Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story / YMMV

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/MagiaRecordPuellaMagiMadokaMagicaSideStory

Alternative Character Interpretation: See here.
Audience-Alienating Ending: Many fans of the game (and even people who only watched the anime) are unhappy with how the anime ended, as it ends on a much bleaker note than Arc 1 of the game did. Arc 1 on the game ends on a happy note, with no deaths, Iroha and Ui reunited, Walpurgisnacht defeated, the Doppel system intact, and the magical girls of Kamihama banding together to form the Kamihama Magia Union in order to find a peaceful way to expand the Doppel system so they can save every magical girl from their fate. Meanwhile, the anime ends with many characters dead (including Ui, who never even regains her physical form), the Doppel system (which in the anime was never a good solution to begin with) permanently destroyed, Walpurgisnacht seemingly killed most of the Holy Quintet including Madoka forcing Homura to reset her time loop, and to top it off Kyubey gloats that the suffering of magical girls will continue to go unnoticed as he harvests them. It's so bad that Japanese fans on Twitter were posting download links to the game and telling people to play the game instead.
Bizarro Episode: The fourth Tart event, "The Masked Student Council Strikes Back," drops the historical fantasy of the previous Tart events for a High School AU where the characters constantly break the fourth wall... for example, acknowledging that they're in a High School AU, or Eliza complaining that Melissa interrupted her text box.
Broken Base: See here.
Catharsis Factor:
- PvP fights can provide this. For example, were you dissatisfied with the ending to Oriko Magica? Go on, kill Oriko with Homura, or even better, Madoka herself. Or you can kill Mifuyu with Yachiyo in Mirrors. The girls fought in PvP are not the real deal, but it's close enough.
- For game players who felt Mifuyu was Easily Forgiven for emotionally manipulating Yachiyo, the duo's fight scene and Yachiyo repeatedly calling Mifuyu weak and almost killing her with Campenella in Season 2 Episode 2 is satisfying to watch.
Character Perception Evolution: Kuroe was initally well received in episode 1 of the first season for her tragic past and dynamic with Iroha, although everyone agreed she was underutilized. Season 2 and 3 tried to alleviate this by giving more spotlight to her which was appreciated at first, but Kuroe's fate of becoming a Witch and her friendship with Iroha ending in tragedy split opinions on her with some thinking it was a fitting fate while some found Kuroe's role pointless if she was just gonna die in the end. Kuroe also went from an underutilized character to the other side of the spectrum, stealing away screen time from the original game characters such as Kanagi and people feeling like the plot revolved itself around her rather than the other way around. The gacha game's incarnation of Kuroe rescued people's soured opinions of her, but it's clear her popularity now isn't as high as it was back then.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
- Like in similar games (such as Fire Emblem Heroes), players tend to reroll (i.e. restart the game from the beginning by reinstalling or erasing data) until they get whatever character they want, possibly a 4-star to make early game much easier. This has mostly stopped with the introduction of ability to pick a free 4-star from a limited^Note pool.
- The Mirrors meta tends to revolve around a few types of units. Free-to-play players or occasional spenders will often use Yachiyo and Nanaka (and to a lesser-extent Asuka) for being easily slotted, having 3 Blast discs (which is favored in PvP), and for being in a strong element as powerful Forest attackers tend to be rare. In whale territory are powerful (and often limited) Light units who have great stats and connects, such as Tart, Ultimate Madoka (whose very presence on a team renders any strategy relying on status ailments unreliable), Sakurako and Fate. Glasses Homura became popular on the NA server when her 5-star upgrade was unlocked, not because she's particularly strong, but because she's a base-4-star that everyone has and (unlike other 4-stars) you can buy her Destiny Gems in the shop for extra slots.
- On the different side of the PvP, the Mirrors Ranking and Kimochi Raid. Because both of those gamemodes have different point calculations based on the disc damage in each of its seasons (unlike the Mirrors, which only cares whether you defeat your opponents or not), there are girls that always appear to maximize your point because of their Spirit Enhancement skills; Sae or Sister Momoko for Charge, Madoka or Mikage for Accel, Yozuru or Ashley for Blast.
- On the now-defunct NA server, it was unusual to see a team that wasn't using a Tercio formation in Mirrors. These formations offered massive attack boosts to Aqua, Flame, or Forest girls, which allowed the player to rely on advantage more effectively than with just Light or Dark girls, while still boosting a Light or Dark girl. The high stat bonus, multiple type, and lack of blast vulnerability made Brave Echelon and Attribute Deltas, formerly popular options, essentially obsolete.
- After the Barrier buff was implemented in the game, the girls that have this buff in their skillset are especially valued even more so than those who have Dodge; unlike Dodge that still has counters, Barrier just plain negate damage below the Barrier's threshold and can only be defeated by buffing your party like crazy and focus-firing at this Barrier tank. This makes units like Surfer Sayaka unreasonably sturdy, especially in Mirrors where she's often flanked by Glass Cannon of your opponent's choices, on the top of her quick MP gain when tanking damages.
