I went into this expecting an alternative to rewatching the series, and it does an okay job at it, but not to the degree that it makes me want to play a gacha game.

• It's the characters, story, and OST from the show and movies. It's why I nominated it in three categories of the Steam Awards even though it feels like it's riding on the coattails of its 2011 success (which is the unfortunate reality of the franchise other than Rebellion).
  
• Gameplay is simple and discovering synergies with a limited pool of characters feels rewarding. You can clear battles well above your "party rank" if you're actually awake.
  
• The 3D models look great and the animations they're rigged to definitely work in their favor.

• Voice lines you redeem for the sand currency are not subtitled except if you pick that meguca to be your background and repeatedly click on them. Inconvenient, but not a dealbreaker.
  
• The original content can't really stack up to the original story, and it's apparent. Full stop.
  
• I didn't clock why it has a "streamer mode" until I rolled two characters who are running around in their underwear. They make even the protagonist of Magia Record have a chaste-looking design in comparison. EDIT: Can't really make an argument that it's successfully gatekeeping, considering this is a popular franchise already. That being said, that's actually not what streamer mode does, it just mutes all the music. Might find an edge use case for that.
  
• It takes longer than watching the movie or the TV show. Battles feel like filler after you've fought the exact same mob composition several times over in the same dungeon crawl.
  
• Maybe it's a quirk of the engine, but the Live2D models appear to be marionettes on strings that suddenly jerk into their animation sequence during the VN bits. Just uncanny enough and just common enough to momentarily jerk you out of the story.

• Kernel level anticheat. If anything is going to make me install this faster, it's this. Purportedly it uninstalls with the game, but according to the intro, you lose your progress when you uninstall. Are we really getting this serious over jpegs?
  
• When they can't bother to depict it any other way, they seem to use 720p aliased screenshots from the TV release, not the BD or the movies. Assuming this is intended to be played on contemporary monitors, why? Why play this when I can just watch something using the exact same frames in better quality? EDIT: It's movies frames. Why do they look so fuzzy?
  
• I am getting the distinct feeling I'm about to run up against a grind at around 10 hours in (EDIT: avoided up to a certain point by waiting for story elements that force feed you the right gems for the right element, usually on-element with that section of the story) and I'd rather spend my time grinding, at worst, in an MMO where I get measurable progress in a persistent world I can share with others (EDIT: still true!). There do appear to be social features, but at that point, why not just discuss meguca online with the millions of people who've already seen it, or make mods for games that aren't as unfriendly to the customer to spread the word of Madokami to others?

In summary, deliver the movie already, SHAFT.

EDIT: Completed the main PMMM storyline.

• Wow, they pull out all the stops for Walpy. Expect the fight to get reused outside of PMMM, but there's enough enemy variety that it feels fresh every fight. It helps that there's fewer filler fights and a whopping three boss fights against Walpy herself.
  
• Maybe I'm lucky, or maybe it's a good time to have picked it up, but there have been a lot of fairly generous events in the past three months. Noteworthy here is that the system itself is not generous at all, and gem economy is complained about at every level of play.
  
• If you miss a non-seasonal event, it gets added to the backlog you can unlock from finishing the PMMM main storyline. The rewards, however, I'm fairly sure are not added.
  
• Okay, Scene 0 is a mixed bag, but Mabuyu is great, and it's really great character development for Mami.
  
• VN insert arts used for gameplay buffs actually look great, and are wallpaper resolution.
  
• Madoka's sacrifice is still, no matter the presentation, heartwrenching yet inspiring.

• There are four separate Magia Record storylines: the original mobile game, the anime adaptation, the manga adaptation, and the Exedra version, all with different plot beats. This means some features might be fresh or differ slightly from what you remember if you've played/watched/read Magia Record before.
  
• That being said, following the movies meant that I'm fairly sure there's some skipped scenes in this. Might be confusing for people fresh to the franchise.

• Magia Record is mandatory for PMMM progression.
  
• Resource management is key, and this is exacerbated by needing mats for the best characters in each element.
  
• Alternatively, if you invest in the wrong character in that element identity early on, that might come back to haunt you later. Most four stars are worse versions of five stars, with some exceptions, so if you really like, for example, Ashley Taylor, the Glittering Hurricane, you're not going to use her much once you unlock Kaname Madoka, the Pluvia Magica. She just does it better. Alternatively, if Light isn't in your color pie for the target, a five star Void breaker is probably just a better investment.
  
• There are also five stars with narrow use cases.
  
• This game is a temptress to the gamblers, as any gacha is. If you don't think you can refuse to open your wallet, best not to start.
  
