Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash

My honest first reaction to Cursed Clash was confusion, not disappointment. The franchise is one of the most kinetic, visually inventive action series running right now, and Byking built a 3D brawler around it that feels like it was tuned for a mobile storefront. The core combat hook is genuinely interesting on paper: regular attacks function as Curse Extractors that build your Curse Energy meter, and only Cursed technique moves actually deal damage. Characters power up through battle, with iconic abilities like Gojo's Hollow Purple unlocking at max Curse Level 3. Each of the 16 base-roster fighters, from close-range bruisers like Yuji Itadori and Todo to ranged harassers like Nobara Kugisaki, has a distinct kit built around their anime abilities. That asymmetry, in a 2v2 context where coordinating crowd control with a teammate actually matters, hints at something worth playing. The execution undermines all of it. The damage-only-on-cursed-hits system means combos feel disconnected and low on impact, since most of your button presses are just meter-building busywork. Movement is simultaneously floaty in the air and sluggish on the ground, with attacks carrying almost no physical weight. The stages are large enough that a hard knockdown can send an opponent clear across the map, and the long wake-up recovery frames handed to downed characters mean comebacks feel arbitrary rather than earned. Character balance at launch was rough, with certain ranged fighters able to outperform close-range characters with little counterplay available. Online ranked and exhibition modes are locked to the 2v2 tag format, netcode drew consistent criticism at launch, and playing with a specific friend requires setting up a custom lobby rather than direct matchmaking. Presentation compounds the frustration. Story mode covers the first season of the anime and the Jujutsu Kaisen 0 film, but it plays out almost entirely through static anime stills with text and voiced dialogue, interrupted occasionally by fights. The menus feel utilitarian to the point of being unpleasant: Free Battle's character select is a plain text list with no visual grid, no character previews, no energy from the source material at all. The special move animations, for a series defined by iconic technique designs, arrive and vanish quickly with minimal spectacle. Post-launch, Bandai Namco has added paid and free DLC characters plus two new story chapters from the second season, which gives the roster slightly more relevance, but it does not fix the underlying combat feel. Who is this actually for? Dedicated JJK fans who want to spend a few hours with Gojo, Fushiguro, and the rest of the season-one cast will find that the character movesets are faithful enough to the source material to produce some satisfying moments, especially in local or online co-op when both players are communicating. Fans who know the Dissidia Final Fantasy style of bravery-to-HP conversion combat may also feel more at home here than the average arena-fighter player. Anyone coming in cold as a fighting-game fan expecting depth, polish, or the visual punch the anime provides weekly will be let down fast. Cursed Clash sat at a mixed 61% positive on Steam at time of writing, and OpenCritic placed it in the bottom three percent of reviewed games from its release year. That spread tells you what you need to know: the people still giving it positive marks are fans who found a floor of enjoyment in playing their favourite characters, not people who think this is a well-made game. It is not. It is a rushed product with one genuinely interesting mechanical idea buried under bare-bones modes, unpolished visuals, and combat that punishes curiosity rather than rewarding it.

Alex · Scout Team

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