First video game adaptation of Gege Akutami’s manga, Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash arrived like a hair in the soup in this first quarter, very rich in releases. Several weeks after the end of the second season of the anime and its traumatic Shibuya Drama arc, without truly aggressive communication and despite the popularity of the work around the world, what is Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash worth? Hang in there, like an occult energy technique, this test is going to hurt. Very bad.
Generally, there are unmistakable signs. A rather discreet communication policy. A code review that comes right on the day of the official release of the game. From the first phases of handling to Paris Games Week without warmth, without emotion and without notable buzz from the public present, not enough at least to make one of the big releases at the start of the year, this is the atmosphere in which Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash was released, the first adaptation of the manga/anime of the same name and developed jointly by the Byking Inc and Gemdrops studios. And this atmosphere is pretty stinky, let me be clear. Wrong? Uh no.
A DVD menu but without the bonuses
From the first part, we understand very quickly (too quickly? Good evening, no) that Cursed Clash is not a great vintage. Nor a great and good adaptation of the manga. The presentation menu, which offers us opening video extracts from the anime, is quite similar to that of a good old-fashioned DVD. Do you find us harsh? Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. Because things get worse when you rummage through said menu and observe the content offered and in particular its container. We select the characters that we are going to play or face in a table that is 100% written, austere, not very salesy and without seeing the famous roster that we have at our disposal.
You read correctly: to choose your character, you scroll through their name… without seeing it. A totally ludicrous practice these days and not at all suitable for non-connoisseurs of the work, who cannot tell who is who by their simple first name. And when we finally see the characters chosen for a fight, just before starting it, we can only notice their excessive pixelation. Certainly, Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash is supposed to run on several generations of consoles, but we had no right to expect better.
Combat yes but in slow motion
Once in the game, the general feeling is this: visually, the game is neither beautiful nor truly ugly. The final product is “mid”, meaning average, correct, acceptable therefore, with exploded textures during the destruction of platforms or other elements of the decor and just OK during the introductory cutscenes, special moves and combined attacks, associating, as its name indicates, two characters on one and the same technique (we will come back to this). The opportunity here to recall the very essence of Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash: the game is an arena fighter, with rather large locations, destructible settings and 2 vs 2 opposition, clearly pushing for online cooperation, with bonuses linked to your agreement, strengthening the effects of some of your attacks.
To type, nothing complicated, the player has an auto-combo system, by spamming the same key, extraction shots (ground and aerial launchers in reality), special shots drawing on energy occult of each character (remember that in Jujutsu Kaisen we follow exorcists facing scourges, resulting from people’s bad feelings) and a special super-attack annihilating at least 50% of the opponent’s life bar.
The mechanics are simple and the game is just as easy to learn. Except it really isn’t. The fault is a manifest latency in everything we do. Between the end of a race and a blow, a coffee can be started, a return trip to the pee room as well. Obviously we exaggerate and force the point and we also use humor (a little), but all this with the aim of raising a major concern about fluidity in the gameplay. Everything is chopped up and this has unfortunate consequences. In the defense phase, we suffer. You may, depending on the opponent encountered (Panda, for example) never be able to get up and lose a round since the time to get back on your feet is so long that by the time the action is finally carried out, your opponent has already beaten you, preventing you from retaliating!
Inconsistencies, uneven difficulty and great frustration
This makes the 2 versus 1 and 3 versus 1 phases (offered in Story mode) unplayable and far too frustrating to generate even a simple desire to take on the challenge. In the other direction, winning a fight is not the most complicated thing. Eldritch Energy techniques are the ones that hurt opponents, but by spamming the auto-combo button, they trigger automatically. And this is where Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash reveals a little potential: depending on the last blow struck, you will be able to follow up directly with another occult technique (without respamming the auto-combo this time) or with a launcher, to resume another series of combos on your opponent, either a little further away or in the air. Obviously enjoyable, effective too. At least a good point.
Except that here again, things could have gone well, with high environments designed for this type of combo… if the camera didn’t go into a spin every other time. Sometimes she follows the action, sometimes not. But (too) often, she does it wrong. And in Story mode, another difficulty is added: that of the dialogues, large, clearly visible, and in the middle of the action, making it almost illegible. Action, moreover, which does not require that much to be messy, since it already quite simply is when the four characters find themselves gathered in the same place in the stage to fuck each other on the face. This is not the only obvious frustration of a mode which is content to chain still images with the voices of the characters to tell a story, that of season 1 of the anime and that also of the film Jujutsu Kaisen 0.
A story in which you are not the hero
Obviously, cutscenes would perhaps have drunk connoisseurs of the work, but isn’t it also to immerse themselves in a plot that they know and that they like to play? And what about those who would begin their Jujutsu Kaisen adventure with Cursed Clash? And what about a real gameplay proposal for this mode ultimately? In the configuration chosen by the developers, it ultimately turns out to be very long, and it doesn’t take long to skip the dialogues, especially thanks to the presence of small thumbnails under the chapters, which tell us if the moment to come will just be narration. or combat.
The main challenge of the mode, of which this slide variation is not exclusive to Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash (it was recently found in Naruto x Boruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Collection), lies in our ability to complete a certain number of objectives ranging from number of rounds not to lose, the number of occult techniques to use, how to finish our opponent or even the number of meters covered during the fight in the arena. Yeah. Classic and ultimately not very interesting. Summary of what we could say for the rest of the game’s content, which revolves around online versus, local versus, an online lobby and a co-op mode, with either a succession of battles to fight, either survival with another player or with the AI.
Enough to ensure a form of replayability of course, but only for those who have enough love for the work to want to play it, without taking into account all its structural defects, its lack of care, and its lack of global commitment. Nor its lack of coherence, as evidenced by the combined attacks, which are supposed to combine two characters on the same technique and which often only sees one of the two performing the action. Given the feedback on the Net, not sure that there are many defenders of Cursed Clash. For its big video game debut, Jujutsu Kaisen did not need to travel to Shibuya: its drama is indeed Cursed Clash.
