Magia Record as a series is, in a word, disappointing. It explores many interesting ideas, and the animation and music live up to the original Madoka, but a jarring story and uninteresting characters undermine it.
Judged on its own merits, it's a mediocre work. Judged against the high standard of Madoka Magica, it falls horrendously short.
Art and Sound: 10/10 and 8/10
They are, in a word, amazing. Every fight scene is beautifully animated and exciting visually and musically. Both the background art and music throughout Kamihama also does a good job bringing the city to life and making it feel as eerie as it's supposed to. The
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character designs are cute, and the magical girl transformation scenes are well animated. There's really not anything to criticize.
Characters: 3/10
The characters are largely bland.
As a protagonist, Iroha is essentially just a bland moe archetype - cute, ditzy, and nice. Her only real distinguishing characteristic is her drive to find her sister - which has little connection to anything that happens in the anime, at least in this season, leaving her as little more than that archetype.
The other characters largely suffer from a lack of screentime spent on developing them, leaving them as little more than 1-dimensional character archetypes. They simply introduce far too many characters to properly develop them in a mere 13 episodes. Of course, the mobile game does give the characters a lot more development – but this is a review of the anime, so I have no choice but to ignore all of that in this review.
The Wings of Magius, the story's antagonists, are where the character writing is at its worst - they are portrayed as incredibly one-dimensionally evil, frequently making decisions For the Evulz rather than for any actual reason. What makes it all the more jarring is that they're all young girls - it's really hard to believe all these young girls, some of them who look like they might be in elementary school, would act so cartoonishly evil.
Story: 1/10
The story follows a fairly episodic formula: In each episode, the cast investigates the latest mystery in the city of Kamihama, culminating in them stumbling into a fight scene. The episodic conflicts are, on their own, often entertaining and interesting.
But Magia Record aspires to be a story-driven anime, rather than just an episodic one, and the overarching story is where it falls apart. The story sets itself up as a mystery – why is the city of Kamihama so weird and full of such eldritch, mysterious, and often dangerous magical phenomena? This setup is excellently done, and made me excited to find out the mysteries of Kamihama... But the payoff is undermined.
Because as far as the story is concerned, none of that matters. Instead of focusing on the many mysteries of Kamihama, or how the main characters react to uncovering the truth, Magia Record papers over all of that interesting world building and treats it as unimportant. After the introduction, the overall story instead focuses almost exclusively on fighting the Wings of Magius, with the protagonists fighting them solely because of how cartoonishly Evil the Magius are or in self-defense instead of for any more complex or character-driven reasons. In short, the mysteries driving the story don't have a satisfying resolution because the resolution doesn't really matter, as none of the characters seem to care very much about the truth anyway. The only thing that matters to the story is that the Magius are Evil with a capital E and must be stopped.
This becomes all the more jarring if you're watching this series after watching the original Madoka Magica, which does explore in great detail why the Wings of Magius might be doing what they're doing, in a way that Magia Record itself does its best to gloss over, and undermines the strict good vs evil framing of Magia Record. The fact that characters from the original Madoka appear in Magia Record only serves to reinforce this problem, making it impossible to judge Magia Record in isolation.
In short, the story simply is not satisfying as the strict Good Vs Evil conflict it's framed as, and it certainly doesn't provide a satisfying resolution to all of Kamihama's many mysteries. The story only holds up if you don't think about it too hard – but the whole point of a mystery story is to make the audience think about it.
Enjoyment: 6/10
The show is indeed enjoyable, despite its flaws. The fight scenes were genuinely fun to watch, and the character interactions are cute, if formulaic. If you're the sort of person who can turn your brain off and just enjoy without thinking about an anime, it will keep you entertained.
Overall: 2/10
The anime does have many redeeming qualities, but the story and characters being so poorly written and bland undermines everything else. Unless you're watching purely for SHAFT's wonderful animation, I wouldn't recommend it, and if you're a fan of the original Madoka anime I'd recommend it even less.
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May 3, 2021
Magia Record as a series is, in a word, disappointing. It explores many interesting ideas, and the animation and music live up to the original Madoka, but a jarring story and uninteresting characters undermine it.
Judged on its own merits, it's a mediocre work. Judged against the high standard of Madoka Magica, it falls horrendously short. Art and Sound: 10/10 and 8/10 They are, in a word, amazing. Every fight scene is beautifully animated and exciting visually and musically. Both the background art and music throughout Kamihama also does a good job bringing the city to life and making it feel as eerie as it's supposed to. The ... 
Feb 13, 2011
Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE
(Manga)
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Story: 10/10
Tsubasa RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE begins very simply. A princess's memories have been stolen by a vilian, the band of adventurers gathered, and the journey begun. Crossing the dimensions, they pick up one feather after another against long odds through determination and teamwork. Meanwhile the vaguely evil villain smiles slyly from the safely contemplating his vaguely evil plans. A generic shounen plotline, essentially. Then it happens. Everything changes, as you find out everything you thought was true was a lie. Our team of heroes will never be the same again. Betrayals, deaths, and unimaginable horrors await. New heroes appear and the storyline changes course again and again. ... |
