This review will have spoilers for the anime, but also some spoilers from the game; you have been warned.
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So you've seen all those reviews coming from people who are long-time Madoka fans; but I'm also someone who's been interested in the MagiReco game as early as JP's first release back in 2017.

The idea of a new Madoka game that would be more story-focused compared to anything that came beforehand was an absolute treat to me. Well of course a phone game wouldn't be able to outdo something like PMMM, but being someone who really liked Madoka; more Madoka is something worth paying attention to, no matter what it is.

After a while, I got surprisingly into the story. Perhaps not perfect, but it does has its appeals thanks to how the format allows to tell several side stories which lets it basically do whatever it wants without being too out of place.

When I heard of the anime coming around there was a feeling of constant skepticism.

"Will it aim to be different from the game?"

"How will it adapt the characters I like into the story?"

"Is 13 episode really enough to cover anything?"

It was at this point I started wondering if it even should bother being faithful thanks to all the constraints laid out, and that thought lingered on for months.

For a while I was very curious in not only how the anime would play out, but how the public would take it.

I established all of this so you take this review with a grain of salt, this is coming not only from a fan of PMMM but also MagiReco for two years, being unbiased is very much impossible but maybe that'll be the appeal of this review.

The anime starts out establishing what are magical girls and it plays it off like it's just a rumor, nostalgically playing Sis Puella Magica as if reintroducing the viewer into the world of Madoka and introducing us to our new pink-haired protagonist Iroha.

It's easy to assume that our pink-haired protagonist Tamaki Iroha is a carbon copy of PMMM's pink-haired protagonist Kaname Madoka, except that's not really the case. While Madoka's character isn't really the core focus of PMMM, Iroha's character is spotlighted far more with the mystery of Iroha's wish and her (perhaps unintentional) aloofness towards her friends early on.

Much of the main cast also has this level of seemingly superficial comparison to PMMM's main cast: Yachiyo having Homura's cold indifference and goes solo but filling more of a pseudo-mentor role more like Mami did, Felicia being similar to Kyouko but with an added sense of childishness, and so on.

A large majority of the first episode focuses on Iroha and Kuroe, Kuroe's inclusion is a point of interest to many since she's an anime-exclusive character and was heavily marketed in the promo materials.

However, an episode later she's been missing and doesn't really show up anymore. At best feeling like the writers forgot about her since her existence is barely acknowledged by Iroha later on, and at worst seems like a blatantly cynical move to interest the people who already played the game but might not want to watch the same story twice.

The first episode easily appeals with its overwhelming sense of mystery, the beautiful audiovisual combination, and to game fans one of the truly original anime content that establishes heavily on Iroha's life before the story begins.

Around the time the second episode hits, the anime tries to fall into more of a monster of the week/occultic mystery format with the Uwasas, focusing less on the tragedy of the magical girl system of the Madoka universe; and more about the anomalies of Kamihama and its Uwasas.

Whether you view this shift away as a good or bad thing, is largely what will make you stay and watch MagiReco. It has its dramas about its characters and their flaws, but never truly reaching the peaks of PMMM's. That's not to say the Uwasas don't have their appeals, but their debut episode struggles to properly interest the viewers in them.

In the climax episode of the Friendship Breaking Staircase arc, the concept of Uwasas was barely established in the episode we properly deal with one as they just vague the whole situation, they handwaved the fact that an Uwasa took someone despite that being how the last episode ended, Yachiyo showed up very suddenly and almost out of nowhere to help them, and a shocking amount of time was wasted on a transformation sequence.

Rena's whole character arc of becoming someone else to avoid constant self-loathing; engaging and on some level relatable as it is, felt so out of place when structurally the whole episode barely tried to establish the foe they were dealing with and basically treated it as a joke since for the most part all it did was just gave everyone a minor inconvenience. Compared to the game where it also built up the mystery behind Momoko and Yachiyo's relationship and establishing the rules of the Uwasas.

Uwasas at their most interesting appeals to some aspect of your humanity, not wanting to see someone you don't like, wanting to see someone you miss, wanting to have things go your way, wanting to relax and not deal with troublesome things and overall just seem genuinely mysterious with how anything can come true.

Largely that episode's core flaws felt like a combination of having to fit a two hour story into a two episode anime and the bizarre priorities into what even should be in the episode.

