The show is a rather unusual and dramatic twist on an everyday magical girl show. The main word being dramatic. There are fights, transformations and monsters but the thing this show dedicates most attention to is drama. A well written and for the most part beautifly executed drama. The show takes a huge advantage of the protagonists being 14 or so year old girls to explore the psychology of teens and how they can balance and swiftly change between bright hope and endless despair. I can boldly call this anime a master of controlling and manipulating the mood, atmosphere and the undertones to it's advantage to make you feel just what the show wants you to feel. Rarely I have seen the show knowing just what buttons to push and when to tell an deep, adult and intruiging story.
Another word that I would use to describe the story would be gripping. Now people throw that word to left and right like it is nothing and I don't think we should treat it that way. I have seen many good and interesting anime shows which were not neccerely gripping. Madoka Magica is really what I can call a gripping show. The episodes flow into each other flawlessly and always make you want to watch more without using the cheap tactics like awful cliffhangers at the end of the episode which did not really bring anything cool in the following episode but were impemented only for you to turn on the next epsode.
The reasons for being that gripping is that the pacing of the show is near flawless after the first 2 episodes. As I said the story flows with no filler and no time spent on unneccery things. The dialoges are well written and the voice actors did an outstanding job.
The show also had a memorable soundtrack with nice opening and amazing ending. And that says a lot because I mostly skip my endings even if the song is not bad. The reason that the ending stands out is not only because of the song (Which is wonderful) but because of the way it was implemented and how the last scenes smoothly flow into the said ending. The original soundtrack itself always helps create a special mood and is subtle when needed and energyzing when the scene demands it.
The animation of the show is superb. There are not as many fight scenes as one would hope but they are all animated and stylized in a great fashion. The style change when the protagonists fight witches is imaginative and always cool to look at. Still this anime often reuses the same shots of character animations especially in dialoge. It is more apperent in the second half of the show. Still it looks more like a directing technique than the means to save some budget.
From here the review enters the spoiler section because to explain the things I did not like about the show I need to get more in depth into the story. If you have not watched this anime I urge you to do so and I also urge you to avoid any and all spoilers concerning it because it can really ruin the whole experience for you.
Now it is time to discuss the things I did not like about the show and really all of them come from the last 4 or so episodes. To tell the truth the frist 8 episodes are near flawless and are a 9 or 10 out of 10 material. I can't say the same thing about the rest of the show. It was still rather good but not as good as what preceeded it at least in my opinion.
I will start with a small nitpick which is the thing I personaly find a bit silly. The fact that the universe runs on the energy which is collected by aliens by giving young girls powers to turn into magical girls and then gather even more energy from their despair as they turn into witched is a bit silly to me. Yes it is a magical girls show and this kind of thing does not seem that much of a silly concept for the genre but this show had a completely different tone. Still it may just be me.
The real problems I have with this show started with the show introducing us to the information that one of the protagonists is a time traveler and that she has relieved this events many time already to try to get the different outcome but she always failed and went back in time to relieve these events again to try to fix things and make the outcome different. First of all it is rather dumb that she has the powers of complete time travel but only travels to a single perioud of time. I think anyone would think of going back a little further than a few weeks to try to fix things after you have failed numerious times. The anime did not set any limitations on her powers so it is not like she can travel only to that set time a few weeks ago. Often she failed only because the events she tried to stop from happenening already started happening at that time she returned to. You would think she had enough brians to go a bit further into the past.
The fact that the whole show till the end was just another timeline she traveled really and I mean REALLY undermined the events that happened before we were introduced to this twist. I mean why should I care if I knew that she could and did come back in time so that the events happened in a different way? The first part of the show starts feeling rather unimportant even though it was much better than the last few episodes.
The other problem I have is the ending. I was left unsatisfied with it and it produced close to no impact on me. It leaves many questions and answeres close to none of them. The protagonist becomes a sort of "God" and just waves her hand to fix everything and make everything good...well at least it would be good if she actually thought the wish through. While better, what she wished for was not really a good solution to the problem.
Also one thing. The collosal potential of the main protagonist is explained as following. The more impact the magical girl has on the fate of the world and ETC the more powerful she becomes. But following that logic the time traveling protagonist should wield far greater power. She has the power to travel through time and basicly holds the fate of the unverse in her hands to some extent and it is only because of her obsession that the main protagonist has this much of an impact of the fate of the universe. In reality the timetraveler is the one who has a much bigger impact. I mean the universe has repeated the same few weeks a dozzen times just because she wanted to save her friend.
Still all of that issues may not bug you at the end of the day, but they did bug me.
To tell the truth overall I stil highly enjoyed the show, especially the first 8 or so episdoes. I can't be mad at this show beacuse in it's first half alone it accomplished more than a huge chunk of shows do in their long 26 or more episode run. The ending was not straight up horrible. Even though the idea was rather dumb in my opinion, it was executed very well. I still HIGHLY reccomend this show to anybody and urge you all to watch it.
