User blog comment:Aijihi/When old animes haunt newer ones/@comment-25034020-20161018044059/@comment-27636373-20161018135732

I won't really call Heartcatch "dark", since it doesn’t do that much to try and “break the mold” in a way meant to break your heart because of how messed up everything suddenly is. But you do have a point; this year alone there's two ‘darker’ magical girl animes. One where a magical girl fights Nazis with all the grit of actual war going on around her, and another I haven't seen yet, but I hear might be even worse from what a friend has told me.

In my opinion the first part of the series is much better than the latter part  when the plot actually starts mattering. The stand-alone episodes can be really powerful but expect literally everything to be sad (epically on in particular WHY). Just know later on when the plot starts going that I personally thought it started getting really pretentious and going up its own butt with metaphors and symbolism to the point that the very end was a mess that didn't make much sense to me other than to drive in the metaphor they were harping on those last few episodes. Still a good watch at the start, but when it starts dipping in quality, well...