The second half of the Culling Game arc is where Gege Akutami stops holding back. What began as a brutal tournament of sorcerers and cursed spirits transforms into something closer to a full collapse of the world Yuji Itadori thought he was protecting. Characters die. Rules get broken. And the entire power structure of jujutsu society starts to buckle under the weight of Kenjaku’s centuries-old plan.
If you need a quick orientation: the Culling Game is a large-scale battle royale initiated by Kenjaku, the ancient sorcerer who has been wearing Suguru Geto’s body. Its first half establishes the colonies, the players, and the rule system. Part 2 is where those rules get exploited, alliances collapse, and the arc delivers its most consequential deaths.
The Colony Structure Reaches Its Breaking Point
By the time Part 2 kicks off, the Tokyo and Sendai colonies are no longer isolated battlegrounds. Yuji and Megumi’s group has been accumulating points and trying to negotiate rule additions that could free non-combatant sorcerers. The strategic layer here is underappreciated — this isn’t just a fight arc, it’s a legal chess match played against a cursed ruleset that Kenjaku deliberately designed to be exploited.
Megumi’s attempt to add the rule freeing Tsumiki is the emotional engine of this section. His willingness to cross moral lines for his sister is the most believable character motivation in the arc, and Akutami uses it to set up the catastrophic pivot that defines the arc’s final act.
Sendai Colony: Hiromi Higuruma and the Courthouse of Death
Higuruma is one of the most interesting new characters introduced in the entire series, and Part 2 gives him space to develop. A disenchanted defense attorney turned unwilling Culling Game participant, he commands Deadly Sentencing, a domain expansion that puts opponents on trial. The concept alone — a sorcerer whose power is rooted in Japan’s broken criminal justice system — is exactly the kind of thematic specificity that separates Jujutsu Kaisen from a standard battle manga.
Yuji’s fight against Higuruma is a standout. Yuji doesn’t overpower him; he wins the trial by engaging with it honestly, which forces Higuruma to confront what he actually believes about justice versus survival. That the fight ends in an alliance rather than a death says something about what Akutami is doing with the arc’s larger theme: not everyone needs to die to be defeated.
Culling Game Part 2’s Central Catastrophe: The Merger Threat
The arc’s highest stakes revolve around Kenjaku’s ultimate goal: merging the barriers of Tengen with the Japanese population to create an evolved form of humanity, a mass awakening of cursed energy that would fundamentally alter what it means to be human. Part 2 reveals this with enough specificity that the earlier scenes retroactively recontextualize — Kenjaku wasn’t just collecting sorcerers, he was clearing obstacles.
Jujutsu Kaisen’s serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump means Akutami is working within commercial constraints, but the Merger subplot is notably uncompromising in how bleak it is. There’s no obvious counter. Every move the protagonists make feels like plugging one hole in a flooding ship.
The Sakurajima Colony and Hakari Kinji
Hakari doesn’t get the credit he deserves. His Culling Game fights are among the most mechanically creative in the arc — his Idle Death Gamble domain works like a pachinko machine, and the moment he hits jackpot mid-fight is genuinely one of the more inventive sequences Akutami has scripted.
More importantly, Hakari represents something Yuji desperately lacks: someone who has chosen to engage with a rotten world on his own terms, without pretending the rules are fair. His partnership with Yuji in the arc’s back half isn’t just tactically useful — it’s a philosophical counterpoint. Yuji wants to save everyone within the rules. Hakari just wants to win, and he’s often right.
Megumi’s Fate and the Shrine Domain
The single most consequential event in Part 2 — arguably in the entire manga up to this point — is the possession of Megumi Fushiguro by Ryomen Sukuna.
Sukuna needed a vessel with Ten Shadows Technique to execute his plan involving Mahoraga, a shikigami that can adapt to and nullify any attack, including Unlimited Void. The mechanics are intricate, but the emotional impact is blunt: Megumi, who spent two arcs being defined by his moral seriousness and his love for his sister, is gone. Replaced. And the thing wearing his face proceeds to destroy everything around it.
Tsumiki, the sister he fought the entire arc to protect, dies. The tragedy is constructed to be airless — there’s no moment of relief before the next blow lands. Fans of the manga argued extensively about whether this was shock value or earned consequence; the case for earned is strong, given how methodically Akutami built Sukuna’s need for Ten Shadows across the previous arc.
For readers wondering how this connects to the anime’s future, the Jujutsu Kaisen Season 4 trailer breakdown offers some useful visual reading of where MAPPA is taking the final arc’s tone.
What the Culling Game Arc Accomplishes Structurally
Shonen arcs of this length live or die by whether the climax justifies the setup. The Culling Game does, but not in the way most arcs deliver payoff. There’s no triumphant moment where the heroes win and the world is safer. The arc ends with:
- Sukuna wearing Megumi’s body and effectively becoming unkillable in the short term
- Kenjaku alive and with his plan significantly advanced
- The sorcerer hierarchy exposed as either complicit or helpless
- Yuji’s team depleted, grieving, and without a clear strategy
That’s not a failure of the arc — it’s the point. Jujutsu Kaisen has always been structured around a specific thesis: sorcerers in this world exist to die, and the institutions that claim to protect people are actually engines of controlled sacrifice. The Culling Game proves it at scale.
Animation Considerations for the Eventual Adaptation
MAPPA’s adaptation decisions will face real pressure here. Part 2 of the Culling Game contains several fights that demand exceptional sakuga work — Higuruma vs. Yuji, Hakari’s jackpot sequence, and the full unleashing of Sukuna in Megumi’s body all require frame-by-frame craft to land correctly. If you want to understand why those sequences will either be spectacular or disappointing depending on production resources, the breakdown of how sakuga works in anime gives the technical vocabulary to evaluate what you’re watching.
The Culling Game arc’s second half is not comfort reading. It’s the section of Jujutsu Kaisen where Akutami proves that the series’ early warnings — that no one is safe, that no institution is trustworthy, that good intentions aren’t protection — were literal promises, not thematic posturing. The characters who survive it are changed in ways that can’t be undone. That’s exactly what a great arc should do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Megumi come back after Sukuna possesses him?
Megumi’s fate after Sukuna’s possession is one of the manga’s most contested ongoing questions. As of the Culling Game’s conclusion, Megumi’s consciousness is suppressed but not definitively confirmed dead. Whether Akutami allows a recovery arc is a major point of fan debate.
What is Kenjaku’s ultimate goal in the Culling Game?
Kenjaku’s goal is to merge the immortal barrier-keeper Tengen with Japan’s non-sorcerer population, forcibly awakening cursed energy in millions of people. The Culling Game was a mechanism to weaken opposition and accumulate enough cursed energy to make the merger possible.
How does Higuruma’s domain expansion work?
Deadly Sentencing creates a courtroom where the opponent is placed on trial. If found guilty, they lose access to their cursed technique — a functionally devastating penalty in a world where technique is survival. The judge is an autonomous shikigami called Judgeman, not Higuruma himself, which means the outcome can’t be manipulated by sorcerer interference.
Is the Culling Game arc the final arc of Jujutsu Kaisen?
No. The Culling Game feeds into the Shinjuku Showdown arc, which is the series’ concluding arc. The Culling Game establishes the conditions — Sukuna’s new vessel, Kenjaku’s advanced plan, the protagonist team’s losses — that make the final confrontation feel earned rather than sudden.