Magia Record Anime Review – 65/100

(Little side note: Not meant to start a civil war between us writers but I’m a firm follower of 60 being a line that separates recommendable to mediocre shows. You pass your subjects if you get over 60%, right? Review-aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritics also use 60 as their middle line. So 65/100 means it’s slightly above average) 

Magia Record has a huge hurdle to clear: being a spin-off of one of the most talk-about anime in the last 10 years. This new adaptation doesn’t have the original writer Gen Urobuchi on board, but the background duo of the original Gekidan Inu Curry helm the project with Shaft returning to produce it. The result is a good indication of this transition and of the fact that Magia Record is based on a gacha game. Magia Record has some stunning art designs that fit its dark themes like a T and Shaft does a pretty decent job in terms of visual directing, soundtracking and shot composing, but the show suffers from its lack of focus to the main story, and introduces far too many characters that aren’t well developed. Magia Record uses the settings set by the original quite consistently, with some brand new updated concepts such as uwasa (manifestations of actual rumors) and doppel (materialization of despair from the magical girls), but as the story progresses it feels as if Iroha the main character wanders around for side quests rather than her main quest of finding lost sister Ui whom she has no memory of, as a result Magia Record feels hollow, superfluous and incomplete.

So let’s dive headfirst to Magia Record’s main issues, its plot. Now in retrospect, the premiere, which is anime original content, makes a strong but false premise of what Magia Record is about. Iroha’s quest to find Ui is without a doubt the show’s backbone, but Magia Record is concerned about usawa cases in which Iroha meets different groups of magical girls with mysteries involving rumors (in the season that features a few of monsters manifested by rumors shows – Kyokou Suiri, Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun just to name a few). There are many shortcomings with this approach, and while its mysteries spark some mild intrigues, the cases usually don’t have any suspense whatsoever. It doesn’t help that sometimes, in whatever decision, Magia Record skips the entire Witch battle and relegates it as an afterthought. The Witch fights, from the little time we got, have great animation but they prove unengaging as we learn next to nothing about each girls’ fighting styles.

The characters make up another weak point for Magia Record, more as they have little time to develop their own arcs. The three magical girls Iroha meet early, Rena – Momoko – Kaeda sort of disappear once their arc’s gone despite living in the same city. The worst offenders are the Wings of Magius cult members as they often appear as overacted and one-note villains that are quickly tossed aside once the story moves forward. In case you wonder, the original cast did appear in this spin-off but they are just a shell of their own selves and (at least so far) they don’t serve as any meaningful role into the big picture at all. Even the main character Iroha is uninteresting to follow. If you follow my posts on the show you will see how little I mentioned her in my posts, simply because she’s just plain in every aspect.

Granted, there’s a pretty solid arc that examines a magical girl’s solitude and her relationship to an AI named… Ai. It’s the arc where Shaft’s abstract visual style works for a purpose, and where it rings true on how the girl’s wish can have adverse effects on herself and where the urawa concept ties strongly to the dark themes of magical girls knowned from the original series. In addition, being original art designers, Gekidan Inu Curry doesn’t disappoint on Magia Record’s background arts, from the abandoned shopping hall to the gorgeous red shrine gates and bridges, every setting in Magia Record has a personality of its own. If I have a minor complaint in regards to the art, it would be that Magia Record sometimes goes overboard in its portraying of the girls’ mundane life. There’s always a sense that something isn’t quite right in this world, but it lessens its effect when it looks abstract even when they are in “normal” life. Different schools that have the exact same layout, a shopping spree with virtually no one around, the trip to buy mugs that look like they are in Brazil (the film) universe… all these called too much attention to itself.

In the end, Magia Record’s structure is flawed by designs. It leans too much on its gacha games convention so the story meanders instead of advances forward. Some would say that Magia Record’s fate is already doomed from the start as it can never surpass the spotlight of the original, but the way I see it, Magia Record gains its attention for being a Madoka’s spinoff – or else no one would be willing to watch it, so that it’s a show’s responsibility to justify why it needs to be here in the first place. Can’t say that it meets the merit yet, but as only first cour there’s still hope that it can pick itself up from here.