Anime Like Jujutsu Kaisen: 5 the Rubric Says You'll Love, Ranked by Critical Proximity

Fans of Jujutsu Kaisen respond to its strongest criteria — MAPPA's 9.0 animation, an 8.5 character spine, an 8.5 cultural footprint — and these five picks deliver the same qualities, ranked by how close their critical profile sits to it, not by vibes.

Jujutsu Kaisen is not carried by its cursed-energy system, and it is not carried by Yuji Itadori. It is carried by MAPPA's Shibuya cityscape work, by the Gojo-Geto flashback that recontextualizes an entire franchise around Riko Amanai's death, and by Nanami handing off the fight to Yuji with "You've got the rest." That is what the Codex 8.23 is actually measuring — a 9.0 on animation, an 8.5 on character, an 8.5 on cultural weight — and the recommendation problem for anime like Jujutsu Kaisen is that most lists chase demographic overlap instead of critical profile.

The consensus is grading the wrong things

MyAnimeList sits Jujutsu Kaisen at 8.70. The community score is a real signal, but it is a signal about the Shibuya Incident dominating 2023 discourse — Gojo's sealing, Sukuna's Malevolent Shrine, Mahito weaponizing Junpei's memory against Yuji. It is not a signal about the show's world-building, which the Codex rates at only 7.5 because Gege Akutami's rule-bound system keeps burying its own clarity under mid-battle exposition. The 23 episodes MAPPA shipped in 2023 are gorgeous, brutal, and structurally uneven, and any honest recommendation for fans of Jujutsu Kaisen has to admit which of those adjectives it is chasing.

So this list ranks by critical proximity to the JJK scorecard — animation-forward, character-forward, culturally heavy shonen — not by "these both have exorcists." That order matters. The show closest to JJK's profile is not the one with the closest premise.

Mob Psycho 100 — the ceiling every JJK sakuga fan is actually chasing

Start here, at the top, because Mob Psycho 100 is the Codex 9.05 that Jujutsu Kaisen's 9.0 animation score points directly at. Bones' 2019 season — the one the catalogue is measuring — runs 13 episodes and lands a 9.5 on animation, a 9.7 on character, and a 9.2 on themes. If what you responded to in JJK Season 2 was MAPPA's Gojo vs. Jogo choreography and the Shibuya destruction, Mob's Claw Seventh Division arc and the Dimple confrontation are the closer, cleaner version of that ambition — same expressive freedom, none of the labor-condition asterisk that shadows MAPPA's 9.0.

The deeper match is thematic. Where Jujutsu Kaisen's 8.0 on themes interrogates the cost of overwhelming strength through Gojo's isolation, Mob interrogates it through Shigeo Kageyama's refusal to use his. It is the same question asked from the opposite direction, and Mob answers it better. This is the recommendation for anyone who liked JJK and suspects it could have been sharper.

My Hero Academia — the character-and-culture twin

My Hero Academia at Codex 8.40 is the closest overall scorecard match on this list: 8.2 story, 9.0 character, 8.3 themes, 8.7 animation, 8.5 cultural. Set that beside Jujutsu Kaisen's 8.0 / 8.5 / 8.0 / 9.0 / 8.5 and you are looking at nearly the same shape of show, judged criterion by criterion.

The catalogue Codex entry is Bones' 2017 first season, 25 episodes. That season's character work — All Might's hollowed frame revealed to Izuku on the beach, Bakugo's Sludge Villain rescue, the Sports Festival's use of Todoroki's ice as autobiography — is doing the same job the Gojo-Geto Hidden Inventory flashback does for JJK: giving the ideological weight that turns a power-system shonen into something worth an 8.5 on characters. Both shows also share the cultural-footprint problem in reverse — they are two of the "big" modern shonen the discourse has to grade in the same breath.

Assassination Classroom — the mentor-and-mortality match

Assassination Classroom sits at Codex 7.53 with a 7.5 on story and an 8.0 on characters, and Lerche's 2015 first season is the recommendation for anyone who loved Nanami. Koro-sensei is the mentor Jujutsu Kaisen wishes Gojo could be for longer than the Hidden Inventory arc allows him to be — a figure whose entire relationship with his students is structured around the fact that they will have to kill him. The 3-E classroom is a hit list disguised as a homeroom, and the show earns its character score by making every student's assassination attempt reveal something about them.

The rubric proximity here is narrower than the top two picks — a 7.53 is not an 8.23 — but the specific criteria that overlap are the ones JJK fans actually care about. If Nanami's exhausted final moments landed for you, Koro-sensei's final roll call is the same emotional register, executed with less carnage and more control. There's a reason mentor-death beats keep carrying scorecards past what their surrounding structure would otherwise earn.

Daemons of the Shadow Realm — the closest premise match on the list

Daemons of the Shadow Realm at Codex 7.35 is the Bones Film 2026 adaptation, 24 episodes, and it is here because the world-building profile — a 7.6, essentially even with JJK's 7.5 — is doing similar work. Curses in JJK are the residue of hardship, regret, and shame; the Shadow Realm's yokai-adjacent architecture runs on a comparable logic of the human unconscious made hostile. The 8.0 animation is not MAPPA-tier, but Bones Film is not asking it to be. It's asking it to serve a 7.4 story that moves.

This is the lowest-ceiling pick on the list on purpose. Its 7.35 sits farther from JJK's 8.23 than anything else here, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What it offers is the tonal match — supernatural, urban, primarily teen cast, curse-adjacent metaphysics — for the fan who has already run through the four picks above and wants one more.

Beelzebub — the outlier, and why it's last

Beelzebub sits at Codex 6.20, Pierrot Plus, 60 episodes from 2011, with a 6.2 story and 6.8 characters. It is the weakest scorecard on this list and it is here for exactly one reason: the delinquent-shonen-meets-supernatural register. Tatsumi Oga raising the demon lord's infant heir is the comedic inversion of Yuji Itadori hosting Sukuna, and if the pitch-black tone of the Shibuya Incident wore you down, Beelzebub is the palate cleanser that keeps the genre coordinates and drops the despair.

The steelman: JJK's appeal is the darkness, not the technique

The strongest counter to this list is that Jujutsu Kaisen fans are chasing tone, not craft — that what pulled them in was Mahito's grimness, Nobara's apparent death, Yuji's psychological collapse, the relentless bleakness the Codex flags as occasionally tipping into shock. On that reading, Mob Psycho and My Hero Academia are wrong-register picks, and Beelzebub is a joke.

The rubric reads it differently. Tone is not a Codex criterion; animation, character, themes, world, story, and cultural weight are. JJK's 8.23 is built on measurable craft, and the shows that share that craft are the honest recommendation — even when their emotional register runs lighter. Grading by vibe is how you end up telling JJK fans to watch Chainsaw Man again.

Verdict

Rank by profile, not premise: Mob Psycho 100 is the ceiling, My Hero Academia is the twin, Assassination Classroom is the mentor match, Daemons of the Shadow Realm is the tonal cousin, Beelzebub is the outlier. The Codex numbers say the order in that sentence is the order you should watch them in, and the numbers are not asking your permission.