Mahou Shoujo/Puella Magi Madoka★Magica, 5-6/10.
It suffers a lot from being overstuffed, and even reminded me of the atrocious second and third 'Pirates of the Carribean' films in that there very well might be a gem of an idea in there, but it's not used to its full potential due to thousands of other tenuous plot points and lack of direction for the characters.
The finale, and well, a lot of the backhalf of the series is abject to not following the number one rule of writing: showing, not telling. Exposition, exposition, exposition. It makes everything feel meaningless. If there's history and story to tell, give us someone to connect to and apply it to them rather than just let a cat say it and the character's passively react. It felt like that happened more and more as the series went on, and although there might have been a couple of sweet ideas and moments scattered throughout they didn't naturally come from the situations the characters are in and instead were basically used to progress the story from point A to B to C.
If I had to search for a positive, the art direction was quite pretty but I felt the mesh (SUBVERSION!) of standard animation against other patterns made the show feel detached, and wants to be appreciated instead of letting people invest in its story. I may have been able to do that a little bit if any of the girls had any defining features themselves, but nope; different hair colour constituted an entirely new person!!!.
Ugh.
It's very watchable though. Not sure why. Fantastic score too.