While nothing in the anime ever reached those lows ever again, this became a critical flaw soon. Many moments that have time to be properly fleshed out in the game, has a habit of feeling rushed and nowhere near as satisfying.

The second worst offender of this case being the Radio Tower arc, her story of running away from a family that clearly hates her and finding an AI Uwasa that grows to love not only her and soon the world is very sweet and very touching; but her finale feels like it skipped a step or two, being angry at Iroha for not wanting to see the outside world again, but then immediately clinging onto Iroha after being taken in because "she called her name".

Despite everything however, Sana's story actually remains mostly intact and still enjoyable. Iroha's whole character arc and her most important interactions with Sana on the other hand was left ignored so a psycho villain can make her dramatic entrance and leaving some incredible visual parallelisms with Iroha and Sana completely wasted. That psycho villain, Alina was also wasted; reducing her interesting views as an artist into a bumbling idiot of a loose canon that got disrespected by an underling who just joined a few days ago and nobody batted an eye.

That's not to say some of the cuts aren't beneficial sometimes, much of the unnecessary fluff from the Seance Shrine and Lucky Owl Water arc made much of the arc flowed better.

But the constant sense of rushing heavily devalues the characters you're meant to get attached to, as a result it becomes difficult to get invested into anything meaningfully, especially in Season 2 when that comes out.

The anime also has a fond habit of showing off PMMM's main cast but not doing anything with them save for an exception, all of them show up in the opening but Madoka only appeared in a flashback and Homura didn't show up at all, Kyouko was utilized to foreshadow the main villain's plans but was largely unused later on, Sayaka showed up for what has to be one of the best animated fight scene in the anime but the door she came from might as well say 'deux ex machina'.

Mami, the exception to this rule joined the main villains with a seemingly interesting motive; but how that holds up remains to be seen next season.

On that topic, the finale deals with some very interesting implications about the magical girl system; but in the end boils down to an unnecessarily flashy shonen fight, and diverging from the game with several cliffhangers basically just screaming sequel bait. It feels so painfully blatant that it just feels annoying.

Much of the story is actually surprisingly faithful, and much of it is actually to its detriment.

Being stuck on a 13 episode anime means all you can do bare minimum is get to the midpoint of the story, its slow burn pacing is inherited by the anime while ending at what should be where the plot should start.
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MagiReco is no Madoka sequel or Rebellion sequel, whereas Rebellion followed up the characters and their arcs; MagiReco shows more interest in developing its world with its series of monster of the week and occult mystery arcs.

Madoka is no longer in the hands of Urobuchi, Doroinu who passionately creates the Doppels for the game and even wrote several side stories was assumed to be MagiReco's second best choice; but with how things panned out, there seems to be some doubt surrounding that.

Currently the MagiReco series is facing a bit of a crisis, desperately needing to let go of their parent series' quintet and its roots; but still heavily relying on them for attention as the OP has shown. The anime plays an important role in seeing how the more casual fans would catch on to the new faces, and whether that's been successful or not remains to be seen until Season 2 airs.

As for what that means for Madoka as a series, well who knows.

Constantly promising the Rebellion sequel every year while bleeding talent left and right and Urobuchi, one has to wonder how that herculean process would even be done; or even if it should considering Rebellion's ending reception. MagiReco in that sense is its cries for help, wanting to free itself of the shackles of PMMM while not even entirely knowing how; becoming the despair to PMMM's hope.

I believe Doroinu can still follow up MagiReco, but perhaps not as a director. Having Shinbo remain as director and Doroinu in scriptwriting perhaps might help seeing as Shinbo has more of an experience directing than Doroinu, but under the clutches of a gacha game and being forced to advertise it; perhaps it's doomed from the start.

The failures in the MagiReco anime adaptation is a lesson of how hard it is to adapt a game's story that's allowed to run for almost as long as it wants to into a one cour anime, and what losses you should or shouldn't make when doing it; or perhaps in this case what you shouldn't even add. Understanding what's truly best to fit into a limited 22 minute anime is by no means easy, and understanding what the whole series should end up achieve by the end is an even harder task.

I hope this review doesn't sound like a "they change the thing I like so I hate it" review, but if you're still somehow interested in how the MagiReco universe develops; I do implore you to play (or watch) the MagiReco game. Its latter half may be a mess, but the first half and some of the side story holds many interesting stories.

This score is one I don't give lightly, and mostly out of how much I want to see it properly become its own than living off the shadow of the PMMM franchise.