If anime were a religion, magical girls would be one of its Five Pillars, along with shounen battle, love comedy, mecha and sports. Friendship, courage and cuteness are the fundamentals of the classic mahou shoujo. Implied yuri and teenage angst come optional in contemporary interpretations.

It’s a genre that is really easy to understand and that’s why I’ve never really been a huge fan of it. It’s like watching the latest Hollywood adaptation of yet another Marvel superhero — mildly entertaining with few surprises.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica is different. I am not ready to declare it the best show this season after three episodes, but I will say that it definitely stands out.

Story

Madoka Magica has a typical story. Madoka Kaname, a normal and klutzy heroine who is not very confident about herself, finds herself caught in the midst of a supernatural battle between “Puellae Magi” (magical girls) and “Witches”.

Stare into its eyes…

Kyubey, the obligatory magical mascot creature, wants to recruit Madoka to fight the Witches and offers to grant her a single wish of her choice in return.

Homura Akemi, a transfer student with an unfriendly demeanour who turns out to be a Puella Magi herself, cryptically warns Madoka not to get involved.

Mami Tomoe, a Puella Magi fighting for Kyubey, gives Madoka some friendly advice and teaches her what being a Puella Magi entails.

Thoughts

Madoka Magica’s art style instantly stands out. The background illustrations, whether indoors or outdoors, are expansive and untamed, very unlike the claustrophobic Japanesque settings usually found in anime. Every scene in the anime feels surreal and somehow magical for reasons I can’t quite put into words.

Classroom without desks

Such rooftops have never been seen on an anime school building

The railings are straight but the street lights are caught in a fish-eye lens

The fight scenes take place in some kind of alternate dimension created by the Witches. The background animation in this alternate dimension features a cut-out visual style I can only describe as “Monty Python”. There is something mildly disturbing about the little creatures(?) scurrying around this alternate dimension. I would describe these sequences as visual manifestations of nightmares.

What is this I don’t even

The stuff dreams are made of

Maybe this is just a cunning plan to cut animation budget

The start of the first episode is somewhat reminiscent of Black Rock Shooter.

The score composed by Yuki Kajiura and the ending song by Kalafina are amazing as usual and Kajiura’s style is really a perfect match for the animation. The combination sends chills down my spine.

Okay, I realize I am just writing in random disjointed sentences. This show is really messing up my mind. Let me try to collect my thoughts…

*Deep breath*

I think the most enjoyable part of Madoka Magica is the way it manages to capture exactly what I think magical girls should feel like.

Beneath the cutesy surface, there is an unspoken air of uncertainty, paranoia and even fear. There is a subtle hint that something dark and horrible lies just out of sight and things are not as simple as they appear to be. Refuge from the unknown is only temporary and peace can at any moment be replaced by chaos. The music and the otherworldly art style bring that message home perfectly.

You can frame this and hang it on a wall

Imagine, a weird talking creature appears one day to tell you to risk your life fighting unknown monsters. There is nothing magical or happy about that picture. Unlike most titles of the genre, Madoka Magica tells it as it is. I really, really like that.

Penetrating stare…

The fact is that magical girls in anime are never truly in danger. Fear and despair always come across as a transparent performance seeking to accentuate the ultimate triumph of love, hope and all things pure and good. The presentation in these shows never matches the supposed gravity of the situation — little girls fighting for their lives against great evil. The heroine may be torn and tattered, but the audience is never really forced to leave our comfort zone.

Madoka Magica on the other hand makes me feel very uncomfortable. It feels like there are no safe assumptions to be made and everything can and will fall apart at a moment’s notice. I have no idea where the story is going and I am dying to find out. This is a good thing.

Step 1 to fighting Witches

Own, like, a billion guns

For example, Kyubey looks like a stereotypical magical companion, but I find his unchanging expression, adorable as it may be, rather disturbing. When he offers Madoka a wish in return for her becoming a Puella Magi, the first thing that came to my mind was that it sounds like a deal with the devil. The fact that Homura appears to be very bitter about being a Puella Magi and wants to stop Madoka from becoming one further foreshadows the nature of this Faustian bargain.

Kyubey’s eternally frozen :3 expression looks downright unhinging if you pay attention. It cannot be unseen.

Your soul in exchange for anything you wish and powers beyond your imagination

Similarly, there is thus far no real explanation for why Puellae Magi are fighting the Witches. Interestingly, Witches drop a “Seed” when they die, which can then be used by a Puella Magi to recharge her magical powers. This frankly sounds like a predator-prey relationship more than a fight for love or justice. It seems to hint at something darker and more sinister about the unexplained relationship between the two.

Of course, it is possible that I am over-thinking this whole thing. Perhaps it will turn out to be nothing more than a completely generic mahou shoujo story with funkier art.

But the fact that the show makes me wonder at all is probably testament to its uniqueness.

Usually I only spend one post on every show I blog about, either a first impression or a full review. I think this may turn out to be one of the few exceptions. We shall see.

