Review of Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story

I wasn't originally planning on reviewing this right off. I watched the show as it aired, and a second season was announced right after it ended, so I thought about waiting until the second season aired to review it. But since the second season won't air until about 2021, and due to recent events regarding the cellphone game this is based on, I decided to review the first season after all. Magia Record if a spin-off of Madoka Magica, the popular magical girl anime that aired in 2011, and MR itself began life as a mobile game in 2017. The mobile game wound up becomingsuper popular, and in Japan, it's still going to this day. I had no way of playing the game until I got a new phone, but the anime provided a nice alternative, and seeing as I love Madoka Magica, I decided to check this out. Unfortunately, as you can tell, while the anime does have some things going for it, it can't seem to escape from Madoka's shadow.

The story follows a young magical girl, Iroha Tamaki, who has been having strange dreams involving a girl she doesn't know. Some clues lead her to Kamihama City, and she runs into a plethora of magical girls who offer to help her with her search however they can. Later, Iroha finds a pint-sized Kyubey, nothing like the Kyubey she knows of, and through physical contact with it, she learns that the mysterious girl in her dreams is actually her younger sister, Ui, who seems to have disappeared completely. In fact, evidence of Ui's whole existence are completely gone, even from people's memories. Now that her memories are back, Iroha decides to stay in Kamihama, thinking that helping fight against powerful witches and rumors becoming reality will lead her to find out what really happened to Ui. But she may wind up getting more than she bargained for.

Like the original Madoka Magica anime, Magia Record is animated by the studio SHAFT, which is both famous and infamous for its usage of colorful, crazy visuals depending on the kind of show they're making. For the most part, the animation is true to Madoka Magica's original style, keeping the crazy, colorful, out there visuals to the witch lairs and keeping the scenes that take place in the real world relatively normal, complete with Madoka's trademark overly elaborate buildings and architecture. It helps that the character movement is still relatively smooth and with very little still frames. One thing I do commend Magia Record for is rectifying one particular issue I had with Madoka's animation. Remember how the anime would have characters' faces be drawn in really weird angles and with an extra thick line that outlines their cheeks and chins? Magia Record still has this as well, but with the characters' cheeks and chins being much rounder, save for certain scenes, this particular quirk is not only toned down to make it seem much more polished, but it's integrated into the animation in a way that doesn't feel intrusive, nor does it look like the result of an animator not knowing how to draw someone's face.

Unlike Madoka Magica, Yuki Kajiura is not in charge of the music for Magia Record. Granted, the anime does use some famous pieces of background music on occasion, but the majority of this soundtrack was done by one Takumi Ozawa, whose portfolio is more limited than hers. He mostly worked on stuff like Divine Gate, Okamikakushi, and Aria The Scarlet Ammo. I don't know if he does the music for the game or not, but that said, his music for the anime is surprisingly good. Parts of it feel like they were directly inspired by Kajiura's work, but it's easy to tell that other parts of the music are distinctly his, and it would have been more contentious had he tried to solely emulate Kajiura's style. But that's only really noticeable for those with a particularly trained ear for music, and considering Yuki Kajiura is one of the more well known composers in anime, that's saying a lot. The opening and ending songs are well sung too, but they're not exactly going to set the world on fire.

Unfortunately, this is where my praises for Magia Record start to dwindle. It's no surprise that Magia Record is based on a cell phone game, and mobile games are known for having a LOT of characters, often with new ones being put in whenever a game has a new event or something. With many of those properties being made into 12-13 episode anime, you have to really be careful with what you adapt, because if you try to bite off more than you can chew, your adaptation will suffer in the process. Two of the things people like myself loved about Madoka Magica was that it kept its cast of characters small and made optimal use of the short run time that it had, making sure to make use of all the ingredients it had while restraining itself from doing more than its run time would allow. Every character and plotline had a purpose, and the creators used them nicely. Sadly, this is where Magia Record suffers. Instead of having one singular plotline to focus on, Magia Record instead tries to juggle Iroha's search for Ui along with learning about the Witches based on rumors, or Uwasa, with the latter taking up the majority of the focus in the anime. Plus, rather than focusing on a smaller cast of characters, Magia Record pulls in a whole bunch of them, and other than a select few, they never really develop or receive fleshed out character arcs, making them all feel rather hollow and one-dimensional. Iroha herself is also a victim of this, and she's the main character. I admit I never got very far in the mobile game (And didn't get the chance to due to the game shutting down. No thanks, Aniplex!!), but even in the earliest parts of the game, Iroha was much more proactive and capable at fighting than the anime makes her out to be. She never really gets stronger in any way, and she always has to have someone to save her.

Speaking of characterization, it doesn't seem like the anime really knows what to do with Yachiyo. Her characterization is all over the place at times. In one scene, she's understandably mistrustful of one magical girl because of her childish, reckless nature, and later on, she completely changes her tune and allows said girl to live with her with little rhyme or reason! The game has her characterization be more consistent, as there, she does start out mistrustful of Iroha to the point of trying to drive her out of Kamihama, but Iroha manages to win her over and Yachiyo stops trying to antagonize her, so there, the changes in her personality make sense, but she's still a hardened magical girl veteran, so you never feel like the change happened too suddenly. In the anime, Yachiyo seems to keep flip-flopping between being terse or being uncharacteristically nice. Make up your mind, writers!!

It doesn't help that the two main plots don't necessarily have much of a connection to one another until the final two episodes. Many episodes just show the characters wandering around searching for the plot, which makes the pacing feel sluggish, and in turn, makes the show feel like it's meandering...and for a story like this, it really shouldn't do that. Madoka Magica knew what to focus on and never tried to pull in any superfluous subplots to make it feel bloated, whereas Magia Record brings in too many plotlines, many of which aren't woven into the narrative very well and wind up having nothing happening. In an anime with a short number of episodes, you can't afford to waste any time and resources, and Magia Record, in its desire to show a bunch of the game characters and cover as many of its early subplots as possible without trying to find ways to organically make them work in a short time frame, wound up doing just that. Sure, a second season has been announced, but that can only go so far in fixing the show's mistakes, and the show leaves a lot of things unresolved in the end anyway, making it feel even more disappointing. In all honesty, the only episodes of this show that I found good were the ones that focused on Sana, as those had the best execution and visual direction in the entire show. I kind of feel bad for being so critical of Magia Record, as you can tell it really wants to do more than its limited number of episodes will allow. Had this been made in, say, the late 90s or early 2000s, it might have been able to get 39 or even 52 episodes to cover the games' entire story and actually afford to meander a bit. But these days, every anime that's not a long running franchise has to be 11-13 episodes, and I think that's what made Magia Record fail: Rather than try to cut the chafe from the source material and adapt it in a way that'd work for the animation medium, it wound up biting off way more than it could chew, resulting in it not having any sort of balance whatsoever.

If you're a fan of Madoka Magica and want to watch something tangentially related to it, feel free to give this a shot, but it's unbalanced nature and bloated narrative make it into just another mediocre gacha game anime. And no, I'm STILL not over Aniplex shutting down the American version of Magia Record!! Why'd you have to get rid of the only mobage I actually cared about?!