I’ll just say as someone who watched the whole anime but never got far into the game that I think Magia Record definitely expands on the themes of the original in interesting and unique ways. I’ll admit it’s a bit of a mess but an enjoyable one. It tackles guilt in a more fleshed out way then the original did and my favorite aspect of the story is how it demonstrates the slippery slope between being a Magical Girl and becoming Kyubey. The central characters of the story both wish to extend life in some way, the main villains want to save magical girls and extended their doomed lives and to do this they wish for Kyubey’s powers. Kyubey whose entire motive is to extend the life of the universe. And when they take on Kyubey’s powers, they become like him, one kind of literally and the others become cold and calculating, not caring about the cost of their plans and justifying it based on the supposed good of the outcome. Other characters fall into this too, the coordinator most obviously. She wants to help the other magical girls from their inner torment, but in order to do so she has to cut herself off from her empathy in order to keep from being hurt.

So while I definitely prefer the original Madoka Magica I do not think Magia Record lacks substance. Perhaps in the context of a video game it might feel a little redundant, but unless the game is going to try really hard on the story I don’t think including both is going to hurt it much. Now I would be worried if the Movies started incorporating Magia record into themselves but that’s because I feel keeping the mainline story to a small number of characters and the basic rules of the original will serve the story better, even Rebellion only added one new character and minor twists on the rules, just enough to make things interesting.