Complete Monster: In the anime, Alina Gray is depicted as far worse than her original game counterpart. After finding out all Magical Girls are destined to become Witches, Alina teams up with Nemu Hiiragi and Touka Satomi to form the Wings of Magius, even playing a significant part in the Doppel system that, when overused, would turn her fellow magical girls into beings no different from Witches. When an Uwasa named Ai develops sapience and wants no part of the plan, Alina uses her own Doppel to corrupt Ai before trying on two separate occasions to kill Iroha and her friends when they interfere with her plans. Having grown apathetic to Touka and Nemu's goal of saving all magical girls, Alina leaves the Magius before eventually merging with Embryo Eve and setting her sights on Walpurgisnacht, intending to take Walpurgisnacht's power for herself and use it to turn all of humanity into Witches so they can suffer the same fate as her.
Demonic Spiders: The Brainwashed and Crazy Feathers in Chapter 8. They hit really hard, always fight in groups of 6, and they can buff their attacks, use Counter, and even reduce your defense. They can wreck your team if you don't quickly take them out. After you defeat the Uwasa, they become much easier to defeat.
Diagnosed by the Audience: The way her classmates often tease her for being an airhead, her peculiar habits, the way her mother talks to her and her attempt to move Mito out of the unfriendly neighborhood imply that Mito is somewhere in the autism spectrum.
Difficulty Spike:
- Another Story battles are much harder than Main Story when you first unlock them.
- Side story battles also spike with each section.
- "Howa Howa Girl"/"Wait, You Got It Wrong!" event, which introduced Mayu, was this to the entire PvE aspect due to its nature. The event had also self-contained difficulty spikes when stages involved mostly magical girls, and once again for the last 10 stages.
- Arc 2's fundamentally changing gameplay mechanics and the introduction of Spirit Enhancement buffs causes the events to start putting 100 Calamities Challenge nodes - even more difficult Boss Bonanza than the already complicated EX Challenge nodes.
Draco in Leather Pants:
- Alina has found herself a lot of fans thanks to her being a Large Ham Mad Artist whose Doppel pose looks like something straight out of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Her much more humanizing relationship with Karin also makes her a popular target of shippers. However, her fans tend to gloss over her wanton cruelty and disregard for human life.
- Himena fans often put more emphasize on her Gyaru Girl antics and less on the fact that she's a genuinely mentally ill person whose suicidal tendencies can reach homicidal level.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- The random NPC giving out water bottles in Chapter 4 became relatively popular, to the point of being part of a Japanese popularity poll which otherwise featured only magical girls.
- The random Black Feather in Homura's Valentines story, to the point she was made playable, as weak as she is.
- Ren was the star of the game's first event, and even long afterward has remained beloved for her adorable design and Shrinking Violet personality as well as an extensive character arc where she grows as a person and learns that You Are Not Alone. Her Pseudo-Romantic Friendship with Rika is also full of heartwarming moments and makes her very popular with shippers. Even after the shutdown on the western servers, she tends to rank very highly on popularity polls in both the Japanese and Western communities and tends to be among the most referenced and discussed of the Magical Girls outside of the main cast.
- Ren's partner Rika has a lot of fans in the Western LGBT fanbase for being a very sympathetic portrayal of a young lesbian coming to grips with her sexuality, as well as being the one to pull Ren up from rock-bottom and being paired with Ren.
- The Rumor of the Anonymous A.I. is the most popular of the rumors by virtue of the heartwarming, yet bittersweet story she shares with Sana. She was further given a popularity boost after being given an appearance more in line with Ume Aoki's style in the anime. One year later, she finally becomes playable in a duo with Sana during the 2021 Valentine's event, forming Rumor Sana.
Epileptic Trees: Not about the game itself, but the announcement of the anime and manga adaptations; some fans speculate that it is an indirect method of either testing the waters for the theoretical Rebellion sequel or a way to finance said sequel.
Esoteric Happy Ending:
- Chapter 10, the last chapter of Arc 1, ends with the magical girls of Kamihama defeating Walpurgisnacht and the Doppel system remaining in place in Kamihama City, thereby saving the magical girls in proximity from becoming witches. There's just one problem, though; the Doppel system is only active in Kamihama City, meaning that every single magical girl outside of that very small radius is still doomed. To make matters worse, the Magia Record universe remains a timeline in which Ultimate Madoka cannot intervene and save magical girls, meaning that there is absolutely no salvation for magical girls outside of Kamihama City. Oddly, this isn't brought up and the ending is treated as unambiguously happy. That being said, some events after this ending show Touka and Nemu trying to expand the barrier beyond Kamihama, as well as the Magius' actions having consequences such as drawing in a vengeful invasion force from another city whose Witches were all lured to Kamihama, who want the Doppel barrer for themselves.
