I don’t know many anime watchers, and everyone around me loved it. One colleague had issues at first, I told him to get past the third ep, and he finished it that day.

I remember my first time. It was midnight, I knew I had to go sleep, but thought I check out first episode for the heck of it. The animation is beautiful, score is very captivating, so I decided to forego sleep a bit more. It was very lighthearted, kind of silly but in a good way, very unlike most anime I’ve seen before. Then I finished the series at 4AM absolutely emotionally rocked, I never cried so much in my life, and I have been through some shit.

It’s totally because the core feels very personal to me, and it gives me hope I’ve never felt or could imagine before. But everything other is absolutely top tier, too. I love Shaft, saw most of their stuff way back when, and this is definitely one of their most timeless pieces, because it’s so stylized. OST is kind of hard to listen to randomly, but fits the anime perfectly. And the story… it just feels right, and complete. Without any spoilers, definitely one of the very few complex story element implementations done correctly.

Unrelated to this, don’t ever watch anything beyond the anime, or first two movies. Anything after that never happened, is not related to this story, and Madoka is finished and done after the 12th episode.