Yeah, the first arc (the one that season 1 covers in its entirety, commonly nicknamed “Unmarked” by the MGRP fandom) is the only proper battle-royale story in the series. Restart has elements of a high-stakes game, but it’s less “every girl for herself” and more “Sword Art Online meets Among Us”, lol. The rest of the arcs barely even touch on any death-game elements.
As for any resemblance to more classic dark mahou shoujo narratives… Well, Yuki Yuna (whose original LN released after MGRP’s) borrows a lot of MGRP’s elements, I’d say, so they’re kinda similar in a sense.
In terms of something like Madoka Magica (which seems to be what most think of when they hear “dark mahou shoujo”), I wouldn’t say MGRP ever quite veers into the cosmic-horror aspects or being betrayed by destiny, but the closest arc to Madoka, tonally speaking, would probably be Limited, IMO.
I will say, MGRP doesn’t really aim to be a magical girl story, in the traditional sense, more so than it aims to be a supernatural action/survival series where the protagonists happen to (mostly) be magical girls. But, then, I suppose most dark mahou shoujo series are famous for breaking the mold of traditional magical-girl series, so maybe that’s to be expected, lol.
There is this one delightfully meta exchange of dialogue from volume 5, where two characters are discussing mahou shoujo anime:
“But there are works that have ‘magical girl’ in the title, right?” – Kuru-Kuru Hime
“That’s just having magical girls as a motif. That doesn’t make it a magical-girl story.” – Weddin
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