Synonyms: Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magika, Magical Girl Madoka★Magika, Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Japanese: 魔法少女まどか★マギカ
Madoka is an kind, friendly, but ordinary second-year middle school girl. She wonders aloud what she should do if she can grant whatever you may wish through magic.
Fafner
DVD 1: Arcadian Project
Fafner goes for the hook early and starts out with a battle scene, and then jumps back to the events leading up to it. It's a common narrative device, but here it seems almost like bargaining: "Watch past the first episode, and we'll eventually show you this bit!" It takes a full episode just to get Kazuki into the robot, and getting there is a drag—for several minutes it's like having walked into a boring school drama, at least until the sci-fi stuff starts up. Even then, the sense of compelling adventure is strangely absent, due to the aspects of the show that make it difficult to follow. Futuristic military and technical terms pop in without explanation, characters casually refer to events and ideas that won't make sense until later on, and people do things with unclear motivations. Brushing up on Northern European culture might help, though, as everything is named after Norse and Germanic legends (i.e., anything that appeared in Wagner's Ring cycle), but the world of Fafner is still a tough one to get into.
