Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash asks players to master Cursed Techniques, pair up two fighters, and aim for new heights in 2 vs. 2 combat. It is a fighting game built on Gege Akutami’s manga and the 2020 anime adaptation of it, co-developed by Byking and Gemdrops and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. It came out on February 1, 2024, in Japan for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, with a worldwide release the next day. It scores 4.4 out of 10.
Trailer, via Bandai Namco Entertainment Southeast Asia.
A 16-Character Roster and Not Much Behind It
The base game ships with 16 playable characters. Players form teams of two from that roster and fight CPU opponents or other people online. Additional fighters arrived later as both paid and free downloadable content, along with two new story chapters drawn from the anime’s second season.
Sixteen sounds workable until you play it. The roster is the whole pitch, and it thins fast once you notice how little separates one sorcerer from the next. The game wants you to build combinations that complement a play style and show off each character’s cursed technique. That idea is sound. The execution is not. Team composition matters less than it should, because the techniques do not diverge enough to make a pairing feel like a decision.
Yuji Itadori and a Story Mode That Goes Nowhere
The single player story mode adapts the events of the anime’s first season and the film Jujutsu Kaisen 0. It follows Yuji Itadori, the series protagonist, as he fights monsters known as Curses to save humankind in modern-day Japan.
That is a fine spine for a story mode. Cursed Clash does almost nothing with it. The mode moves from one fight to the next without giving the material room to land, and the result is a campaign that feels like a checklist rather than a retelling. Fans who came for the first season and Jujutsu Kaisen 0 will recognize the beats. They will not feel them.
Strengthen your cursed techniques through exhilarating battles, defeat your opponents, and… domain expansion…?!
That line is the game’s own promise. The battles are not exhilarating, and the domain expansion hook does not carry the weight the marketing implies.
Where Cursed Clash Falls Apart
The problems stack in a clear order.
- The story mode is lackluster, and it is the mode most players will start with.
- The character roster is small for a team fighter, and 16 does not stretch far in 2 vs. 2.
- The netcode is poor, which poisons the online play that should be the long tail.
- The co-op mode is underwhelming, which undercuts the entire 2 vs. 2 premise.
Start at the top. The story mode is the first thing a buyer meets, and it is the weakest part of the package. Move to the roster, and the small count bites harder in a game built on pairs. Then the netcode, which decides whether online matches hold up. Then co-op, which is the reason the game exists in this shape at all.
Any one of these would be survivable. All four together are not.
What Cursed Clash Gets Right
The 2 vs. 2 structure is the right call for this series. Pairing sorcerers and Curses, mixing techniques, and building a team around complementary strengths is a better fit for Jujutsu Kaisen than a straight one-on-one fighter would be. The game understands that.
It just cannot deliver it. A team fighter lives or dies on its netcode and its co-op, and Cursed Clash fails at both. The roster that should give the team-building room to breathe is too thin to sustain it. The story mode that should give the whole thing a reason to exist is the mode you will want to skip.
This is the part worth saying plainly: Cursed Clash is not a broken game so much as an unfinished idea. The concept is correct. The follow-through is missing at every level that matters.
Bandai Namco has published better anime fighters, and Byking and Gemdrops have the genre in their bones. That makes the result harder to excuse, not easier. The downloadable content — extra fighters, two more story chapters from the second season — patches around the problem instead of fixing it. More characters do not repair netcode. More chapters do not repair a story mode that never worked.
The Score
Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash is a 2 vs. 2 fighter with the right idea and the wrong execution. The roster is thin, the story mode is a slog, the netcode is poor, and the co-op mode does not justify the team format it is built around. The source material deserved better, and so did the people who bought in on the strength of the first season and Jujutsu Kaisen 0.
Skip it unless a deep discount and a dedicated friend make the co-op worth tolerating. Even then, temper expectations.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
