It feels fair to say that Magia Record is a bit of a weird thing. Nearly ten years out from Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the series has spawned a surprisingly large franchise. In this day and age, that means a gacha game. Thus it comes to pass that we have MagiReco, an anime adaptation of said game. It’s easy to be cynical about this sort of thing. Must be a soulless cash-grab, right?
Well, nothing’s ever really that simple.
Any franchise that lives long enough has to reckon with itself eventually in some way or another. Madoka was already doing this as early as Rebellion, but as much as the franchise itself, that was Gen Urobuchi and Shinbou codifying and modifying what they’d done with the series proper. Production-wise, the Magica Quartet is no more. Shinbou is gone, and Urobuchi is working on some thing on youtube about robots. This is not the first time Madoka Magica has been revisited or expanded upon. There have been manga, there have been books, there was, of all things, a roguelike for the PlayStation Portable. Nearly a decade later, Magia Record is a different animal. Even if the base parts that make something “Madoka” are all still here, they’re arranged differently. New characters form the bulk of the show’s cast, many of whom have similarities to the original Puella Magi. When old ones are reintroduced, it’s in an altered context. No one is quite who they appear to be, and the show itself by turns makes open nostalgia plays and is willfully cryptic.
To be very clear, this is not Rebellion. MagiReco is neither an obvious continuation of the franchise nor a radical departure from it. The patch of middle ground it seeks to farm is thus a tricky one.
MagiReco seems to operate from a curious core thesis, which is that Madoka’s metatext has been so heavily mined by other stories that there’s little point in digging into it. Instead, MagiReco almost aggressively foregrounds this iteration of the Madoka universe as pure text before it does anything else, only approaching deeper themes through this odd backdoor route. It is a show with a keen interest in the mechanics and the aesthetics of “Madoka” as an idea. Before it is any other thing, it is a vehicle for telling “Madoka stories”, and sees that as a valid goal on its own.
The show’s structure, which emphasizes smaller character arcs within a fairly large cast, somewhat ironically builds it similarly to the traditional magical warrior series to which Madoka is often (wrongly) cast as an antithesis. Add to this a bit of trademark SHAFT-y oddness, helmed by Gekidan Inu Curry (who both reprise their roles in the animation and now lead the series as directors), and you have a recipe for good solid fun. Which in some ways, is exactly what the show is.
You may notice that I have danced around the issue of the series’ actual quality. To tell the truth, I think MagiReco’s odd priorities mean that even moreso than is the norm for this kind of thing, you will take away what you put in. Do you have an interest in Madoka more as a cool magical girl series (however dark it may be) or as a Faustian tragedy? MagiReco is not solely for the former crowd, but it is that mentality that the series is clearly written from first and foremost. In part, MagiReco seems to see iterating upon “Madoka” as an idea as an end unto itself in the same way that post-Futari wa Precure seasons have done to that franchise.
This isn’t to say that it’s shallow. MagiReco’s habit of picking at the clockwork of the PMMM universe (or at least this version of it) means that it occasionally interrogates its own predecessor, sometimes to truly interesting effect, and sometimes not. The way that MagiReco interacts with PMMM is curious, often bordering on audience-antagonistic. Mami returns, but as a villain. Kyouko shows up only to dip for the finale, where she’s nowhere to be seen. Sayaka makes an appearance in the final episode where, while she does get to participate in one of the show’s highlights as far as fight scenes go, she does not actually do much. Of Madoka herself and the ever-divisive Homura, the former only shows up very briefly in a flashback. The latter, not at all.
Of the show’s original cast, its two leads Iroha and Yachiyo are clearly riffs, design-wise, on Madoka and Homura respectively, but they only broadly resemble those characters in writing. Iroha’s quest to find her disappeared sister is much more focused than Madoka’s broad love-everyone attitude (which is not to say it’s better or worse, but it’s distinct). Yachiyo on the other hand, is like Homura in her general lone wolfishness and status as a “veteran” magical girl, but the similarities don’t go much farther. Her own tragic past is of a very different kind. She loses friends and teammates to what she believes to be the results of her own wish--simply “to survive”--and in the show’s brightest spots, which it has a surprising amount of, she actually comes across as rather motherly.
If all of this seems a bit circuitous, it may be well because MagiReco’s biggest weakness is its lack of much of a unified core. That aforementioned structure means that the series lives and dies by individual arcs. Some are absolutely great; Rena Minami’s plumbs some truly moving depths of self-loathing, and you really feel for the character. Much later in the series, Sana Futaba’s absolutely wild arc about living inside a computer and how this relates to her (now bygone) home life, is also superb. On the other hand, some others are simply competent, and it’s here where the show loses points.
How much worth you’re going to find in even the best arcs though does ultimately come down to whether you think any of this is worthwhile in the first place. This in turn is going to tie into how you feel about the original series and possibly Rebellion. For a show that is otherwise rather humble, there’s a lot of high emotion tied up in discussion of Magia Record. It is a series that is “post-Madoka” in a very different way than the numerous imitators--good and bad--that have tried to bite a piece of the PMMM pie since the early 2010s. This will doubtless be further exacerbated by the on-its-way second season, which promises to build up a stronger overarching narrative and to return Walpurgisnight, and possibly Madoka herself, to the show's universe.
Longtime fans are as likely to love MagiReco as hate it. Personally, as a somewhat recent Madoka convert, I found every episode compelling and am thrilled to see what comes next. But even as I type that, it feels like trying to force clarity onto a series that continues to thrive best without it. The Less You Know The Better, and all that.
MagiReco feels uncommonly like a series that will meet you halfway but no farther. Puella Magi Madoka Magica aired nine years ago. MagiReco, intentionally or not, seems to beg the question; are you the same person you were in 2011? Is anyone?
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