More screencaps

Madoka’s mother is, dare I say, a MILF

This is totally getting banned in Tokyo

This supporting character reminds me of someone but I cannot quite come up with a name

I guess Homura is Fate to Madoka’s Nanoha…

Sayaka is Madoka’s good friend

She’s kind of a main character but seems redundant

Weird structure on top of the school building

Classy

It’s some kind of monster chicken

Someone should introduce Mami to guns that can hold more than one round

Or I guess one huge round would do…

The hidden camera view…

Sweet dreams are made of this

I am suddenly reminded of this.

So, I caved and bought a second-hand PS3 Slim for S$300 (about 220 USD), partly because the PS3 has finally been successfully modded with a hacked debugging dongle reminiscent of PSP’s Pandora battery. (I am a cheapskate…) The awesome part is that my ancient Dell monitor has secret HDCP-via-DVI support through a HDMI>DVI converter and displays 1080p perfectly, so I don’t have to wander out of my room into the great unknown that is my living room to forage for a Barvia.

I finally get to play that (second-hand) copy of FFXIII I bought in Japan five months ago for cheap. Having skipped right passed all the Final Fantasies released during the PS2 generation (because I am such a cheapskate that I didn’t buy a PS2 until the PS3 was released), FFXIII comes as quite a huge leap forward from my perspective. I’m a FFVIII guy, so all this tech futuristic stuff is just right up my alley. After all, there’s no real difference between magic and sufficiently advanced technology.

Anyway, some first impressions after sitting through the tutorials.

There’s something about Japanese society that keeps producing these utopia-turn-dystopia stories, like how Chinese producers love to talk about the Warring States Period. The former is a rather pessimistic view of how Japan’s material-rich society is but an illusion that will eventually be its own downfall, while the latter is a constant reminder of why mainlanders prefer strong leadership to individualistic ideals of democracy. But I digress.

Story

I just started playing the game, so I’m going to extrapolate what I think is going on based on the first generic corridor Lightning runs through, using my keen plot sense horned by years of studying anime modern Japanese visual culture stereotypes. This is what I have so far:

We have the Cocoon (obvious name is obvious), a floating spherical utopia — that looks suspiciously like a Death Star — in the sky where humans lived in peace for hundreds of years. (I’m guessing this is a metaphor for Japan and the sheltered lives the Japanese live.) Then we have the fal’Cie, some kind of non-human supernatural beings who built Cocoon for humans. (Uncle Sam?) I’m playing the Japanese version and the katakana for fal’Cie is exactly the same as that of Farsi, which is the Persian language they speak in Iran. Interestingly, Iran just started fuelling its first nuclear reactor. This is all linked somehow… I just need my conspiracy tin-foil hat to think.

Cocoon hovers over a planet called Pulse, which in kanji is rendered as 下界 (underworld) but read as Pulse. Apparently all manner of wild magical beasts roam free on Pulse. There are also non-friendly fal’Cie living there who apparently want to invade/destroy Cocoon for unknown reasons (probably because they are bored of frolicking around the grasslands). The government of Cocoon is called 聖府 (holy government), which is a pun of the Japanese world for government 政府 and has a decidedly less punny English name — Sanctum.

I’m going out on a limb here and guess that the fal’Cie from Pulse is trying to destroy Cocoon for humanity’s own good and the Sanctum, though ostensibly trying to protect Cocoon’s citizen, is actually a corrupt evil organization hell-bent on preserving some kind of status quo for its own nefarious purposes.

Sanctum is probably demonizing the underworld to stop people from realizing how awesome it is to go out. It’s basically a conspiracy to turn its citizens into hikkikomori. The moral of the story at the end will be that the great outdoors is an awesome place and we should all go out of our room and roam free in the wild like savages. Well, I’m not falling for it.

But seriously, I’m still running straight paths down endless corridors in the game, so I’m just making shit up based on a few paragraphs of flavour text in the game menu. Don’t bother correcting me either. I possess a 10kΩ resistance against spoilers.

Graphics

Graphics-wise, I feel a bit conflicted. While FFVII and FFVIII offered a substantially differentiated experience for their time, it’s a whole lot harder to be impressed nowadays, particularly since the PS3 and the 360 run on three-year-old technology comparable to today’s budget PC graphics. I’m not holding my breath, but I did like the train sequence at the start of the game. That is to say, the graphics and cinematics do have their moments, and it’s nice to not have that the immersion-breaking back-and-forth between curvy FMV cutscenes and blocky in-game graphics for which I remember the PS1.

Gameplay

So far, there’s really nothing much to speak of in terms of gameplay. I hope it gets more complicated than facerolling on the controller’s O button and running in straight lines.

I kind of get turned off by games that require insane min-maxing to win, so I should be happy. But I’m kind of worried that FFXIII goes too far in the opposite direction. Maybe it’s because I haven’t run through enough straight corridors to get to the good part yet.

Conclusion

…Okay, this is turning out to be one negative-sounding first impression. It’s actually not that bad. The high production value basically guarantees a minimum level of quality enjoyment. And if all else fails, there’s still Lightning’s Japanese voice-over by Maaya Sakamoto. She keeps me hanging on. But if you ask me whether I would still play through FFXIII if the Japanese version didn’t exist, I would be hard-pressed to give you an answer.

Maaya doesn’t just tip the balance, she breaks it.