The Culling Game is the moment Jujutsu Kaisen stops pulling punches. Mangaka Gege Akutami uses this arc to shatter the comfortable rhythms built across the Shibuya Incident — new rules, dozens of players, and a kill-or-be-killed tournament played across sorcerer colonies scattered throughout Japan. If Shibuya was the series proving it would hurt its characters, the Culling Game is proof it will hurt them again, and worse.
Below is a guide to every major battle and plot-defining twist in the arc, written for readers who want context and analysis alongside the recap. Spoilers for the full arc are present throughout.
What the Culling Game Actually Is
Kenjaku — the ancient cursed spirit wearing Suguru Geto’s stitched corpse — spent centuries engineering a single moment: the mass awakening of Culling Game players across Japan. The rules, inscribed into each player’s cursed technique, are brutal and binding. Players earn points by killing other players. Colonies are walled-off zones the Japanese government cannot enter. Anyone with a cursed technique who enters a colony is automatically enrolled and cannot leave without spending points.
The stated endgame is merging all of humanity with Tengen — the immortal barrier-technique sorcerer who has sustained Japan’s curtain for centuries — creating an evolved form of life that Kenjaku considers the next step in human history. The Culling Game is simply the mechanism by which cursed energy is supercharged and concentrated. The players are fuel.
Yuji Itadori and Megumi Fushiguro enter the colonies with a specific objective: accumulate enough points through rule additions to free non-combatants and ultimately find a way to remove the binding vow forcing participants to fight. That mission structure drives most of the arc’s major confrontations.
Yuji vs. Hiroshi Higuruma — The Lawyer Who Became a Death Sentence
Higuruma is the arc’s most compelling new character by a considerable distance. A defense attorney who lost faith in Japan’s legal system, he awakened inside the Tokyo No. 1 Colony and immediately began racking up points by defeating other players. By the time Yuji reaches him, Higuruma has accumulated over 100 points and developed his Judgeman technique to a frightening level of precision.
His Domain Expansion, Deadly Sentencing, is unlike anything seen before in the series. Rather than a pure combat domain, it summons a cursed spirit — Judgeman — that acts as judge in a trial. The target is accused of a specific crime, and if found guilty, their cursed technique is confiscated. There is no simple way to resist it; the domain’s internal logic is self-contained.
Yuji’s fight with Higuruma works because it isn’t really a power contest. Yuji loses his technique early. The resolution hinges on Yuji convincing Higuruma through sheer will and honesty that fighting for points is pointless — that the real enemy is the system that created the game. Higuruma, a man who already abandoned the legal system in disgust, is uniquely positioned to hear that argument. He becomes an ally and one of the arc’s most important rule-change negotiators.
Megumi’s Colony and the Return of Hana Kurusu
While Yuji handles Tokyo No. 1, Megumi enters the Tokyo No. 2 Colony in search of Tsumiki, his sister, who was enrolled in the game. What he finds instead is Angel — a reincarnated ancient sorcerer inhabiting the body of a girl named Hana Kurusu, who has developed feelings for Megumi in their shared school life before either knew what they were.
Angel’s technique, Jacob’s Ladder, is one of the most tactically significant in the arc: it can nullify binding vows, including the Culling Game rules themselves, which makes her the key to potentially freeing enrolled players. The catch is that Angel’s price for cooperation is killing the “disgraced one” — a reference to Sukuna, which means killing Yuji.
The Megumi-Hana dynamic adds emotional friction to what could otherwise be a pure mission segment. Hana is genuinely in love with Megumi, but Angel’s ancient hatred of Sukuna overrides her. The negotiation between those two wills inside one body becomes a recurring thread that pays off in genuinely dark fashion later in the arc.
Kinji Hakari and the Pachinko Gamble That Breaks the Rules
Hakari might be the single most inventive character Akutami has designed in terms of sheer mechanical creativity. A third-year Jujutsu High student who was suspended for fighting with the higher-ups, Hakari runs an underground fighting ring and operates entirely outside conventional sorcerer society. He is persuaded to enter the Culling Game in exchange for Yuji’s help resolving his problems with Jujutsu High’s administration.
His Domain Expansion, Idle Death Gamble, is built around a pachinko machine. When the jackpot hits — a randomly determined outcome — Hakari enters a state of near-infinite cursed energy regeneration for a fixed period. He becomes effectively unkillable during that window. The twist is that his technique requires him to repeatedly re-trigger jackpots, making each fight a chaotic loop of gambling and violence.
His extended battle against Kashimo Hajime — a 400-year-old sorcerer reincarnated specifically to fight Sukuna — is the arc’s best sustained fight sequence. Kashimo’s lightning-based technique is devastating, and his read on Hakari’s pattern is sharp. But Hakari keeps hitting jackpots. The fight ends less as a decisive victory and more as an exhausted mutual respect, with Kashimo withdrawing to conserve himself for what he actually wants: Sukuna himself.
The Sendai Colony and Ryu Ishigori’s Unhinged Joy
Yuta Okkotsu returns from overseas to handle the Sendai Colony. What he finds is Ishigori, an ancient sorcerer whose technique, Granite Blast, fires concentrated cursed energy with the power of an artillery shell. Ishigori is not evil in any conventional sense — he’s simply ecstatic to be alive again in a world where he can fight freely. He is one of the arc’s more sympathetic antagonists precisely because he has no agenda beyond the fight itself.
Yuta’s response is characteristically overwhelming. His copy technique — the ability to replicate any cursed technique he’s been exposed to — makes him one of the strongest characters in the series. But Akutami is careful not to make Yuta’s victory feel easy. Ishigori pushes him to deploy Rika, the cursed spirit bound to Yuta since childhood, at full force. The battle is one of those sequences where the scale of destruction becomes its own kind of storytelling.
