Last two. Whose actually surprised to see this one here? Nobody should be. It’s a banger.
You might notice that I’m doing this one a bit later this year. Well, part of the reason for that is the damn way anime season run. The past couple of years I wrote one of these lists, I ended up feeling weird about putting shows on from the Autumn season when they were only half over.
So this time, I decided to at least wait for that last Autumn season to be finally over so I had a better sense of my feelings on those shows. That, plus I ended up really packing my schedule full at the back end of the year and decided to watch a lot of shows right at the end.
Number two:
#2: Jujutsu Kaisen
Originally aired 3rd October 2020 to 27th March 2021 | 24 Episodes | Based on the manga by Gege Akutami | Supernatural, Action, Horror, Demons
If there’s one thing I love, it’s a big dumb action shonen full of big dumb characters whose hearts are as large as their brains are small. Except for those select few characters where the opposite is true, and we end up loving them still anyway.
Jujutsu Kaisen came out of the gates swinging hard. It’s your pretty run of the mill Shonen where a bunch of narrative and stylistic elements could have been plucked from a number of other shows of the same genre. But where this one excels is in the execution, which is, at the end of the day, all you need to do well for your show to hit big.
When I talked about this show last year, I’d only seen 11 episodes of that first, 24 episode, series. And with that I placed it 6th. Having seen the rest of the series now, I know that it not just continued to be as good as it was in the early stages, it just got better and better as it went, leading to a cross school battle that got out of hand just as soon as it got started.
Placing all of the established characters on the board and showing us all what they could do and it’s wild. I even wrote a piece after the series was over talking about I had no idea how any of the character’s powers actually worked, and yet I didn’t care, it carried itself so strongly without the need to explain anything.
By the time the series was over, I think I had, like, four favourite characters. And I couldn’t pick between them; Itadori’s good boy energy, Kento’s grumpy old man energy (while having a heart of gold), Todo utterly bizarre mannerisms and obsession with Itadori and Gojo just being… well, Gojo. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
It doesn’t hurt that this is a fantastic looking show either, the action sequencing being some of the most amazingly animated I’ve seen, that first episode alone goes hard and shows you just what you’re in for it you stick around for the good fights further down the road.
It’s really hard to flesh these out when they’re about a show I really enjoyed. Just watch Jujutsu Kaisen. It’s fantastic and well deserving of all the hype it had surrounding its release.
A Richard Wood Text Adventure 