Grief Syndrome Review

Before we get this review started, let me just say that I freakin' love Puella Magi Madoka Magica. I collect the merch, read the manga, and watched all the movies. So when I heard there was a Madoka video game, I was obviously excited. I couldn't play the official ones, sadly, so I went to the next best thing: fan games. That's when I discovered Grief Syndrome.


Description
Grief Syndrome is a fanmade game by a Japanese doujin group Twilight Frontier (They're the same people who created the Touhou fighting games). It is a side-scrolling beat-'em-up based on the anime series known as Puella Magi Madoka Magica. You play as the main protagonists of the show: Madoka, Homura, Sayaka, Kyoko, and Mami. Your main enemies are the witches, monsters born out of despair. There are 5 bosses and one secret boss. Despite the game being Japanese, many things are in English, so it is easy for an English speaker to play the game, even without translation

Plot, Characters, and Writing
No score; this is a completely gameplay based game. It is recommended that you watch\read the source material before playing, as there are spoilers.

Graphics, Music, and Art

The sprites are wonderfully composed. They highly resemble the original show, to the point that it almost looks official. You can tell that was a lot of work to make the witches and their stages look as show accurate as possible. The protagonists, on the other hand, look a bit too bland.
The music is good, too. While not as great as the original, Grief Syndrome's music tries it hardest. None the music is nice enough to be considered "awesome", but it is pretty catchy and memorable.

Gameplay, Mechanics, and Controls

The controls are simple enough for a beginner to learn and complex enough for more advanced players. There is not much to say about them, except you can change at anytime

The controls from the PMMM Wiki

The gameplay involves you picking your character and fighting baddies (known as familiars) while going through quirky worlds before fighting the witches.  Defeating these cause your character of choice to level up, strengthening their HP, Power, and Soul Limit each time until they reach level 99 or die. Once you've killed all the bosses, a new lap starts. The higher the lap, the tougher the baddies!
 Every character has an HP bar and a Soul Limit. However, when your HP is at 0, you don't "die". Rather, you're revived and can go back fighting enemies. This takes up soul limit. You are automatically healed by the game, but this also takes up Soul Limit. Once you run out of Soul Limit, your character permanently dies until you start all over again

Now this all fine and dandy. I'm okay with this. Unfortunately, they are some problems.
First of all, they are some character imbalances. Sayaka is most notable, being way stronger than she was in the show. Secondly, there are a lot of annoying enemies, such as the Adelberts in Gertrud's labyrinth (Because the white ones transform into hard to block vines). The gameplay gets tedious and boring after the 3rd lap. All this, plus the several different endings you can get
was just too repetitive for my tastes.More witches would have been a better thing because, as I said before, the gameplay just gets too stale and adding a few more canon witches (Hell, maybe a few fan made ones as well!) sprinkled here and there would be fine.

Conclusion-Should You Play It?
While Grief Syndrome was a very enjoyable game, it may get a bit repetitive later on. Overall, it is a nice love letter to the series and is good for casual play here and there.

Download Link
Download it here (You will needWinRAR to open it.)