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Shaft has always been my favorite animation studio due to their exceptionally unique art style and story telling methods along with creating or adapting several of my favorite series including 3 gatsu no lion, Monogatari and of course Madoka Magica. MagiReco Season 2 gets 10 grief seeds out of 10. I think you’ll find it to be quite different, for the better. If you thought MagiReco season 1 was interesting, but didn’t like the pacing or direction, I encourage you to give at least an episode of this a try. MagiReco Season 2 builds on a series that I already loved a lot and sures up a lot of the problems I had with it. I really hope this continues into the next season. A reduced episode count means more time to work on episodes and allows you to have good pacing. I think the decision to go with 8 episodes in this cour and split the story into one more season coming in Fall, was brilliant. As more clues are revealed about the wings of magius and their goals, the story begins to feel a lot more like OG Madoka. Speaking of ambiance, the season does feel considerably darker than the first. Those traditional high quality sequences and direction that we’ve come to know and love from the Monogatari series make a return and they really added to the overall ambiance of the show. In general, this season felt way more SHAFT-y. The transformations which are key to any Mahou Shojo series were great too.
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The fight scenes are some of the best I’ve ever seen from SHAFT. I don’t know if it was due to staff, budget, time or some combination of all, but this season looked amazing.
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SHAFT upped the production values for the show substantially since season 1. I loved that they were able to incorporate the cast of the original TV anime with game’s girls and their chemistry on screen was really nice. I think it worked very well and felt faithful to MagiReco the game, yet also fresh. and deviate, while keeping the overall direction of the story pretty similar. For this season, SHAFT decided to do their own thing It’s rare that games perfectly translate to anime adaptations, so it presented some issues with pacing at times.
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MagiReco season 1 heavily followed the game’s storyline, at times to the detriment of the anime. The second season has rectified all of those issues and deviated substantially from the game’s story, for the better in my opinion. While I enjoyed the show a lot, it was undeniably lacking in some areas. MagiReco was one of my favourite shows of 2020, so when I heard we were getting another season I was ecstatic.
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