  - These factors end up playing a massive factor in Arc 2, as said force ends up killing off Ryou and their use of a copy of the Mirror Witch forces Ikumi to sacrifice herself, and while the Doppel System is spread across the planet, Iroha, Ui and Lil’Kyubey have to fuse together into a god-like being and Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence alongside Touka and Nemu in order to do so, with only the other Magical Girls remembering them. and "Puella Historia" arc shows that even with all the sacrifices, this system is still really fragile and can fall at any time the heroes drop their vigilance. Basically, two story arcs are spent to fix the Fridge Logic that came from Arc 1's ending.
Fan Nickname:
- Eroha for Iroha due to this page◊ in the official parody comic Magia Report. The swimsuit outfit she got in-game did not help.
- Legbreaker for Yachiyo, for mangling Tsukuyo's legs in Chapter 4.
- Rika is usually called Saber-face because her artist is known to copy Takashi Takeuchi's style and made a lot of Fate/ stay night fanarts. She's also commonly refered to as a snail (with her head photo-shopped onto a snail's body) due to her extremely long attack animations.
- Gorilla, as a part of Fate/Grand Order osmosis, is a term referring to a character sporting a 3/1/1 disk distribution (such as Rena). Unlike FGO however, it's not exclusive to the Blast-focused units (an equivalent of the Buster units whom the nickname is given to), so there are terms like Charge Gorilla unit like Momoko.
  - Ashley Taylor's release give birth to the term Godzilla, referring to the fact that she sports 4/1/0 disk distribution. Her disk set has also spawned the name "Blastley." Although Ashley was initially unique in her disk distribution, 2022 saw the release of multiple "Godzilla" units (not all of them Blast units).
  - Due to a (quickly deleted) Magia Report before her release where Iroha-chan wants to pull "Chelsea", Ashley's name was thought to be Chelsea before her name was revealed, and even afterwards is still sometimes called Chelsea by the English-speaking fanbase.
- When talking about the groups, the fans usually uses Nanami-ke for the main characters, Tokiwa-gumi for Nanaka's team, and simply Azalea for the titular event's main characters.
- The Memoria "A Once Empty World"/"World of Emptiness" is often called "World of Bullshit" due to it allowing players to win or lose Mirrors matches based on random dodges. It's not the only one to have that effect, but it is the first and the most well-known.
- Sana is referred to as "Snaa" on Image Boards.
- The various 4* memoria depicting main characters (and Asuka) posing on a backdrop of a flower garden are sometimes called "garden memoria" for short, or "(Character name) garden". For example, the memoria "Attitude Toward Art", which depicts Alina, could be referred to as "Alina garden."
- Lil' Kyubey is often called Mokyuu by fans for the sounds he makes whenever he "talks".
- "Mikazuki Villa" is the name of the boarding house Yachiyo owns and the main characters live in, but is also used to refer to the group of main characters themselves (namely Iroha, Yachiyo, Tsuruno, Felicia, Sana, and later Ui).
- The grouping of Ui, Nemu, and Touka is referred to as the "hospital trio" given that they met and became friends because they were roommates at a hospital when they were ill.
- The grouping of Leila, Seika, and Mito is called the "apartment trio" because they are Childhood Friends who live in the same apartment complex.
Friendly Fandoms: It's not uncommon for Magia Record and Fate/Grand Order fandoms to be on good terms with each other due to the gameplay similarities with each other and both being distributed by Aniplex.
Game-Breaker: Given its own page.
Goddamned Boss: Breakpoint Challenge Tower Floor 34 has you fighting 9 Madoka-senpais. They don't have much HP and don't hit particularly hard (With the exception of her Magia which can kill Dark Magical Girls in one hit), but there's 9 of them and all of them cast Taunt every turn, making your attacks goes everywhere. If you don't blast them with Magia immediately, then prepare to fight a long and annoying battle against all of them.
Good Bad Bug: The Great Rainbow Orbing of 2019. On August 26, 2019, there was a bug in the North America server which gives a guarantee rainbow orb drop in the Labyrinth Awakening Quest. When the bug was fixed, any rainbow orbs gained from the exploit were removed, but any upgrades players made with them were kept. Fortunately, apologems were given to all players depending on how much rainbow orbs they were able to retrieve from the players.
Harsher in Hindsight: See here.
High-Tier Scrappy: Dodge Memoria were hated for how they completely dominated the PvP meta before they were hit with the nerf-bat. The issue was that there was no easy way to counter the Dodge effect and when a second Dodge Memoria was added, they could stack.
Hilarious in Hindsight: See here.
Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Our main character Iroha has been paired with many characters in the series, to the point that many fans joke that any girl she befriends would inevitably end up becoming part of the Iroharem. She's shipped with all four of her friends in Mikazuki Villa, with Yachiyo and Sana being two of the girls she's usually paired with the most. She's also shipped with: Rena, Momoko, Madoka, Kuroe, Mitama, Ui, Touka, Nemu, Shizuka, Yuna, and probably more.
Low-Tier Letdown:
- Defense-type magical girls are hampered by their limited use, often because they (except for Kirika) can't reliably Draw Aggro for their teammates without corresponding Memoria. As the result, their utility is hampered unless they are multi-slotted, which can only gained by rolling multiple copies, which is very expensive for higher rarity girls.
- For the first few years of the game's life, Charge disks were considered noticeably inferior to other two types due to the fact that Charge stacks are used up all at once for a single attack, with underwhelming effects, and many Charge-focused units (most famously Momoko) performed worse than if they had more of other disks. However, this changed with the introduction of the "Charge Conservation" buff, which stops Charge from being consumed for 1-2 turns and makes Charge a viable strategy with characters like Sae and Sister Momoko.
- For a very long time Mitama Yakumo, the very first Void-element Magical Girl, was not considered to be worth the investment. Not only does she have low offensive capabilities while not having the defensive Connect of a tank, but said Connect actually inflicts a defense debuff on its recipient. What's more, her Magia is the only one in the game that does no direct damage, only inflicting several status effects and also inflicting Curse on herself. However, both the changes to Mirrors scoring to favor Magia teams as well as the introduction of Kimochi raids, in which her ability to build up Magia fast and debuff the Kimochi to increase your burst damage, have turned her into a very valuable asset.
- While Fire Magical girls and the type as a whole aren't necessarily bad, many Mirror Tier list consider being a Fire type as a downside due to the existence of strong and accessible Water type magical girls for Mirrors such as Yachiyo and Nanaka. This is mitigated somewhat on the NA server, which has "Tercio" formations that give a 30% attack boost to two girls of either Fire, Water, or Forest (and an attack/defense boost to a Dark or Light type); though this obviously makes those Water types even better, it also makes a Forest counter-team more viable, which in turn makes Fire useful. Even so, Yachiyo remains the most popular fighter by far.
Memetic Loser:
- Momoko has become a meme in the fandom due to many players getting "spooked" by her when trying to roll for other 4*s. This is because having three Charge discs makes her a lot less viable in combat than other 4*s.
- Tsuruno does well enough in combat, but is best known for her extremely mediocre cooking. The Magia Report comic also makes fun of her for this.
- Aimi is often the butt of jokes for not just her inability to admit her feelings to her crush Hayato despite knowing he reciprocates, but for being one of the few Magical Girls that is clearly interested in a guy without a established female love interest in a fandom that doesn't really care for such ships. Lots of jokes are thus made at Aimi being one of, if not the only, straight Magical Girl in Kamihama, or her being in the closet about being bisexual, or outright lesbian, all at her expense.
Memetic Molester:
- Mitama, due to her job involving fiddling with a girl's soul gem and jokingly asking Iroha to undress. Then there were the Iroha Potions from the first Mitama Special Training event...
- Kako has come to be seen to be a lesser shade of this, given how she quickly forms very close friendships with Ayame and Felicia on the basis that they're thirteen years old like her. Some have come to see her as preying on any thirteen-year-old girl she comes in contact with.
- Yachiyo, for being one of the very few girls over 18 and her enthusiasm about inviting younger girls to live with her. There's also that one scene where she keeps gleefully poking a sleeping Felicia's face. Jokes about the Mikazuki house gang being her underaged harem abound.
- Alina, due to her obsession with Mifuyu's body, her suggestive facial expressions, and her borderline predatory behavior towards Felicia and Sana in Chapter 9. She's also revealed to be breeding witches in her holy form's side story.
Memetic Mutation: Has its own page.
Moral Event Horizon: See here.
Not Badass Enough for Fans: Iroha gets this from some anime watchers, who dismiss her as a weak Vanilla Protagonist who generally can't win any fights by herself.
Obvious Beta: The NA version at release was incredibly unstable, crashing every few story missions, during PvP, and often on the front game screen at random. Furthermore, people have struggled with broken menus, inability to equip memoriae, and/or leveling up their magical girls.
Only the Creator Does It Right: How many Madoka Magica fans feel about the Magia Record anime when it was revealed that Gen Urobutchi was not involved.
Rainbow Lens: Several fans take Ria Aimi's wish, which was to Turn me... Into a naturally beautiful girl, as being an allegory, if not outright, wishing to become a girl. While hints in story indicate this was more about being Formerly Fat, or just plain in appearance, her issues with who she used to be and never being able to be who she wanted to be that come up in her inner thoughts have been seen by fans as applying just as well to being a trans girl, if not better.
