If you’re a fan of “Jujutsu Kaisen,” you’re likely aware of two key points. First, a list of just 10 characters barely scratches the surface of the show’s impressive lineup of powerful individuals. Second, it’s probable that some of your personal favorites didn’t make the cut. For instance, the internet sensation Kento Nanami, voiced by Kenjiro Tsuda in Japanese and David Vincent in English, doesn’t appear here. Even the series’ protagonist, Yuji Itadori, voiced by Junya Enoki and Adam McArthur, narrowly misses out on the Top 10. This raises the question: which characters are potent enough to secure a spot?

Before diving in, a word of caution for those only following the anime: to accurately convey the true strength of some characters, we’ll delve into achievements that have, as of now, only been revealed in the manga. With that spoiler alert in mind, let’s explore the list of contenders!

Maki Zenin, voiced by Mikako Komatsu and Allegra Clark, seems an unlikely candidate for this list, at least on paper. Her binding vow, known as Heavenly Restriction, completely deprives her of cursed energy, necessitating special glasses just to see curses. This limitation even led her to part ways with the sorcerer-centric Zenin clan.

On paper, Maki Zenin (Mikako Komatsu and Allegra Clark) has no business being on this list. Her binding vow, Heavenly Restriction, locks her out of cursed energy so thoroughly that she needs special glasses to even see curses. For this reason, she actually left the sorcerer-heavy Zenin clan.

However, the flip side of the Heavenly Restriction coin is that Maki’s physical abilities are superhuman even by “Jujutsu Kaisen” standards. She doesn’t hang with the rest of the characters because she’s a talented jujutsu sorcerer in the traditional sense — she does it because she simply is that good.

Maki’s superhuman physical abilities are formidable enough to battle foes she would otherwise struggle to compete with. She’s strong, fast, and skilled. While she’s extremely durable, she can take damage from powerful enough attacks, and accumulates an impressive array of battle wounds over the course of the series. Yet, she’s known to recover from the kind of stuff very few “Jujutsu Kaisen” characters should be able to withstand. Maki’s ability to compensate for her lack of cursed energy by leaning on her own strengths and tools makes her different from the majority of other figures in the franchise, and more than enough of a problem to warrant a place on the list.

Yuki Tsukumo (Noriko Hidaka and Anjali Kunapaneni) is a free-wheeling special grade jujutsu sorcerer who’s notorious for disagreeing with Jujutsu High’s methods and not taking any missions. This doesn’t mean she’s a coward, though. On the contrary, she’s a cool, playful, and focused character who works on her own solutions for dealing with curses, instead of the reactionary tactics Jujutsu High has embraced.

Yuki’s status as a special grade jujutsu sorcerer gives a rough idea of her strength, which is honestly overwhelming. Her physical abilities and fighting skills are brutal, and her innate cursed technique, Star Rage, can put mass behind her attacks, allowing her to deal crushing blows. To give you an idea of how destructive this can be, Yuki’s ability to add mass is so extensive that she can actually turn her own body into a black hole as a last resort tactic.

She can also heal from grisly injuries by utilizing her abilities. If all of this wasn’t enough, she also has a serpentine spirit familiar called Garuda, whose powers Yuki can augment in order to turn it into a cursed tool weapon. She can also resist domain expansion attacks — which are usually unblockable — with a technique that neutralizes them.

Though Yuki isn’t invincible and ultimately falls to Kenjaku — more on him later — the battle really could have gone either way and Yuki had Kenjaku seriously concerned. This alone is a testament for the sheer threat she poses. 

Toji Fushiguro (Takehito Koyasu and Nicolas Roye) is a menace, to put it mildly. The second character on the list with less-than-comfortable ties to the Zenin Clan, he’s a confident, stoic, and calculating assassin whose nickname, “Sorcerer Killer,” is a testament to his abilities.

As a gun for hire, Toji is effectively a game-ender whenever someone coughs up enough cash to pay for his services. Toji is a force to be reckoned with despite being a non-curse user. He’s an incredibly powerful physical specimen and a master tactician who is able to come up with fight plans to overwhelm just about anyone. He even uses his lack of cursed energy to render himself invisible to those used to perceiving it. After all, virtually every other person has at least trace amounts of the stuff. Thanks to his unique skill set, he manages to give even Satoru Gojo (Yuichi Nakamura and Kaiji Tang) trouble before ultimately meeting his fate at the hands of the overpowered special grade jujutsu sorcerer.

