Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story

マギアレコード魔法少女まどか☆マギカ外伝 (TV) (Magia Record: Mahou Shoujo Madoka☆Magica Gaiden)

7.0(1)

OtakuDen

6.8(64,339)

MAL Score

Ranked #5690

Popularity #1554

Drama
Suspense
Mahou Shoujo
Psychological

Episodes: 13
Duration: 23 min per ep
Aired: Jan 5, 2020 to Mar 29, 2020
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

A whispered legend says a white creature named Kyuubey will grant any wish a girl desires—if she agrees to become a magical girl and risk her life battling the merciless witches that prey on humanity. The bargain is real, and its price is steep.

Iroha Tamaki, a gentle middle schooler from Takarazaki City, fights witches with a magical crossbow and a healing ability. Yet she can’t remember what she wished for, and even Kyuubey offers no answers. Drawn by talk of a place where “magical girls can be saved,” Iroha heads to Kamihama City, only to find witches there far stronger than anything she’s faced. Rescued by the seasoned magical girl Yachiyo Nanami, Iroha tries to leave the danger behind—until meeting a small Kyuubey stirs fragments of forgotten memories, pulling her back into Kamihama’s unsettling mystery.

Otaku Consensus

Otaku Consensus: Magia Record is strongest when it lets Shaft and Gekidan Inu Curry turn Kamihama into a hostile pop-art maze, with the Yachiyo-Iroha found-family dynamic and Tsuruno material giving the game-derived ensemble a pulse. Its weakest link is the adaptation’s sprawl: viewers repeatedly praise the look while criticizing the 13-episode season for confusing pacing, thinner thematic excavation than Urobuchi-era Madoka, and a lack of the original’s subversive shock.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Magia Record if you want the Madoka universe treated less like a trapdoor thriller and more like a strange, crowded urban fantasy about damaged girls building routines inside impossible systems. Shaft’s Winter 2020 season keeps the franchise’s visual grammar: collage interiors, oppressive witch spaces, and theatrical framing, but Gekidan Inu Curry’s leadership makes the texture feel closer to an illustrated nightmare diary than a clean sequel. It is best for viewers who enjoy decoding atmospheres and ensemble tensions more than waiting for one devastating twist; it scratches the same psychological-mahou-shoujo itch as Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Yuki Yuna Is a Hero, without trying to duplicate either. If you like memory-fragment mysteries and production design that can carry a scene when the adaptation gets busy, this is its lane.

Key Characters

I
Iroha Tamaki(VA: Momo Asakura)
Iroha works because she is a deliberately gentle lead in a franchise built on dread, with her quiet persistence making the missing pieces around her feel more unsettling than melodramatic.
Y
Yachiyo Nanami(VA: Sora Amamiya)
Yachiyo gives the ensemble its seasoned edge, acting as a cool counterweight to Kamihama’s younger, more volatile magical girls rather than a simple mentor figure.
F
Felicia Mitsuki(VA: Ayane Sakura)
Felicia brings bruiser energy to the cast, and her abrasive bluntness is a major reason the found-family material feels earned instead of decorative.
T
Tsuruno Yui(VA: Shiina Natsukawa)
Tsuruno is frequently discussed for the season’s friendship-and-emotion material, even by critics who feel Magia Record rarely digs as deeply as the original Madoka.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Gekidan Inu Curry is credited as both chief director and series composition, a rare double role that helps explain why the season’s strongest identity comes from atmosphere, symbolic clutter, and witch-space unease.
2
This is a 13-episode Winter 2020 cour adapted from a gacha game with visual-novel-style storytelling, and that source structure shows: it expands the cast and setting aggressively while also creating the pacing complaints that dominate mixed reviews.
3
Shaft’s production is staffed around highly specific visual roles, including Ken Naitou as art director, Takashi Hashimoto as action director, and Akihisa Takano, Yoshiaki Itou, and Kana Miyai as main animators.
4
AniList’s strongest tags point to the show’s actual flavor: Magic and Urban Fantasy at 96%, Primarily Female Cast at 92%, Henshin at 90%, Found Family at 79%, and Memory Manipulation at 75%.
5
Tsuruno’s arc is one of the better-known discussion points outside the main mystery, with reviewers noting that it touches friendship and emotional self-presentation even when they judge the treatment as surface-level.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The original creator is credited as Magica Quartet, while Ume Aoki returns as original character designer, keeping the spin-off visually tied to the Madoka lineage even as the narrative moves into a different cast structure.
Fun fact 2: Gekidan Inu Curry’s promotion to chief director and series composition is central to the anime’s identity; the staff credit signals a shift toward the franchise’s surreal design language as a guiding principle rather than a supporting flourish.
Fun fact 3: Reception is visibly split across platforms: MAL lists it at 6.85 from 64,188 votes, AniList at 65/100 with 636 favourites, and IMDb at 6.2/10 from 685 ratings.
Fun fact 4: Several user reviews frame the anime through its source-material problem: it adapts the main story of the Magia Record mobile gacha game, which helps explain both the larger ensemble and the common complaint that the season feels crowded.
Fun fact 5: Momo Asakura, Sora Amamiya, and Shiina Natsukawa voice Iroha, Yachiyo, and Tsuruno respectively, and the three actors are also the members of the voice-actress unit TrySail.