Retroactive Recognition: A pre- Paimon Corina Boettger voiced Meiyui Chun, who only had seconds of dialogue.
Ron the Death Eater: In-game Touka is an antagonist, but like nearly every antagonist in the franchise is well intentioned. She cares for her friends and family, she is trying to save Magical Girls no matter the methods, and ultimately joins the heroes. In fan discourse however, Touka is often written just as a unrepentant brat whose Magical Girl Supremacy is elevated to a point of being her most defining trait.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- Let's just say the way PvP matchmaking works isn't exactly good. It gets worse when there's a leaderboard ranking because you might be unlucky enough to fail the opponent's evasion check. Even worse than normal PvP is the ranked PvP, because each season of the event has different score calculation - it's not enough that you win, you have to use certain strategies on the top of that.
- The cap on DoT debuffs like Poison and Curse basically makes the debuff-focused girls like Hinano and Hazuki nonviable against bosses; while the debuffs normally leech HP by percentage, it caps on 10k damage per tic. This is the same with the boss, however the bosses usually have inflated HP to the point of 10k damage isn't even putting a dent on their bulk, and the cap doesn't stack between different DoT debuffs unlike the percentage sap for your girls. Add to that, a lot of debuff-focused girls are Glass Cannon that they might not survive for long to pull the trick over a sustained battle, so the DoT strategy is Awesome, but Impractical at best.
- Unlike the Awakening improvement, raising Magia level doesn't allow you to allocate the materials into slots - you need to have all the materials on hand before you can raise the level. This sometimes causes you to forget your personal target milestone and slot the materials for another girl's Awakening, only to realize that you need those materials for Magia level.
- The 2020 Christmas event came with an update that lowered the MP cap from 200 to 150 MP, which makes Doppel spamming more viable but not Magia spamming. This has been controversial since it makes characters who are used to stack buffs with Magia less viable. This includes Valentines Nagisa and Sudachi, two of the best units for Ranked Mirrors.
Shocking Moments: After Arc 1 ended with the main cast alive and Disney Deaths from Mifuyu and Nemu, a lot of fans were expecting Arc 2 to do the same. That was the case until Chapter 4 where Ryo Midori is accidentally killed by Ao and it's made clear that she's gone for good.
- Season 3 of the anime is filled with these. Needless to say people who had played the game were shocked when the anime ended with Kuroe, Momoko, Mifuyu, Alina, Touka, Nemu, and Ui dying. The Doppel system also permanently disappears with no way of recreating it because its creators died, meaning that magical girls are doomed to become Witches in this timeline. It's also heavily implied that Madoka, Sayaka, Kyoko, and Mami died fighting Walpurgisnacht, forcing Homura to reset her time loop.
Squick:
- The circumstance of Alina's personal Memoria. Alina threw herself off a building while filming it with the implicit intention of letting herself rot on camera.
- Mayu, in her side story, almost got molested by her infatuated, significantly older, married superior if Ria didn't interfere.
- Touka explaining just what exactly the mechanic of Tsuruno's brainwashing is in Chapter 7, mostly through Fridge Horror with a dash of Genius Bonus.
- Shin the Babysitter Witch has too many allusions of infant abuse and abortion than most people would like.
- The human trafficking allegories of Kyubey's contract stops being subtext in "Green Jasper Diviners", to the point that Chiharu outright says that "They got sold to weird old men."
Suspiciously Similar Song:
- You'd be forgiven for thinking "Kokuhou High End," the OP for the ''Sayuki Steps Up! desuu~'' event was another remix of Crazy Noisy Bizarre Town. The animation isn't helping either.
- Summer Kyoko's transformation sequence music sure makes it sound like she's running in the nineties.
That One Achievement: The "Connect 1 time" requirement to get bonus Magia Stones from main story missions, while not difficult on the surface, can be pretty irritating because it's so easy to forget to do it. In some cases, if you're too overleveled and using too many characters, it may end up being impossible because you can't help beating all the enemies before you get a Connect charged up, forcing you to switch to a one-girl party and redo the quest. Needing a do-over because your team is too strong is a unique sort of frustration.
That One Boss: Eve/Shitori Egumo in Chapter 10 is a witch that can be comparable to Walpurgisnacht. It has huge stats all across the board, hits like a freighter train, heavily resists status effects, and it casts Curse and Dispel to everyone every turn. Due to it's resistance and Dispel, Game-Breaker strategies like double Madoka or double Mami are useless against it. And it's fought multiple times in Chapter 10. The only consolation is that it only moves once per turn and it occupies all 9 tiles, making AoE Magia very damaging against it.
That One Level:
- The last challenge battle in "My Diary With You" event. It had very high difficulty, so muscling it out was just not possible, and on top of that the last wave had an enemy that cast Curse on your entire team, effectively putting you on a time limit. The only efficient way was to make them skip turns, which only few girls can reliably do. One of the viable strategies boiled down to "use Mami and pray you can Tiro Finale the last wave on turn one."