Like Maki Zenin, Toji has Heavenly Restriction, which has granted him abnormally sharp senses to complement his physical prowess and tactical skills. He also owns a very handy cursed spirit known as the Inventory Curse, which can store Toji’s vast arsenal of normal and cursed weaponry. This enables the assassin to switch tools and tactics at a moment’s notice without overencumbering himself.

Suguru Geto (Takahiro Sakurai and Lex Lang) becomes a “Jujutsu Kaisen” villain over time as he starts to see humans as inferior to sorcerers. As a major antagonist who moved from jujutsu sorcerer status to that of a ruthlessly evil curse user, he obviously has power to spare. Being one of the four special grade sorcerers in the world, he’s a particularly powerful character whose physical fighting skills and extreme intelligence would already be fearsome even if he didn’t have his nasty cursed technique.

Geto’s innate technique is Cursed Spirit Manipulation, which allows him to command cursed spirits — even ones that are already tied to another sorcerer, provided that he kills the sorcerer first. He can collect an indefinite amount of these curses, and has possessed over 4,000 of them at once. As a last resort attack, he can even unleash them all at once with his Maximum: Uzumaki technique. Geto also has a handy special barrier technique called the Curtain, which creates a dome-like energy barrier that can either hide things from view or trap others inside.

A centuries-old sorcerer in a contemporary body, Hajime “God of Lightning” Kashimo (Ryōhei Kimura and Zeno Robinson) is a massively powerful figure who participates in the Culling Game and establishes himself as a fast and powerful menace with hand-to-hand skills to spare. As his nickname implies, his personal cursed energy ability is lightning-themed, and turns his body into a live wire in a way that amplifies his attacks. Like traditional electric power characters, Hajime can also shoot lightning.

The fun thing, however, is that all that stuff isn’t even Hajime’s real gift. It just goes to show just how great he is at manipulating cursed energy. His true innate cursed technique is turning into the Mythical Beast Amber, a fearsome monster that physically transforms Hajime to reflect various electric powers, such as electromagnetic energy beams.

All of this would be enough to potentially put Hajime even higher on the list if it wasn’t for a few demonstrated weaknesses. As a lightning-themed character, he’s weak to water. He can also unleash Mythical Beast Amber only once in his lifetime, and his battle against Ryomen Sukuna (Junichi Suwabe and Ray Chase) shows that Hajime is very, very far from invincible.

Rika Orimoto (Kana Hanazawa and Anairis Quiñones) is just a girl. Then she’s hit by a car, and the desperate focus of her friend Yuta Okkotsu (Megumi Ogata and Kayleigh McKee) imbues her with vast amounts of cursed energy. As a result, the young girl becomes the strongest cursed spirit ever seen. Still enamored with Yuta in this condition, she starts haunting and protecting him, whether he likes it or not.

Rika is so immensely strong that Suguru Geto — who, remember, is a cursed spirit manipulator with access to over 4,000 spirits — considers Rika the Queen of Curses and would love to use her as a weapon. When necessary, she’s also able to use her considerable physical might to battle opponents or perform various support actions. Oh, and those aforementioned 4,000 spirits at Suguru’s disposal? Rika ends up beating them all with relative ease once Yuta unlocks her full strength by promising himself to her.  

Rika’s curse is ultimately lifted and she passes on peacefully. However, during the years she spent haunting Yuta, she was easily one of the most formidable entities in the world, intertwined with him though she was. She left a little something behind her, too: While the real Rika has moved on, she gifted the cursed spirit some of her will, which allowed a new, separate Rika entity to keep on accompanying Yuta. 

Kenjaku might look and sound like Suguru Geto, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead of Geto surviving death on “Jujutsu Kaisen,”  his corpse was hijacked by a disembodied, ancient brain implanted in Geto’s head, which is just one of the many host bodies he’s used before.

Since Geto’s body still retains his innate spirit manipulation abilities and Kenjaku is a 1,000-year-old curse user with evil intentions, this is obviously a problem. Where Geto is the most evil curse user of his time, Kenjaku has a solid claim for the all-timer award, and his lengthy existence has given him plenty of jujutsu skills to boot. Kenjaku is a masterful barrier user and tactician, and apart from Suguru’s borrowed abilities, he has a number of his own.

