Another point in the shift in how Magical Girl shows worked, and more importantly, who they were marketed to.
The Studio Pierrot Magical Girl shows, and their imitators, had established the girl who turns into an adult element of the Magical Girl genre. Well, here that is flipped on its head and we have an (almost) adult woman trapped in the body of a child. A gimmick we last saw in the repellent Rizelmine.
And it’s kind of based on Gainax’s Princess Maker series of games.
However, Gainax were making it for NHK, so it’s not the tawdry otaku-bait you might think it was from its heritage. While Magical Girl shows had an adult male audience already, here I think we start to see the shows deliberately taking that into account, while still making the show “safe” for the original audience. It is a weird situation, which produces a few fascinatingly bad ideas for shows later in the decade.