- Also, the second half of Extra battles in Amane and Tsuruno training event. They can't be outmuscled either, and depending on the battle, you will either face familiars that hit hard and can dodge attacks, familiars that can inflict Bind or Magia Seal on you or familiars that hit hard and can curse you on top of a boss that every three turns can one-shot single magical girl.
- Mayu's event was on its own harder than most events due to its premise, but the last stages take the cake as they start throwing magical girl teams with specific teams at you every battle, and two witches with more debuffs as the last two bosses for good measure. Some nodes could likely depend on whether or not you were able to use Magia or Doppels turn one.
  - Events like Mayu's are called accomplish events, and they are generally regarded as the most difficult event type due to health not regenerating between battles. It takes a lot of strategizing, time, and effort to clear these events due to the high difficulty of the later challenge quests.
- Many of the Advanced-difficulty battles in Another Daze can fall under this, but special mention goes to Chapter 8-2. It's you vs. Iroha's team. On the surface it doesn't look to be any worse than the other Advanced battles, but then you almost immediately meet a barrage of skills that seems to be custom-built to protect them and cripple you. Iroha's skill gives her 20 MP each turn, which doesn't sound too bad until you realize Sana will literally protect her with her life, no matter the cost ^note. Felicia will debuff a random target with Defense Down, which can easily lead to them being taken down in one turn. Tsuruno will sometimes give herself Evade, which can and will buy time to pick off a weakened Magical Girl. Yachiyo is the only one without a skill, but she can take out a non-Forest Magical Girl if you don't keep her in check. Combine all of that with their already high stats, and you're in for one magical hell where your only hope is absurdly powerful Support units giving you much-needed Connects and/or MP boosts ^note.
- Main Story Chapter 8 Yachiyo Part 11. It's a 4-wave battle against the Feathers which are Demonic Spiders in their own rights, the Amane sisters, Holy Mami, and the Uwasa of the Flower Speaker. Holy Mami will spam her Magia each turn, while the Flower Speaker has a very high offensive stats. It's 3 boss fights in a row. Not even Events Challenge mission throws Boss Rush at you. It is so difficult even the game doesn't expect you to win without losing any Magical Girls. Fittingly, the corresponding story has the fight heavily exhaust Yachiyo and Kanagi.
That One Sidequest: The NA version of Magical Halloween Theater disabled Memoria use entirely, apparently as a response to a bug in the JP version where Memoria would lack an initial cooldown. As a result, some mission requirements were changed to not need status effects... but not all. The player is required to stun the enemy to fulfill one of the criteria, which is easier said than done: at the time of the event, there were only two girls, Alina and Hinano, that were capable of inflicting stun. Hinano has stun as a Magia effect, but that both requires building MP and having the enemies survive her Magia—a surprisingly difficult task since the enemy teams are severely nerfed, and Hinano has to be awakened to at least 4-star to get the stun effect, meaning she's probably at least level 80. Pulling this off essentially requires Madoka to charge Hinano's Magia quickly, or have her levels low enough that you could stack three Defense candies so she could set it up herself before the enemy team dies. Alina, whose connect causes about a 1/3 chance of stun upon attack, is a bit easier to work with, but good luck having this very specific 4-star girl on hand. To sum it up, you either need to have Madoka or Alina, both of which are 4-stars; or have managed to avoid leveling Hinano to the point where she can destroy an entire Fire team by herself; to have any hope of success, making this task needlessly difficult for non-paying players.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- Kuroe, a Magical Girl that Iroha knows in the anime, makes for an interesting Foil to Sayaka from the original series, particularly in their relationships with the respective leads, their wishes and how they view being a Magical Girl. Unfortunately, Kuroe is never seen again after the first episode. The second season fixed this one problem pretty extensively.
- On paper, Nemu has an interesting back-and-forth with Touka because of their personality; Touka is a very emotional prodigy scientist, while Nemu is a stoic but imaginative writer. This should've make Nemu an opposing force against Touka's claim of the hard fact that Iroha's memory about them is false because Nemu should be the one who will listen to this supposed 'delusion'. Not only Nemu is somewhat forgotten until her entrance in Chapter 7, despite being Iroha's first lead, Nemu also dismisses Iroha's claim about Ui for the same reason as Touka (in spite of aforementioned conflicting views between those two). This causes her to be a 'lesser' villain compared to Touka, and later Alina, and is basically only functioning as the antagonists' Mook Maker.
