Back to Miximan's Profile Miximan's Profile

Story:
The show starts off from a typical shonen premise: a guy interferes with a magical item/entity and then learns to understand and control its power. However, it fails miserably at creating a strong enough drive to make the viewer invested in the story beyond the flashy fights. The main issue here is strongly correlated to how the characters are designed and a bit with the world building, but more on that later.

The merging of the first two plot lines was rough, one being Itadori’s grandpa letting the “good guy needs to act as a hero” legacy to him, supposedly giving Itadori the necessary drive to ... seek out his powers, and the other one being about the power of Sukuna’s fingers. You could argue that they are strongly bonded as one follows the other for seemingly the same outcome, but I disagree. Personally, the starting plot would have made more sense if it focused on just one thing. They could have either built more around Itadori’s grandpa, so that when he passed on the legacy, we would actually care, or dropped the idea altogether, as it realistically had little to no impact on the story, and focused solely on Sukuna.

Although there are some significant events taking place further into the story, they feel like a breeze trying to move a huge boulder, lacking the impact they should have. Because the necessary level of bond between the characters and the viewer isn't yet created. The pacing feels unnecessarily rushed, especially considering there are several episodes that feel like fillers. Why not slow down the pacing and balance the content across the episodes?

Overall the story isn't great, although having a decent premise. Throughout the 21 episodes I have watched it was very hard to keep focus.

Characters:
The characters are what made me dislike this series; their lack of original personality and minimal development was a deal breaker. Another fact is that most characters are overpowered for seemingly no reason, we know little to nothing about their pasts and how they managed to get this op.

Let's take Itadori and analyze him. He is a teenager with super-human strength, just because. We know nothing about his past, besides the fact that he has no parents and was raised by his grandpa. He starts off as the typical shonen mc and ends up literally the same personality-wise: dumb, clumsy, funny, sad background, OP. In the beginning he barely knows anything about magic and doesn’t quite progress at the set pace of the show. I feel like he could’ve learned more skills in the mean time. We won’t account for Sukuna’s power and skillset as he already had power before the show started. So, strictly speaking about Itadori’s progress, it was minimal skillset development and zero when talking about personality and mindset. Very disappointing.

Gojou is the better character of the series as he succeeds in his role as that mysterious cool guy. One thing that bothered me is the undeniable similarities with Kakashi from “Naruto”. They have similar personalities, they are both overpowered, a teacher, the same hair color and even the head band, although the latter are not as important, the similarities are there.

World:
The world setting is nothing special. While not bad by any means, there wasn’t much effort put into expanding the horizons either physically (by making the school exchange take place in Kyoto, for example) or in terms of complexity, as events seem to revolve solely around the main characters. One anime that pops up into my head for doing a better job with exactly this stuff is “One Punch Man”, as it makes the viewer acknowledge that events are happening all around Tokyo, not only around the mc.

The magic from this universe is nothing new or innovative. We see similar energy auras in most popular shonen series, and while it's a concept that works, it's not particularly original, so there's little point in commenting on it. Although I have to say that it does a worse job at explaining how this aura, or magic, call it how you want, works than other anime.

The monsters, for the most part, are somewhat silly, but not necessarily annoying. What bothered me about the ordinary monsters was the power discrepancy compared to the sorcerers.

Animation:
The animation is on top. Nothing can be said here, besides the fact that this is the main blinding factor of this series. People accept more flaws when there's great graphics.