Kenjaku’s innate Brain Transplant ability allows him to move his (weirdly toothy) brain from one host to another, allowing for effective immortality. He also has a gravity-themed cursed technique known as the Antigravity System, which he retained from former host Kaori Itadori. He also boasts one of the most unnerving domain expansions in the series: Womb Profusion, which summons a massive, tree-like knot of malformed cursed spirits. He also has access to a special cursed object called Prison Realm, which can trap people and things in a pocket dimension.

Yuta Okkotsu seems to start out as a pretty weak dude who stumbles into special grade sorcerer status because he happens to be haunted by the powerful Rika Orimoto. To say that this is incorrect would be a dramatic understatement. 

Trained in the art of the blade by Maki Zenin and armed with an impressive array of physical and mental combat abilities, Yuta would be a formidable force even without his sorcerer abilities, which are incredible. His boundless swathes of cursed energy were able to turn Rika into a powerful cursed spirit, and they also make him an unpredictable opponent who can use his energy to both attack and fortify as needed. He has also mastered the Black Flash technique, which enables him to augment physical hits with a reality-distorting spike of cursed energy. 

However, his true power is the incredible amount of cursed energy available to him, which he tends to wield through his connection to both versions of Rika the cursed spirit. This also manifests with his innate technique, Copy, which allows him to simply copy techniques from other cursed technique wielders on the condition that Rika has eaten a part of them. Copy has left Yuta with the ability to use a massive number of different cursed techniques. He also has two powerful domain expansions and a dangerous extension technique called Jacob’s Ladder, which blasts opponents with a pillar of light.

While Yuji Itadori is stuck watching from the sidelines, one major “Jujutsu Kaisen” protagonist has proven time and time again that he can hang with the best … and beat most of them. Satoru Gojo is pretty much universally recognized as the strongest contemporary special grade jujutsu sorcerer out there, a great teacher, and possibly the most powerful guy in the world … if you ask him, at any rate. 

Gojo is an amazing hand-to-hand fighter with physical abilities that outclass nearly anyone, and his cursed energy reserves seem to be nigh-boundless. Like Yuta Okkotsu, he’s a master of the Black Flash, and has a vast array of combat tricks up his sleeve. 

We’d be here all day if attempted to list every single one of Gojo’s Cursed Techniques, so let’s stick with a quick recap. As a user of the Limitless technique, he can manipulate cursed energy on levels few others can comprehend, slow down time, and manipulate gravity and mass in various color-coded ways. He can use the same Curtain technique as Suguru Geto. He has a powerful domain expansion called Unlimited Void, and multiple anti-domain techniques to counter domain attacks. Oh, and there’s also Satoru Goro’s famed Six Eyes power, which allows the user to observe cursed energy and understand the abilities of other cursed technique users. No wonder the guy’s near the top of our food chain.

Out of every Curse in “Jujutsu Kaisen,” one stands above the rest. The franchise doesn’t mince words about Ryomen Sukuna being the be-all and end-all of the show’s threats, from his “King of Curses” moniker to his seeming invincibility. 

The strongest jujutsu sorcerer in all of history, Sukuna has acquired an indefinite lifespan by becoming a cursed object whose consciousness eventually manifests inside Yuji Itadori. Sukuna’s reincarnation arc and the circumstances around his 20 cursed fingers is a subject for its own article, but whenever the villain is in control of a body and wielding a decent chunk of his fuller potential, he’s the single mightiest thing out there, full stop. 

Sukuna was the greatest sorcerer in an era when sorcerers were at their strongest, which says everything there is to know about his combat abilities. His innate techniques are powerful cut and fire attacks, and he eventually gains the power to summon animal-themed shadow spirits, and manipulate the shadows themselves. His domain expansion, Malevolent Shrine, summons a grim building where everything is subjected to brutal slicing attacks.

Disconcertingly, the four-armed Sukuna also has the ability to create mouths and eyes anywhere in his host body, which makes for some truly nightmarish visuals. Yuji’s connection to Sukuna is an important element of “Jujutsu Kaisen,” and the body horror element of that connection is one of the most memorable aspects of the series. There’s no question about Sukuna’s strength, compared to all other contenders.