something.

Super Eyepatch Fox

Negative emotion breeds curses. Curses eat people. A boy swallows a demon's finger and becomes its cage. The exorcists who should execute him decide he's more useful alive. Fast fights, hard rules, casualties that stick.

Gigguku

This show moves. The fight choreography is some of the most kinetic stuff ever animated for TV, and it's bolted to a power system with actual rules, so every fight is a puzzle and a spectacle at once. It's dark, people you like get hurt, and the ceiling of what one episode can look like keeps rising. I put friends on this and they stopped texting me back until they finished.

Father's Basement

Another dark shonen about a cursed teen at a magic school, which is a sentence I've typed too many times. Here's what's different. It's faster and nastier than its lane, the rules hold up under pressure, and it treats stakes like they're real, losses don't get walked back. The tone walks a line between comedy and dread that shouldn't work and does. I wanted to file it under more-of-the-same and it wouldn't let me.

A boy fights... for "the right death." Hardship, regret, shame: the negative feelings that humans feel become Curses that lurk in our everyday lives.

What defines it

Cursed techniques have rules, but the best fights are never diagrams with punches attached. Conditions and domains expose how a character thinks under pressure. Martial arts weight keeps even the strangest abilities grounded in bodies and space.