The Sendai Colony also introduces Dhruv Lakdawalla, an Indian sorcerer with a technique tied to orbital mechanics. He’s a smaller piece of the arc but signals that the Culling Game’s implications are global, not just Japanese — a detail Kenjaku has planned for.
The Biggest Twist: Megumi’s Collapse and Sukuna’s True Move
Nothing in the arc hits harder than what happens to Megumi Fushiguro. After Tsumiki is revealed to have been possessed by the ancient sorcerer Yorozu — who is herself obsessed with Sukuna — Megumi is manipulated into a desperate state. Yorozu forces a confrontation that Megumi cannot win cleanly, and in the chaos of that despair, Sukuna makes his move.
Sukuna, who has spent the entire series as a passenger in Yuji’s body, transfers into Megumi’s body using a mechanism tied to Megumi’s Ten Shadows Technique. The reason is specific and horrifying: Megumi’s technique gives Sukuna access to the Divine General Mahoraga, a shikigami so powerful that Sukuna himself noted it as the one thing capable of adapting to and eventually defeating any attack — including his own. Sukuna needs that tool.
The implications cascade immediately. Yuji is left without Sukuna, which should be a relief — but Sukuna in Megumi’s body is free to act without the constraint of Yuji’s will. He obliterates Yorozu with casual brutality, then begins moving toward his own goals with no further pretense of captivity. Megumi’s consciousness is suppressed. The character who spent the entire series as a grounded counterweight to Yuji’s emotional chaos is gone, replaced by the king of curses wearing his face.
For readers who want to understand where the story heads from this point, the Jujutsu Kaisen Season 4 trailer breakdown examines how MAPPA is positioning the final arc visually and tonally — and how Sukuna’s new form figures into it.
Kenjaku’s Endgame and the Merger Revealed
Kenjaku’s plan crystallizes in the arc’s back half. The Culling Game was never really about selecting the strongest sorcerers. It was about generating enough cursed energy — through hundreds of deaths — to force Tengen into the merger. Kenjaku has been operating on a timeframe spanning at least a thousand years, maneuvering political and spiritual systems across centuries to reach this single moment.
The confrontation between Tengen and the main cast reveals the full scope: if the merger proceeds, Japan’s population becomes absorbed into Tengen’s barrier network, effectively ending individual human consciousness as it currently exists for those caught inside. Kenjaku frames this as evolution. Everyone else frames it as genocide.
What makes Kenjaku genuinely frightening as a villain is that his logic is internally consistent. He isn’t wrong that humanity’s cursed energy problem is escalating, or that Tengen’s current form is unstable. He’s simply chosen a solution that requires everyone else to stop existing as individuals. The arc doesn’t give him a clean refutation — it gives him an opponent willing to fight regardless of whether they can win the argument.
Why the Culling Game Arc Works (and Where It Strains)
The arc’s greatest strength is scale managed through character specificity. Akutami introduces over a dozen named players but keeps the emotional throughline focused on a small cast: Yuji’s guilt, Megumi’s loss, Yuta’s controlled fury, Hakari’s anarchic energy. The new players serve the story rather than overcrowding it — most of them.
The strain comes from pacing. The manga’s chapter-by-chapter structure occasionally fragments the colony storylines into parallel threads that are difficult to track simultaneously. Some players — particularly those in the Sendai and Hokkaido colonies — receive less space than their techniques deserve. Kashimo, in particular, is built up as a generational talent and then held in reserve for a payoff that arrives much later, which makes his Culling Game presence feel slightly undercooked relative to his apparent importance.
But the arc’s ambition is undeniable. The sakuga sequences that MAPPA brings to adapted versions of these fights have the material to work with precisely because Akutami drew the fights with spatial clarity — you always know where characters are and what the stakes of each exchange mean. That’s rarer than it sounds in a genre where scale often comes at the expense of legibility.
The Culling Game arc is ultimately about what happens when systems designed to control cursed energy fail catastrophically. The sorcerer world built up across the series isn’t just threatened — it’s dismantled, and the characters are left to fight not for victory but for the possibility that something worth rebuilding will survive. That’s a darker premise than most shonen series attempt, and Jujutsu Kaisen earns it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many colonies are there in the Culling Game?
Ten colonies are established across Japan. The Tokyo No. 1, Tokyo No. 2, Sendai, and Hokkaido colonies receive the most narrative attention in the manga. Each colony has its own population of players and internal dynamics.
Can players leave a colony?
Not freely. A player must spend points — earned through killing or through rule additions — to exit a colony. This is the binding vow that traps participants and the core reason Yuji and Megumi’s point-accumulation strategy matters.
Why does Sukuna want Megumi’s body specifically?
Megumi’s Ten Shadows Technique gives Sukuna access to Mahoraga, a divine shikigami capable of adapting to and eventually overcoming any attack. Sukuna identified this as the most tactically valuable tool available to him — a means of countering techniques that would otherwise be dangerous even to him.
Is Kenjaku the same person as Geto?
No. Kenjaku is an ancient cursed spirit whose technique allows him to transplant his brain into other bodies, using their cursed techniques. He hijacked Geto’s body after Geto’s death. The Geto fans knew is gone; Kenjaku simply inherited his appearance and technique.
For authoritative background on how manga arcs like the Culling Game are structured for serialization, the Wikipedia entry on Jujutsu Kaisen provides a reliable overview of the series’ publication history and arc breakdown. For deeper reading on Gege Akutami’s creative approach and the series’ critical reception, VIZ Media’s official Shonen Jump page for Jujutsu Kaisen is the primary English-language source for the manga.