YMMV / Puella Magi Madoka Magica Portable

• Annoying Video Game Helper: An unusual case. The Loading Screens give advice everytime you transition from floor to floor in a dungeon, and playing again on a New Game Plus has this effect.
• Esoteric Happy Ending:
  • In Homura's true ending, even if all the girls survive and have a stockpile of grief seeds, the odds are still against them living very long as Puella Magi. And in the "Homura dies alone" ending, Kyubey comments on how he'll just wait until something comes along that does require Madoka to contract.
  • The best ending has Madoka successfully avoid a contract while the other four girls defeat Walpurgisnacht. The story then ends with the girls having a Ship Tease-laden tea party, happily smiling and joking at each other. However, since Madoka didn't make a contract, millions of girls are still dying of despair, humankind is still plagued by witches, and the main characters are probably going to all die in a few years after their Soul Gems start to run dry.
• Fridge Brilliance: Candeloro is kind of puny for a Witch. Of course, she's the embodiment of Mami's Heroic Self-Deprecation and Survivor's Guilt...
• Fridge Logic: In one of Homura's routes the aforementioned "Homura dies alone" ending. Homura defeats Walpurgis and dies after sharing her last moments with Madoka. This would mean her Soul Gem wasn't destroyed or fully tainted, as she doesn't become a witch. So she died from her injuries, something that shouldn't be possible according to Kyubey.
• Fridge Horror: What if Status Quo Is God still applies in the Bonus Route? Would Kamijou and Sayaka's relationship still last?
• Ironic Echo: The music for the fight with Candeloro, Mami's witch form, is the same music used when Mami fought Gertrud in Madoka's Route. Same with Kyoko and Gisela.
• Les Yay: Are you really surprised? Heck, even Hitomi "Girls can't love girls" Shizuki gets into it if you play your cards right^note if you're wondering, she's into Homura.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: While few people outside of Japan have gotten to play it (fan-made translation patches do exist for those who know how to install them), it has received near-universal praise from those who have due to its genuinely fun Roguelike gameplay, interesting new approaches to time-tested mechanics like New Game Plus, expansion upon the series’ lore (a good amount of which was later confirmed to be canon), good storytelling, and of course, the ability to shoot for a true Golden Ending to a series that was otherwise infamous for its soul-crushingly depressing nature.
• Player Punch: If you unintentionally end up turning any of the girls into a witch.
• Stock Footage Failure: To cut corners, some shots from the anime were used. It's very noticable when Kyoko asks Madoka to try and speak to Oktavia and the background is when the barrier resembled a classical music theatre, when the current barrier is a laser light show concert hall. Also it's very easy to tell when characters have been replaced (e.g. Madoka cradling Mami's dead body is identical to her cradling Homura.)
• That One Boss: Ophelia. First off, you're all on your own as Homura, so you can't switch to anybody else if her health or magic gets too low if you're low on items and Grief Seeds, and you can't expect Madoka to help cleaning Homura's soul gem since in this route, Madoka will not make a contract until the very end. Ophelia's minions are Demonic Spiders that like to gang up on you, and can attack from a 5 square radius - meaning that they'll probably take off a fair bit of health if you let them. Ophelia herself is a hard hitter, but to top it all off, she uses Rosso Phantasma to create very similar duplicates of herself. Unless you find the real one quickly, the duplicates will keep attacking Homura during their turn - and they hit just as hard as the original, not to mention each one of them can spammingly turns into spears that attack from afar too.