Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3 has officially kicked off its run of new episodes as part of the ongoing Winter 2026 anime schedule (crashing Crunchyroll in the process), and with it the anime is already facing off against the Culling Game’s biggest problem. Jujutsu Kaisen is now adapting the Culling Game arc from Gege Akutami’s original manga, and it’s the first real step towards the story’s grand finale. This arc introduces a ton of new faces to the chaos, and sparks a deadly tournament with new foes popping up pretty much at every single turn.
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Jujutsu Kaisen: The Culling Game Part 1 debuted its first two episodes with its Winter 2026 premiere, and with it set up Yuji Itadori on his next mission. With Sukuna having some kind of plan in mind for Megumi Fushiguro, Yuji now needs to enter the Culling Game tournament set up by Kenjaku to save Megumi’s sister Tsumiki. But with the start of this new tournament, the anime is already deep in the arc’s biggest problem. The actual tournament set up itself.
What’s Wrong With the Culling Game?
Near the end of the double episode premiere for Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3, Megumi told Yuji about the new tournament that Kenjaku had formed in order to gather together all of the humans whose powers had awakened as a result of the Shibuya Incident. Known as the Culling Game, fans also see a very brief glimpse at the rules for the tournament. There are quite a few, and are pretty complicated for what just seems like an excuse to have characters fight each other at random points across random locations. That’s because they are just excuses.
Fans only get a few seconds to see the entire layout of the rules in the episode itself, and it’s because they ultimately do not matter. Without going too far into spoilers for the Culling Game, the rules for this tournament really only come into play a couple of times. The basic idea is that sorcerers are killing each other to gather points for some unknown goal, but ultimately this does eventually get thrown out as even more chaotic events happen to bring the series to its final arc. It’s all kind of just a mess to see unfold.
Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3 Faces an Uphill Battle
The Culling Game arc is the most ambitious arc of Gege Akutami’s original manga, and it crumbles under the pressures of the set up. The rules make it seem far more complicated than it actually is, and ultimately in the grand scope of the series it’s a tournament that doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s really just to introduce many more characters to the series after the Shibuya Incident wiped out a large amount of the cast, and these new characters are debatably not as strong as those seen before.
The Culling Game does result in some cool fights, and that’s where the anime does indeed shine. The tournament might not be the most complicated one that Shonen Jump fans have ever gotten to see, but it does have some interesting fights that the anime could take to the next level. This arc is incredibly messy, but it’s up to the anime to clean that up for the TV watching audience to avoid those same pitfalls seen in the manga’s version of the events as it airs through the rest of the Winter.
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