Magia Record

» see madoka-magica-mobile.aniplex.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

by the time magia record's english servers went live i was in my mid-thirties and past the anime-gacha window in every direction. mobile-first titles built on an anime property that expected you to have watched the original 12-episode series to feel anything were not something i tracked from ankara. i had watched two episodes of madoka magica on someone's laptop once around 2013 and understood it was well-regarded, and that was where my involvement with the franchise ended.

the game itself was built by f4samurai and published by aniplex. it launched on japanese mobile on 22 august 2017 as a side-story game set a few years after the events of the original anime, following a new set of magical girls in kamihama city while the original cast made cameo appearances. the writing was taken seriously enough that the game got its own anime adaptation in 2020 based on its plotlines, running for two seasons across 2020 and 2022.

that is a rare inversion. the game was popular enough in japan that it generated its own anime rather than the other way around. peak revenue was strong through 2018-2020, and while it never crossed into first-tier gacha revenue territory (that is fate/grand order and monster strike land), it was steady enough to run for almost seven years on the japanese mobile side.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

combat was five-versus-five turn-based squad battles with connect moves that let magical girls chain attacks together. you built a stable of magical girls through gacha pulls, upgraded them with memoria (equippable memory cards that added stats and passive skills), and worked through a chapter-based story map. the setting was kamihama, a fictional city adjacent to madoka's mitakihara, with its own new magical-girl cast and a witch-versus-uwasa mythology parallel to the original.

what people paid for was the writing. the original madoka magica had a reputation for turning the magical-girl genre inside out in twelve episodes. magia record extended that mythology in a form the fanbase could inhabit for years rather than watch in one sitting, which is why the japanese version outlived every other localization by such a wide margin.

~ how the english version died first ~

aniplex usa launched the english version on 25 june 2019 for ios and android. it ran fifteen months. on 28 august 2020 aniplex announced the english service would end on 30 october 2020, citing that it could not sustain the operational cost of a separate global version against the smaller international audience. in-app purchases stopped immediately at announcement. players who had spent money got no refund path.

the english shutdown left a bitter mark on the global fanbase that still shows up in reddit threads about aniplex localizations. the japanese version ran for almost four more years after the english closure, which made the whole thing look worse in hindsight. the pc port on dmm games launched in april 2019 and closed on 1 july 2024. the japanese mobile version closed on 31 july 2024, seven months after the shutdown announcement. an offline archive client was made available for players who wanted to review the story they had unlocked; that closed on 14 october 2024.

~ what it left ~

magia exedra, a new madoka mobile game announced in april 2024, launched later that year as the replacement. it carried over some account data for players who migrated. whether it will run as long as its predecessor is not answered yet. what magia record leaves behind is the two-season anime adaptation, which is now the only remaining canonical form of the story it told. the game itself is offline in every language and every region. [[nier-reincarnation]] closed three months before it and belongs on the same shelf: mobile-first gacha titles built on niche japanese ip that ran for a few years each before their audience was not enough to sustain them. [[marvel-avengers-alliance]] and [[elyon]] and [[maplestory-2]] round out the same grave of licensed live-service games that took their stories offline when the servers stopped.

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