Jujutsu Kaisen's anime has a challenge ahead, but series creator Gege Akutami has already talked about how to fix it. Jujutsu Kaisen's second season left off with a load of momentum that's now sitting dormant. After the Shibuya Incident arc leaves total carnage in its wake, protagonist Yuji Itadori is trembling with uncertainty following Sukuna taking over his body and wreaking havoc. To make matters worse, Yuta Okkutsu, the star of Jujutsu Kaisen 0, is charged with fulfilling his extermination.

Jujutsu Kaisen's third season is hotly anticipated, but one of the arcs it will cover has a weak spot. Season 3 will first cover the Itadori Extermination arc where Yuta tries to see his new mission through, but things conclude fairly quickly, setting the stage for the Culling Game arc—and that's where Season 3's troubles begin. MAPPA has an amazing opportunity to overcome some of the problems with Jujutsu Kaisen's manga, though, and it could make the Culling Game arc fantastic.

The Culling Game Will Be the Core of Jujutsu Kaisen's Season 3

The Culling Game Sets Jujutsu Kaisen’s Climactic End in Place

Fans of the series will already be overall familiar with Kenjaku's mission to realize cursed energy's full potential. The Culling Game is a ritual to execute a grand merger of the people of Japan with Tengen by gathering cursed energy, thus creating something greater than sorcerers or cursed spirits on their own. In effect, the end game is to effect a singularity similar to the Human Instrumentality Project from Evangelion.

The game has a basic set of rules, but it's based on accumulating points by taking the lives of players. Japan is turned into a set of colonies delineated by boundaries, and those within the colonies are declared players of the game (unless they were civilians at the start of the game, in which case, they're given one chance not to participate). Sorcerers' lives are worth 5 points, while non-sorcerers' are worth 1. New rules can be added to the game by spending 100 points, and the rules are able to counteract existing rules.

Gege Missed a Huge Opportunity With the Culling Game (And He Knows It)

The Culling Game's Coolest Mechanic Was Tragically Underused

If it sounds like an interesting premise, that's because it is. Unfortunately, the Culling Game arc doesn't have the best reputation among fans of the series, who typically find the arc lackluster compared to the surrounding ones. There's one big way that the fights in the Culling Game could be spiced up, though, and Gege acknowledged it himself: rule additions. During a 2024 Jujutsu Kaisen exhibition, Gege said that he wished he had added more rule additions mid-fight, as translated by X @z9eIYzexP4d34:

Q: Looking back on the developments in the Culling Game arc, do you notice anything significant?

A: In hindsight, I regret not integrating the rule additions more into the battles during the Culling Game arc. We had discussed using accumulated points to add rules during battles, potentially shifting the situation in one's favor. However, in the end, none of those ideas were utilized at all.

This statement is pretty significant. The Culling Game is home to several fights, but within the fights themselves, it actually uses rule additions remarkably little to turn the tides of its many battles. One of the biggest problems with the Culling Game arc is that it introduces so many new characters and the fights start to feel like filler because the value of the characters isn't yet immediately evident. If it's willing to follow Gege's lead and bend the rules of manga adaptation, MAPPA could take advantage of the rule additions concept to spice up one of Jujutsu Kaisen's most troubled arcs.

How Jujutsu Kaisen’s Anime Could Make the Culling Game Incredible

MAPPA Might Just Have the Responsibility to Betray Jujutsu Kaisen's Canon

It might sound taboo at first to suggest that an anime deviate from the manga, but Attack on Titan provides a fantastic template. While commenting on his favorite characters in an old interview, Attack on Titan creator Hajime Isayama gave the green light to unfaithful adaptations. Lamenting missed opportunities in characterization, Isayama added that the anime provided an opportunity to fill out characters who he hadn't given enough attention. These moments, although not strictly canonical, make Attack on Titan all the better. At least as far as Isayama is concerned, Attack on Titan's anime is the true version.

Likewise, if MAPPA were to take an unorthodox approach to adapting the Culling Game arc, it could make up for some of the gaps that Gege now regrets. These changes don't have to mean massive plot implications; even just using rule additions to buff up some of its duller fights in ways that are fairly inconsequential for the overall game could make a big difference in of the anime's pacing. Moments that drag can become invigorating.

Alternatively, with one of the criticisms of the Culling Game being that the lack of familiarity with the characters makes the arc feel like filler, an ironically strong move might be to add filler that further defines those characters. Introducing filler (including battles) for characters with a long-term impact could make those characters much stronger and give them more on-screen presence in an arc that can seem somewhat frenetic and unfocused in the big picture. Rule additions play into this because they can expose how different characters might strategize and, overall, how they think.

Those little moments where one sees the strategic dimension of a character's personality are important, and one only needs to look at Yuji and Todo's tag-team battles to see why. Although Todo is first played as a comic relief character, he's revealed to be actually quite formidable and intelligent because of how he uses Boogie Woogie in battle. The strategic element also gives a feeling of effortlessness that further defines Todo and Yuji's friendship. For Jujutsu Kaisen's next season to be the best it can be, an unexpected and unorthodox approach might be the right move for MAPPA.