Madoka Magica: Magia Exedra is the new madoka gacha game, released from Aniplex the 25th of March, 2025.
The game launched on Android/iOS; a Steam release was scheduled soon after launch, but there has been no word about it even 2 months after release.
I’m fairly new to gacha games, this is the first time I’ve been playing one for any significant amount of time.
But in the past few months, Exedra has been all I’ve been playing: While im in my home-labbing arc, i don’t really feel like committing to real videogames, and exedra is a nice little time-waster featuring characters i love.
I’ve been playing the game on and off since launch, and I’ve almost finished the storyline, so i thought this would be a good point to put my thoughts out: There are some additional challenge modes to go through, but im pretty sure i’m at the end-game.
To be honest, the game is a mixed bag…
The Gameplay
Gameplay-wise, Exedra is a pretty standard turn-based rpg. I’ve been told it resembles Honkai: Star Rail, but it did not play that.
The story is broken up into “windows”, basically chapters, each chapter corresponding to a specific Witch’s labyrinth.
As you can see, the map is not really explorable, but instead it contains a series of nodes: most nodes will trigger a battle, the yellow ones also contain items. Once you beat a node, you automatically proceed to the next one: there isn’t really much to do outside of battles. Your character will just auto-walk and pick up stuff, until they bump into an encounter or the end of the node.
Compare and contrast, dear reader, Madoka Magica: The Battle Pentagram.
That game came out in 2013 for the PSVita, only in Japan.
It was similarly made bt a small team on a shoe-string budget, and yet:
- It had real-time combat
- It had fully explorable 3d witch labyrinths
- It allowed you to fight fellow magical girls
Yes the maps were recycled ad nauseam, and the AI was not very good, but it was a solid effort. And its kind of disappointing to see a new game coming out 10+ years later, that is incredibly linear.
Yes I do understand there are limitations intrinsic to having to play on mobile, but an effort should have been made to make map travel and exploration less mind-numbing.
Once you get into a battle tho, things do improve a lot.
The girls have 6 different classes.
- Breakers
- Attackers
- Buffers/Debuffers (2 distinct classes, but they basically do the same thing)
- Healers
- Defenders
Most of the roles are self-explanatory, as soon as you know that the white bar on top of the enemy health bar is a shield that needs to be broken before the enemy can be damaged. Breakers deals with the shield, Attackers go to town once the enemy is broken.
Defenders provide a shield to your team as well, except it just works as a second health bar in the player’s hands.
Each magical girl has 3 different actions at her disposal: a Basic attack and a Special attack, as well as an Ultimate, which can be unleashed when her gauge is full. Special attacks consume SP (the yellow pips at the bottom), which you can think of as Stamina, or AP from Fallout 1/2: SP needs to be managed, lest you run dry at a critical moment. The ult gauge on the other hand, is just charged by attacking with the other 2 skills.
The normal combat flow goes like this: break the enemy’s shield, pile on the buffs/debuffs, and deliver a damage nuke.
Once you break an enemy shield, it will fully regenerate in its following turn: that way, the player is very much incentivized to take off as much of the enemy health bar as possible in a single turn.
Is this combat system very deep? no, not really.
It doesn’t have a lot of depth, but it has enough to keep me engaged: you gotta manage SP, time the enemy break so all your ults are ready to fire, and pay attention to turn order. Boss fights even require a little bit of thinking, because a lot of Witches like Oktavia or Walpurgisnacht have dirty tricks like constantly regenerating shields, or multiple actions x turn.
So overall, id say the moment-to-moment gameplay is allright.
The Story
All story events in the game are delivered un a Visual Novel-style, which is probably to be expected for the genre.
There are 3 campaign stories to unlock, plus a number of events
- The Madoka Magica campaign, adapting the events of the anime.
- The Magia Record campaign, which adapts the events of the Magia Record mobile game.
- The Oriko campaign, which adapts the events of Oriko Magica: The Sadness Prayer.
The events usually last 2 weeks or so in real time, and contain around 8 visual novel chapters for you to read.
Events adapt a variety of things, from the original PMMM Drama CDs, to spinoff mangas, to original MagiReco stories which i assume where part of the previous game.
So, how are these stories?
Ehh, their quality really varies: some have voice acting, some do not. Some have animated 2d models, others barely do.
I mainly read the PMMM storyline, kinda stopped caring after that.
The reason for my apathy is quite simple, the format and the general lack of care kinda ruins the story: the backgrounds are usually pretty bland, the live2d models just cannot match the emotions expressed in the lines (especially when said lines are lifted from the anime), there is just…a general feeling of cheapness to it all.
This issue is exacerbated 10-fold in the “action” scenes, where these problems compound into really disappointing results.
Let’s take an example: do you remember dear reader, the iconic Kyoko vs Sayaka fight from episode 5?
It is, i think, quite an important moment in the story: It introduces us to Kyoko as a character, it shows us Sayaka’s stubbornness in wanting to continue on Mami’s legacy and lying to herself, which are all elements that would later become crucial in her arc.
Now, how did exedra adapt this iconic moment? There’s no bespoke CG, no live2d, just a generic background image with slashing special effects and clanking noises added in post.
