Review of Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story

As someone that's played the mobile game, in my humble opinion this felt like a downgrade. They changed quite a lot of things, with the greatest one being that Madoka and Homura should have appeared by now. One of the great things about the mobile game was how the story of Madoka and Iroha slowly meld together but you can barely feel that in this one. It feels like they're holding back on revealing both Madoka and Homura just so we would hype up their appearance even more. The story of Felicia and Sana felt rushed and their characters don't feel fully fleshed out (same goes fora lot of other characters too). They're suppose to be main characters yet they feel like side characters. Plenty of small interactions are cut out mostly because they're time constrained but that also sacrifices characterization. Did you know that Felicia is bad at math? There was a scene in the game that goes something like this:

Felicia: What!? "(-1)-(-1)=0"? That makes no sense it's all negative the answers gotta be negative too duh!
Iroha: Felicia if you put two minus signs together it becomes a plus.
Felicia: No it doesn't!
Iroha: Tsuruno please help me...

Small talk like this is what slowly builds character and its nowhere to be found in the anime. I get it, they have to fit the whole story into (around) 25 episodes but they're cutting a lot of corners and it doesn't look good.

Overall, although I've done nothing but bash at how it couldn't adapt the source material well enough, it was still pleasant to watch. Considering how much had changed from the source material there were plenty of new things for me to experience and they even had some neat add-ons like Kuroe who was never in the game.