Story: The story largely revolves around Madoka, a middle school student, who one day, comes into contact with Kyuubey, a weird cat-like thing, who offers her the chance to have one wish granted in exchange for becoming a magical girl and fighting witches, creatures who bring despair to the world. However, Homura, a transfer student in Madoka's class, doesn't want Madoka to accept Kyuubey's contract and tries to stop her. It initially plays out like it's going to be a cute show, and then it throws several very messed up curveballs largely involving what it actually means to be a magical girl that make it more like a tragedy than fluff. I did love the ending, which brought the story to a nice, bittersweet conclusion that was perfect for the show. Overall, the story did a good job with the transition between the cutesy beginning to the tragic ending that I really don't have any complaints about.
Art: The highlight of the art was the witch labyrinths, which were very creative and wonderfully trippy at times, and I always got excited when I saw new ones. The other backgrounds were interesting, if a bit weird at times, and the characters all looked fine. Overall, the art was very good.
Sound: The soundtrack was beautiful and quite memorable, and fit the series quite well. The opening and ending themes were also good; I like to think of the cute bubbly opening as "what you think this show will be like", and the dark, intense ending as "what the show is actually like". I wasn't a huge fan of the English dub - the voices sounded too high for my liking - but the Japanese version is good, so I'd recommend the sub over the dub this time around.
Characters: The characters all have rather tragic stories, either in their backstories or in the series itself, that are well developed and well fleshed out. From Madoka's desire to see her friends happy and her grief at seeing them succumb to despair to Homura's determination to protect Madoka at all costs to Sayaka's descent into despair because of the consequences of her wish, all of them play out excellently and create a lot of sympathy for the characters involved. Kyuubey is a pretty interesting character too, at least in it's belief that it's doing the right thing even though it's actually ruining the lives of the girls it contracts (your mileage may vary on how justified you think Kyuubey is). To say anything about Mami or Kyoko, the other two girls introduced, would spoil, but their development plays out in an appropriately tragic way too. Overall, the characters are excellent tragic heroines that make the series as good as it is.
Enjoyment: Here's where my praise goes down a little bit. While overall I enjoyed the series, at times I found that it was too bleak to really be all that entertaining, and there was very little relief from the series overall bleakness past episode three. I do understand that adding too much humor or lightness would have likely cause some serious mood whiplash that probably would have cheapened the tragic nature of the story, but things seemed almost hopeless past a certain point that made things too depressing (at least until the last episode). Even with that being said though, I do recommend this series to anyone looking for a good tragedy, as the tragic elements were some of the best I've seen.