Sadge 😔
So yeah, i do not think that playing through the game’s campaigns is the best way to experience the stories. If there is an anime/manga of it, go consume that instead.
But, there is light at the end of the tunnel: Scene 0.
Scene 0
Scene 0 is an event that is running at the time of writing, and it kinda redeemed the game for me from a story point of view.
Scene 0 is the story of Mayabu, a green-haired little goblin that begins her story shortly before the events of the anime. While going along with her day-to-day life, she suddenly finds herself in a weird situation: time will randomly stop around her, leaving her unaffected. From that point on, Mayabu embarks on a journey to figure out what is going on and why, getting tangled up in the spiraling fates of the Holy Quintet along the way.
The story is very long (i’d guess it took around 5 hours to read), fully voice-acted, and with a much better production quality imo.
The pacing is, uncharacteristically for the game, quite good: it starts out slow, but there are a lot of little mysteries that get drip-fed throughout:
- Why does Mayabu has amnesia?
- Are the timestops her doing? or is she seemly unaffected by Homura’s power?
- where is this in the timeline?
- Is Mayabu also able to loop? what will happen to her once Walpurgisnacht shows up?
Mayabu herself is a great character, socially akward and kind of a slob, yet head-strong once she puts her mind to something.
So ye, scene0 is really fun. I highly recommend it to any PMMM fan. You can play it yourself, or even watch it on YouTube
The Presentation
Graphically the game looks pretty good, despite the sometimes inconsistent framerate. It runs well enough, but its a mobile game so im not really sure what to say.
Moving onto the game’s audio, the original music made for magiReco and Exedra is quite nice and it fits well with the style of the original Yuki Kajiura OST for the anime, but on the other hand the game has a tendency to over-use the Anime’s OST; A lot of stages use an instrumental rendition of Magia as their BGM, even when fighting regular mobs.
There is an original Kalafina song that plays in the game’s OP, which i like quite a lot. Here is a link
I have no clue who a lot of the featured characters are, but the fact Tart and the gang show up makes me happy. My wallet will undoubtedly weep, once they get added to the roaster.
(Man i must write about Tart Magica sometimes, its such an amazing manga…)
But speaking of wallets shedding tears…
The Gacha
As i said in the beginning of this piece i’m quite new to these kinda games, so i don’t think i can provide a valuable take, but lets go anyway.
There are actually 2 separate currencies for rolling in Exedra: Gems, and Keys.
Keys are given to you for free as part of account progression, pretty regularly. Usually every time you complete a chapter, you get a key.
Keys can only be used to roll on the standard pool of characters, so in most situations they are pretty useless. But never say never, because I’ve gotten a handful of 5-stars from keys before.
Gems is where the gaslight truly begins, and the economy starts looking bleak: Gems are used to pull on pretty much any banner, and can be either acquired through playing the game, or spending real money. (no $TRUMP coin support yet, unfortunately).
There is also a pity system like in other games, but i have heard is a lot less generous that what you get in HoyoVerse games (e.g Genshin Impact).
Each time you pull on a specific banner, you get a token: If you are pulling on a featured character banner, you can redeem 200 tokens to outright just buy it.
A single pull is 300 gems, a 10-pull is 3.000, so you’d need around 60.000 gems to pity a character:
Sounds like a lot huh?
Turns out, it is a lot: I’ve gone the whole game saving up gems, and i have just reached 60k recently. 😥
Oh and to add insult to injury, tokens only work on a single banner: if for whatever reason, you run out before you can reach pity, your progress towards it just disappears.
(As a side-note, the pity system also applies to the standard banner: but if you reach pity on the standard banner, all you can get is a key that gives you a random 5-star)
So that’s fun…
In order to make up for such a draconian system, the chances of getting any given 5-start is actually quite high (3%) which is how i managed to get some good characters from the key-only banner.
On the bring side, the pull only contains character: you ain’t gonna waste precious currency on a sword or whatever, so that’s nice.
Another sore point of the system is the overall economy: doing weekly missions gives less than 300 gems, so it seems quite difficult to accrue gems after you finished most all content…
Overall: while getting lucky from keys is nice, and the pool being limited to characters is nice, the gacha system seems quite stingy and unfair.
Conclusion
My feelings on Exedra are quite mixed: while the combat is fine enough, and a choice few of the stories are lovely, the gacha system is really predatory; The game also suffers from some of the usual gacha game problems (overly slow progression, spiky difficulty).
On the bright side, the progression systems are pretty easy to understand: When I first played Zenless Zone Zero (ZZZ) I found an absolute mess of different upgrade systems using a dozen different resources and currencies, whereas Exedra is pretty straight-forward.
I don’t hate the game, but its probably a 4/10 for me.
Ok. Adequate. Kinda mid.
If the idea of a Madoka Magica videogame intrigues you, i suggest you go find the two real madoka videogames: Madoka Magica Portable on the PSP, and the previously-mentioned Madoka Magica: The Battle Pentagram on the PSVita.
Both games have English fan-translation patches that are pretty much complete, and both should be supported on emulators (PPSSPP and Vita3k respectively) 😉