- The Puella Magi Oriko Magica trio's side stories show that the beginning of the plot of Oriko Magica has begun in the Magia Record universe, and that Oriko is aware of Kamihama's anomalous status. At one point, Iroha and Team Mikazuki Villa save Yuma's life. After this, Oriko, Kirika, and especially Yuma (being the adopted daughter of a major character) are conspicuous in their absence. There's speculation that they were intended to be event-limited characters, but the event couldn't be finished before the game launched so they were made unlimited. Yuma's absence in particular borders on nonsensical given that she relies on Kyouko for her survival. While Oriko and Kirika would eventually get an event focused on them discovering Mitama's connection to the Mirror Witch and targeting her based on that, and Oriko would get an alt in that event, some still consider this too little, too late.
- A common opinion regarding Himika Mao, due to her April Fools release and the fact that she debuted in the parody webcomic Magia Report causing the game to treat her as a Joke Character, despite as a character, she has a lot of things going with her.
- Among all characters in the game, Madogatari crossover units might be the most unquestionably wasted characters in the game bar none. Introduced as a crossover even before Magia Record was a thing, the previews of the collab made it appear that Madogatari is a what-if scenario where Bakemonogatari cast made contract with Kyubey. Bakemonogatari is filled with colorful personalities and stories, so this preview attracted a lot of speculations about how they'll fit in Magia Record. What the playerbase got was literally nothing; the collab had no event and the girls' sidestories has no story, and the playerbase was simply given banners to roll the collab units, with nothing else to do. For an extra kick, when Magia Record had a collab with Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Detonation, the crossover units Nanoha, Fate, and Hayate are fully realized characters with event story and sidestory. There's a lot of speculations on why this happened, but it ultimately doesn't change the fact that the entire fiasco feels like zero effort money-grabbing scheme from the good will of Bakemonogatari fanbase.
- Happens to a lot of characters in the anime, with many Demoted to Extra or Adapted Out entirely, though this can be understood to be a symptom of an effort to compress the lengthy, multi-layered storylines of Arc 1 into a linear anime format. However, Alina Gray might be the most egregious considering her importance to the story. In the first season she's a straightforward Ax-Crazy sociopath with little of the twisted morality that made her a popular character in the game, nor does she really serve as a foil to Touka and Nemu since she barely interacts with them. Worse, she spends the second and third seasons largely as a Dirty Coward watching events unfold, even quitting the Magius at one point because she's "bored," then abruptly returns for the climax solely because Touka and Nemu's Heel–Face Turn required another villain to fuse with Embryo Eve. And since Karin only appears as a glorified extra, Alina's central relationship from the game isn't present to humanize her.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- While battles can be unrelated to narrative as not all stories involve battling anybody, some of them fall under this; for example the battle related to Mami sparring with Homura at the end of Homura's third sidestory is just another fight against a witch's familiars.
- Most of the quests for unlocking Doppels are completely story-less; you just fight random familiars and then a shadowy version of the magical girl whose Doppel you're trying to unlock. There is no story involving how a magical girl unleashes her Doppel or how she reacts to it (which is full of unrealized potential seeing as how Doppels are considered a reflection of their magical girl). This is averted in a couple of cases involving magical girls who were initially low rarity and then uncapped; they're given events where they are shown awakening and interacting with their Doppel, but this is far from the norm.
- Karin unknowingly feeding into Alina's madness has a lot of potential drama when the Wings of the Magius attack the rest of Kamihama magical girls, causing them to retaliate against the Magius in a climactic marathon battle. Karin would have the front row seat when her beloved senpai goes completely insane, and she can either strike Alina down or stop her from her path of villainy with the Power of Friendship. What happens that chapter? Karin is conspicuously absent from the final battle, fighting outside Kamihama, while Alina goes on to be Kamihama magical girls' public enemy. The thing that makes it egregious is that the story proceeds to avoid that subplot until much later - Karin has a role in one event (Summer Treasure) after the chapter, and she makes no mention about any of this detail whatsoever. By the time Arc 2 starts addressing this issue, that subplot has gone somewhat cold.
- Kuro's "Side Story" is devoid of any storyline. While it's intentional as a meta commentary on how in the grand scale of things she is an insignificant character, her side story could have given her back story on what kind of magical girl she is prior to meeting Homura.
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring:
- The Azalea event is so full of the heroes, especially Ayame, dying for the stupidest reasons in its bad ends. It's so bad that Ayame dying is somewhat a minor Memetic Mutation that persisted after the event, as seen in Mitama's debut event. The subsequent Gamebook events end up decreasing the effect of anti-climatic deaths by making them implied while increasing the poignancy of their nuanced Downer Ending.
- The Myth Arc subplot regarding Kei and Yu. First appeared in the first part of Summer 2018, the two are yandere in a mutually abusive relationship that ended with a suicide pact. Kei died while Yu survived the attempt, and it'd driven Kei to possess Madoka and mistakenly attack Homura in an attempt to kill Yu. Nagisa's event reveals that Yu lost her memory from the suicide's trauma and wandering around Mitakihara as serial killer who pilfer her victims' organs for a living. The second part is especially egregious because Nagisa's story is already horrible enough without an organ trafficker serial killer mixed in.
