*ੈ✩‧₊˚𖤐Does anyone here watch decent anime or am I surrounded by people who think Boku no Hero Academia was a work of fine art.⭑⚝⭑ᯓ★
*ੈ✩‧₊˚𖤐Works of culture, naturally. Dungeon Meshi, Akira, various Ghibli movies, the Gundams that aren't complete rot, Rose of Versailles...I could go on!⭑⚝⭑ᯓ★
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[I TEND TO GRA#E MY OWN EYE$ WITH THE PARTI#ULARLY MU$#ULAR AND BEAUTIFUL MEN OF JOJO'$ BIZARRE ADVENTURE]
.) Aww, thanks! I'm nQt really, like, super familiar with anime in general, but I lQve the aesthetics Qf a lQt Qf 80s and 90s shQws! I've definitely lQQked at mQre screencaps than watched episQdes thQugh haha, the Qld stuff can be hard tQ find! ))
*ੈ✩‧₊˚𖤐Oh thank god, someone with significant intelligence. I have hope for this website. No, no, your understanding of nuance intrigues me even though I don't know the material. Keep talking. Why did they decide to do it that way? Stupid choice, obviously, but I wonder /why./⭑⚝⭑ᯓ★
*ੈ✩‧₊˚𖤐You know? Flawed as that work is, I can't disagree with you in front of all of Chittr lest I be a lying man.⭑⚝⭑ᯓ★
*ੈ✩‧₊˚𖤐Tragically you are correct. It CAN be hard to track down episodes, especially in good quality. Alas, time marches on...⭑⚝⭑ᯓ★
Well! You see! Magia Record was a live service game! It was the main continuity of the Madoka Magica franchise for its entire seven-year lifespan, before an increasingly fraught codebase and game balance debt led the team to soft-reboot it as Magia Exedra last year. The original game has three arcs: 1. The Happy Witch, which follows a girl named Iroha Tamaki as she seeks out the truth of what happened to her missing sister, and gets caught up in magical girl politics in the process. 2. The Gathering of 100 Evils, which follows the entire cast of The Happy Witch as well as FOUR BRAND-NEW MAGICAL GIRL ARMIES waging a war over the Automatic Purification System that's central to the game's plot. 3. Puella Historia, which features representatives of each of the armies from 100 Evils going back in time to interview magical girls from the distant past and uncover the truth of the Symbols Witch. Early on the game suffered a lot of production-side issues; there's evidence of two major rewrites during Arc 1, one right before the game's launch when Oriko was removed, and one right around Chapter 5 where the Magius' internal structure was altered. This resulted in a situation where Arc 1 didn't end up as a fully "closed" story, and a great deal of the bulk of Arc 2 is dedicated to exploring the consequences of the Arc 1 cast's actions. There's an entire army called Promised Blood whose deal is basically that Touka personally starved their city to power her plans in Arc 1 and they want revenge! (Arc 2 is like, really fucking long. Four real-life years, twelve chapters coming out to about 70 hours of fully-voiced visual novel content, plus a huge number of LOAD-BEARING EVENT STORIES that directly tie into the plot!) This is all necessary context for the fact that the Magia Record anime was pitched during Arc 2's production, around the release of Arc 2 Chapter 4 if I'm remembering right, but with the caveat that they'd only get to adapt Arc 1. The showrunner of the anime was DoroInu from Gekidan Inu Curry, the guy who designs the vast majority of the witches and who wrote a few fan-favorite event stories like the one Nagisa Momoe comes from. (Normally getting the mech designer to write the story is an awful idea, but DoroInu is actually pretty good at it.) When he was tapped to write the anime, he expressed concerns that Arc 1 didn't seem like a standalone story to him (because it isn't! It's a great foundation, but there are so many loose ends that didn't get closed off until Arc 2!) and so he decided to make a companion piece instead of a straight adaptation, using a new anime-original character named Kuroe (no first name given) as the thematic center of the new scenario. Which would be a really good idea if the runtime wasn't slashed from 39 episodes down to 25 in the middle of the second cour! Desperately trying to finish the goddamn scenario in the time they were given by the deadline they were given, so much of the actual context of the anime had to just go completely unspoken and moved into the game, using tie-in units whose Magical Girl Stories were anime recaps from the unit's perspective to fill in the gaps. Kuroe in particular received a trilogy of event stories in the game, as well as a Magical Girl Story that specifically contains the missing content from the anime as well as a depiction of where the timelines actually diverged. When all was said and done, we had a clusterfuck of a narrative that you had to be playing the game at the same time to get the full picture of and that, as previously mentioned, is set in an alternate timeline where everything went to shit. So DoroInu did successfully make a "standalone story" version of Arc 1, but at the price of alienating the anime-onlies and confusing the hell out of the casual players. Because you see there's ONE MORE THING. It is a critically important part of the lore that there can only be one version of Iroha Tamaki. Her presence in ONLY ONE TIMELINE is directly plot-relevant because it gives her "restoration" powers that allow her to revert objects, people, and even TIMELINES to their "peak" states. So the fact that the anime featured an alternate reality Iroha confused basically all of the serious fans, and we never really got a full explanation from DoroInu. The closest we heard is that the anime's locked timeline was a "fragment" of the Unique Record "projected" into the Law of Cycles' domain "with the gaps filled in," which is a very evocative image that parallels the starting point of the locked timeline (Ui's soul gem was allowed to fully shatter before she could be preserved, leading to unrecoverable faults in the APS), but also explains nothing at all. All DoroInu had to say on the matter was that he "grew up in the Super Robot Wars generation" so "asking people to play the game if they want to hear more of the story is second nature to him." When all was said and done, it truly was a Trainwreck on the Galactic Railroad. But I liked it a lot, both on its own merits and how it complemented Folklore of Zero's storyline. Wow this post got long. ······································································ #mood: Excited #nowplaying: Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido - Mechanism
*ੈ✩‧₊˚𖤐Oh my goodness gracious. What an absolute mess, but in a truly fascinating fashion, you are not wrong. I am glad you could enjoy it, it very much sounds like a work of the moment, ephemeral and convoluted, but still with its own particular value.⭑⚝⭑ᯓ★
It really is, fahaha! The good news is that if you want to get into the original game, which IS peak with no caveats attached, even though the actual game servers have been down for over a year, the scenario is fully preserved through video uploads by a generous team of fan-translators! You can find the uploads at https://youtube.com/@MagiaUnionTranslations The "intended" way for newgen fans to experience Magia Record is through the in-game reupload in Exedra, but. Um. Telling people not to do that is a public service! The Exedra version removes the voice acting (newgens were robbed of Ui's visceral screaming...) and abbreviates the actual story by a small but significant margin, leading to the loss of some fan-favorite scenes like Homura Akemi's iconic debut.