• If you don't have the exact right party, PvP is a blowout against you, every time.
  
• Photo mode is advertised as a feature, but is not available in the Steam version.
  
• Speaking of the Steam version, Exedra does not by default link to the Steam Cloud despite account information being stored locally in appdata, and while I hear from community members that you can link your Steam account to another platform and play on both, the game appears to tell you that you will no longer be able to play on the platform you transfer from.
  
• There appears to have been a support site once, but the redirect from the FAQ for "Inquiries" appears to, by machine translation, lead to a page for four different mobile games' support and a separate option for inquiries about the company itself, which is not credited anywhere on Steam. Each link official Steam support page for Exedra goes to the landing page of the main site for the game.
  
• The movie got delayed. Not an Exedra thing, but I gotta complain somewhere.

Not a cent spent, but I feel like I'm lacking common sense by continuing to play. But, as MC Ride once said, "My existence is a momentary lapse in reason," so why not go for broke? Further edits to come after further progression. Until then, still recommending to just watch the shows and the movies.

I've had friends ask me before, "So standardheadache, you've logged quite a few hours in LOTRO, what do you think of it?" I'd ask the same: for an MMO that's been going for nearly 15 years, it's worth finding out whether it's a sunk-cost fallacy for the remaining 100k active players or whether there's still ample opportunity to hop on as a new player and have fun. With the advent of most of the game going F2P, it's worth taking the opportunity to review LOTRO to hopefully convince more people to try out this throwback to the golden age of MMOs.

And what a throwback it is. LOTRO was competing with Burning Crusade when it came out, and its first expansion was pitted against Wrath of the Lich King and Warhammer Online on the market. Much of its gameplay reflects this, and it has been less modernized than WoW. However, it still fits the bill of what used to be called a “WoW clone”: racial traits that matter, class trait specs that change how you play the game, one class per character, and an emphasis on side quests alongside the main story. The leveling experience has been streamlined where the open world is no longer as dangerous as it used to be, but the story remains a solid way to level in the expansions.

How is the story? It's definitely not as monolithic as, say, FFXIV's, but it also doesn't suffer from making you the most important person in the world, either. Your importance peaks at “incredibly helpful stranger”; you aren't a chosen one or capable of more than the average person, you've just built a lot of trust with important people by starting at the bottom with disparate factions. Ultimately, you become a trusted hired hand, capable of doing things an insider can't or won't do. You are still subject to the cold, the shadow, and dread, all of which are mechanically reflected in gameplay.

Gameplay spans a lot. There's the metagaming aspect, where you customize your trait specs to best fit your desired solo and group roles (which may be different), and the actual hotkey-mashing, rotation-completing you know and love from these sorts of titles. Rotations are fairly concise; key abilities are unlocked via the trait tree for each spec, and there aren't many abilities that you actually use in combat. I usually have two hotbars dedicated to in-combat abilities; for my level 130, two and a half. Each class gets utility skills that are rarely used in combat, and therefore can be relegated to a non-hotkeyed hotbar without much issue.

The classes themselves are par for the course for a WoW clone, with some exceptions like Captain and Minstrel. As previously mentioned, all classes are capable of filling multiple roles, and often have a sustained dps role suitable for soloing as well as a more group-oriented role. Main dps classes may have an ability to lose aggro, while even offtanks have ways to pull aggro. It's recommended to pick a race that complements your class; elves, for example, have a trait that increases bow damage, so it's best to have an elf as a hunter rather than a dwarf for group content. However, picking offmeta can open up unique opportunities for open-world content; hobbits aren't the best for group content ever since hope consumables were introduced, but free stealth and playing possum on any class can get you out of sticky situations and save on repair bills if you aren't a VIP (or if you're a lazy VIP like me and don't pick up your bonus in major towns every couple of days when the VIP consumable resets).

As for the community, it's something that hasn't changed much over time. When I started playing as a wee lad, given the lifetime subscription to keep me quiet and out of trouble, I was never bullied for being a child and never had predators make moves on me. My guild's coleaders were married, and many of them were in their twenties to forties. Now, the average player is between 30 and 60, and my current guild's coleaders are also married, and likely in their fifties. World chat has some definite dad energy.

tl;dr: do I think it's worth it? At risk of sounding biased since I've been with it since year one, yeah, I'd say so. At the very least, it's far more free content than most MMOs these days, and the “grind” to get microtransaction currency has been substantially reduced in importance, so you can spend more time actually playing the game. If you find you can't launch the game through Steam, try downloading the missing DirectX files manually. If that doesn't work, you can always try downloading the launcher through the main website; most LOTRO players don't use the Steam version.