- The ending to Season 3 of the anime is criticized for being much bleaker than the game due to the reasons listed in Audience-Alienating Ending, and having not only everything Iroha did be moot but make it seem like saving Ui only leads to tragedy.
Unexpected Character:
- Players suspected that Magia Record would release a special character for the first anniversary, and tried to guess who it would be. Mitama was a popular candidate until she was released months before the anniversary. Then players started guessing regular Homura would be the anniversary release. Very few expected the actual anniversary character, Ultimate Madoka.
  - This character actually managed to pull this off twice. As she was the first anniversary character in the JP game, NA players assumed they were safe until the NA game's anniversary, which is in late June. It turns out that #NATempo slows for nobody, and the character was first released in late February 2020, a full four months before her expected arrival date and (as it turns out) subsequent reappearance. Cue Freak Out from the entire player base as people scrambled to get enough rolls to pull for her in February.
- The third anniversary character was also met with widespread fandom speculation. The leading guesses were Devil Homura, who was absent thus far but had been teased in Valentine Nagisa's event; Kuroe, the anime-original character who hadn't yet been introduced in the game; and an Ui alt, on the basis that the anniversary unit has always been the magical girl in the last panel of the accompanying Magia Report (which in this case was Ui drawn as a tarako). Notably, the JP server built up the hype for the anniversary by teasing a mystery card that was a dark-type four-star (this was the first time they'd ever done this), and the game shut down for sixteen hours of extended maintenance. As the anniversary came closer and closer, diagonal Blast discs were datamined (a common meme in the months before the anniversary was that when Devil Homura came she would have 3 or 4 diagonal Blasts), followed by an icon appearing to represent every element at once.^Note Very few people expected that the anniversary magical girl would actually be not a magical girl at all, but the Lil Kyubey themself, whose card uses the player's name.
- The release of Ashley Taylor as an exclusive character for the NA server could also apply. Her debut in JP server is also a surprise because the fanbase had already come to term with her being the now-defunct NA server exclusive.
- Also applies to the crossover characters, especially the ones from Lyrical Nanoha which, unlike Bakemonogatari, isn't even a Shaft property. The Nanoha event in particular was this for the NA game, as not only were players unaware the event would even happen (due to licensing issues between countries), it happened much earlier in the NA game than it did in JP.
Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Sakuya's eyes are much larger than most characters, taking up a lot more of her face than other characters and very notably diverges from the art style of the game and Madoka characters in general.
Values Dissonance:
- Yuna's Magical Girl Story has one of her classmates get told by her teacher to dye her hair due to it being too light, despite it being the classmate's natural hair color, and the teacher only backs off when she shows a medical note saying she's allergic to hair dye. Hair color conformity is a common feature of Japanese schools, where the population is rather homogenous, but basically unheard of in the West. How that concept works in a setting where people's natural hair colors include pink, green, blue, and white is unexplained though.
- Members of the Neo Magius such as Hinema will talk about how San's fellow members of the Youth Association are attracted to her and all want to date her. In the context of Japanese mindsets this is encouraging a mutual attraction and legitimate ship tease. By the views of a Western mindset however, where all of San's fellow Youth Association members are 20 or older while San herself is 16, this is very much disturbing if not outright illegal.
What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
- While the East-West Kamihama schism/right-wing vs. left-wing conflict had always exist in the setting's worldbuilding, that subplot grows pretty significantly in Arc 2 to the point that an in-universe election is a plot point.
- Everything about Shizuka can be interpreted as a cautionary tale that ultra-nationalism is a tool the conservatives use to control the younger generation in order to protect their own capital.
WTH, Costuming Department?: Due to the various artists who draw the Magical Girls in the game, some with very different styles from the base Madoka style, certain costumes get a fair bit of flak from sections of the fans, often for being overly sexualized despite both the age of the characters involved and questions about why their outfits would even be like that in-universe. Leila Ibuki and Himaka Mao, whose costumes basically have them running around in their underwear are particularly prone to this criticism. This is especially apparent with most designs Sasagi Koushi is involved with that tend to show off their midriffs for no apparent reason, spinoff designs like Kazumi's having a skin-tight trend and Suzune's being created by a hentai artist ^note. Similarly, Ebony was also heavily disliked due to her extremely pale skin and Stripperrific, cliche outfit. On a lesser note, Rabi Himuro also receives dislike with her outfit heavily riffing on Native American culture while she herself isn't.
The Woobie:
- Poor Sana. Abusive Parents, no friends, and a tendency to isolate herself has left her a quivering, self-loathing mess. She deserves all the hugs.
- Also, Ren Isuzu. She has trouble speaking, and she was teased so much for it that it drove her to attempt suicide. Twice.

YMMV / Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story

Edit Locked