Jujutsu Kaisen’s Culling Game arc wrapped in 2026 and I watched three different friends hit the same wall within a couple weeks of each other. They finish it. They feel weirdly empty. They open MyAnimeList and just stare at it.
I get it. Once you’ve had a shonen with a power system that actually has rules, a cast the writers are willing to kill off, and jokes dark enough that you feel a little bad laughing, “watch another action anime” isn’t really an answer. You want the specific thing, not the genre.
This list isn’t ranked, by the way. It’s roughly the order I’d bring these up in conversation, which is not the same thing.
Chainsaw Man
Start here if what you’re actually chasing is the studio. Same team as JJK, and you can feel it in how a fight gets staged, there’s this thing MAPPA does where the frame goes almost still for half a second right before everything explodes. Denji’s broke, orphaned, and merges with his pet devil mostly because it’s the only way out of debt, not out of any grand desire for heroism. Underneath the gore he’s just a kid who wanted breakfast. If Sukuna was doing more for you than Gojo was, honestly, this is Sukuna’s whole energy for a full season.
Fire Force
A firefighting brigade versus people who spontaneously combust into fire demons. No cursed-energy rulebook, but the same shape sits underneath it anyway: a special-forces unit, a strict hierarchy, a slow-burn mystery about what’s actually causing all of this in the first place. Season three finished its second part in 2026, so new viewers finally get the whole arc without getting stranded mid-story on a cliffhanger.
Blue Exorcist
Rin Okumura is Satan’s actual son, hiding that fact while training to become an exorcist, which is a setup you’d think would collapse under its own irony and somehow doesn’t. It’s an older show and it looks it — less visually ambitious than JJK by a wide margin, no contest there. But the core question underneath is nearly identical: what do you do when the thing inside you isn’t fully separate from who you are.
Black Torch
Newer. Still figuring out what it wants to be, and it’s already getting compared to JJK directly since it started airing this year, mostly because of the setup: a kid with an odd connection to supernatural creatures, a Bureau-style organization training him up, a team dynamic that rhymes with Yuji and the first-years without ripping it off outright. Worth catching now, while it’s still deciding whether it’s going to become its own thing.
Dandadan
I’ll admit the premise sounded stupid to me before I actually sat down with it. Two teenagers dare each other to prove the supernatural is real, aliens and ghosts show up to settle the bet. That’s the pitch. I was wrong to write it off. The fights hit as hard as anything in JJK and, more importantly, once a power’s rules get established the show actually sticks to them instead of finding a loophole three episodes later. That’s the real kinship here. Not the tone. The discipline.
Hell’s Paradise (Jigokuraku)
A death-row prisoner gets shipped to an island full of executioner monks, chasing an elixir of immortality, surrounded by things that used to be human and mostly aren’t anymore. Swap cursed spirits for body horror and you’re basically in the same emotional territory: people fighting stuff they don’t understand, using abilities that cost them something real every single time. Season two dropped in 2026 and somehow got even meaner about that cost. Compliment, not complaint.
Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War
Watch this one if what you actually miss is scale. Overpowered captains fighting each other, a villain roster that keeps topping itself, a soundtrack carrying half the emotional weight on its own. It finished its run in 2026, so for the first time ever you can watch the whole final arc back to back without years of gaps between cours. That alone is worth something.
Demon Slayer
Yeah, I know. Obvious pick. Going to say it anyway. People lump Demon Slayer and JJK together constantly because they’re both defining this decade of anime, even though they’re doing pretty different things underneath — Demon Slayer plays everything straight where JJK keeps undercutting itself with a joke, and its fights lean on color and motion way more than on power-system logic. Watch it for the sincere version of this genre. There’s a version of you that needs that after JJK’s constant sarcasm.
Mob Psycho 100
Skip it if fights are the only thing you want. When they happen they’re some of the best animation you’ll ever see, full stop, but that’s not really why the show exists. Mob’s a kid with terrifying psychic power who’d honestly rather join the body improvement club than use any of it on another person. Good palate cleanser. Watch it between JJK rewatches, not instead of one.
Hunter x Hunter
Older. Slower to get going, no getting around that. Also the show most JJK fans end up recommending to each other once everything current has been chewed through. The Nen system is still the cleanest example anime has of a power system with real limits and real consequences attached, which is the same quality that makes cursed energy interesting instead of just a costume. People aren’t exaggerating when they call the Chimera Ant arc the high point of the entire genre. I’ve heard it called that so many times it almost stopped meaning anything, and then I watched it, and yeah. Fine. It’s true.
