Anime has taught me many things. Fun things are fun. Blue-haired girls never win romantically, especially if they happen to be childhood friends. The circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant, it’s what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are. Another thing anime has taught me is that, no anime is ever really gone, and if you wait long enough, the anime you love will eventually return. This is what has happened with Magia Record, a high-quality spinoff of Puella Magi Madoka Magica that I think fans of the original will enjoy.
The story follows a new generation of characters who have been recruited by our old nemesis Kyubey to sign contracts and become magical girls so they can do battle with evil witches in exchange for a single wish. The story is based on a mobile game from Aniplex in which players recruit a team of magical girls and play through the game story, defeating witches and recovering grief seeds.
One of my pet peeves as a fan is that the stories told in anime are fun and enjoyable, but are often poorly structured because that’s how stories that grow out of a long manga or light novel series naturally tend to flow. So when a great anime that tells a nearly perfect story comes along (like Madoka Magica, or AnoHana, or Chu2koi season 1, or Gurren Lagann), I really want to enjoy it as a complete thing, and certainly don’t want that beauty of it to be diminished by the story continuing in a new direction. I wasn’t really a fan of the Rebellion sequel film because it disrupted the (to my mind) perfect balance of the original Madoka series. Happily, I don’t have this kind of negative reaction to Magia Record so far and am able to sit back and enjoy the totally new story, characters, and visuals the show has to offer.
Will Madoka Fans Embrace Magia Record?
One of our favorite companies in Japan is Nitroplus, which JAST USA and J-List have worked with closely on projects like Super Sonico, the 100% remastered Saya no Uta and the upcoming Togainu no Chi – Lost Blood – and Totono: YOU and ME and HER game titles. This is the company that also created Madoka Magica, and like many of their most popular works, the story flowed from the magic pen of Gen “The Butcher” Urobuchi. Whenever a new Nitroplus project is announced, fans hold their breath while they wait to learn whether Urobuchi will be personally involved with it or not.
The lack of Urobuchi’s name in the credits for Magia Record has caused some anxiety among anime fans, who assume that, when coupled with the lighter tone of the original mobile game, it means that the tightly-packed plots, dark overtones and tragic story elements of the original Madoka will be absent from the new series. While I’m not familiar with the mobile game, I can say that so far, the new series has everything fans could have asked for: a new generation of magical girls with new mysteries to discover, the familiar unsettling visual design of the witches in their bizarre worlds, plenty of dark imagery, and even a proper OP by ClariS.
I’m honestly loving the anime more than I thought possible. My mouth was literally agape as I realized that the Madoka-verse had finally returned to us.
Are you hyped for the new Magia Record anime series, or do you think it will be the worst thing since season 2 of Aldnoah.Zero? Tell us on Twitter!
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