For Ashley Taylor, the best girl whom I did not get during her Fate Weave.
Note: this article is about the NA server - observe that the title is not “マギアレコード” or something else.
Contract
The story started on a Monday (Tuesday in my time zone, actually), when @MagiaRecordEN invited @sally_amaki to announce an upcoming NA exclusive Magical Girl named Ashley Taylor in a Twitter video.
Long story short, Sally Amaki is a Japanese American who came to Japan in 2016 to learn Japanese (from scratch!) and pursue her dream of becoming a voice actor. She did this by passing Sony’s audition and becoming a member of the idol group 22/7. And since Magia Record is a game by Aniplex (subsidary of Sony), it’s an internal Sony thing :-)
And here’s a cute picture of her (Thanks u/JaninayIl!)
By then I was in the midst of enjoying both the Magia Record and the 22/7 anime, so this counts as what you would call a “dream collaboration”, so I downloaded it the very next day.
(Both turned out to be underwhelming, but we don’t talk about that here.)
Miracles and Magic
奇跡も、魔法も、あるんだよ
Both Miracles and Magic Do ExistMadoka Magica Episode 4
Back when the main anime of Puella Magi aired, the English-speaking community were the first to decode the runes appearing inside (to the surprise of its Japanese authors; here’s a Puella Magi wiki page on the topic). Too bad - that’s what happens when you use a Germanic language to encode stuff :-)
Game mechanism
In the game, you clear episodes to get CC and materials. You use these to enhance Magical Girls to clear more episodes. Therefore, the purpose of this game is to do Fate Weaves and get new Magical Girls - there’s even an auto battle mode so you can focus on the Fate Weave part. And this is true for life too - you can work, earn money, buy Magia Stones, for the ultimate life goal of pulling Magic Girls. Subarashii!
On the NA server of Magia Record, the staff made a whole lot of changes to the game mechanism to make it less demanding than the JP version. As an example, you can get AP (stamina) potions by playing daily missions of clearing 10 episodes and battling in Mirrors (PvP) 5 times, a task that takes half an hour at most. This relieves a huge shortage in the game: materials. To enhance Magical Girls, you need a whole range of materials only avaliable from certain levels, so you need AP to farm these materials. The lack of AP is a cause for constant attention: once your AP gauge is full, every 5 minutes passing is 1 AP wasted.
That said, while both miracles and magic exist, they also require money. There are two levels to this: in-game money and real money. To enhance your Magical Girl - even just for levelling up - you need the game’s currency of CC, and in such huge amounts that people would go recommend you exchange your precious, hard-earned event currency for CCs. I’ve personally never encountered anything like this, a game where you run out of coins, the cheapest and most plentiful of currencies in a game.
As for real money, the issue is simple: you don’t really always get the Magical Girl you want, the rates are just not that high (Oh boy have I seen 10% SSR rates on a free Gacha).
Exceptions do exist, rarely: I once had a Fate Weave ticket, so I used it, and:
Mirrors
Long story short (okay, I skipped the Mirrors intro story since only the Main Story has full voice), Mirrors is where replicas of Magical Girls appear, and we fight against them. As us players (and probably Madokami) know, these are actually other players’ Magical Girls, so it’s only a setup for a PvP mode.
Apart from Daily Missions bonuses, you get Mirror Coins used to buy CC and materials.
Events
Events are, frankly, used to make sure you clear more episodes, so that the game company gets more money to do Fate Weaves in an infinite cycle like the one Homura went through. But for some events this is highly recommended, because you get new outfits that come fully voiced. 10/10!
Localization
One small but notable aspect is that the NA server team has done a lot of localization, so maybe they are trying to attract non-enthusiasts to play this games as well. In the example below, the original version featured Felicia eating Tsuruno’s ice cream due to not being able to understand Kanji, one of Japan’s three writing systems; after localization, the Kanji becomes cursive writing, and there is much rejoicing as there is no confusion on what Kanji is, and no doubt that the word Kanji in the characters’ voice (since this is from the Main Story) must mean “cursive”.
Ash
And lastly, here is a nice picture of Ashley to throw you off track. Since kawaii culture is so well known, there is no need to localize that at all!
*Warning: finishing her Magical Girl story and learning about her wish may cause dispair, which Kyubey can in turn transform into energy, and is therefore not recommended.
Wrap-up
As a die-hard TrySail fan, the gameplay was certainly not the reason why I began playing this game.
Puella Magi fans may be able to enjoy another universe (which, of course, is observable by MadoKami) in which Homura-with-glasses play with her friends on the beach. And imagine a place where you don’t have to worry about tainting your Soul Gem!
As for non-enthusiasts, the gameplay is a little tiresome - and since the NA server is a past version of the JP one, the gameplay is about to get a whole lot more complicated: a new “Feelings” system where you fight against non-Witch and non-Rumor creatures called “Feelings”, and use dropped items to enhance your Magical Girls further.
Update
Barely three months after I wrote this, the NA server announced a shutdown.
People were sad, angry and confused; little did they know, this probably spelt trouble within Aniplex, or inside the Magia Record franchise, in a foreshadowing, almost, of the anime’s unfortunate fate.
Another reason was probably complexity: the second story arc, and the new “Feelings” system that comes with it, might have been too complicated for Aniplex to feel comfortable updating the NA server with. This is my guess, at least.