Uma Musume: Pretty Derby is a run-based horse raising/racing game in the vein of every other horse racing game out there. It's not as deep as the sim games like Winning Post, but there's still a lot to keep track of. Now, as far as I can tell the global audience is barely aware of the horse racing game subgenre or the idol management games that Uma Musume is cribbing from (source: just look at that aftermath article that seems to think there are no real horse racing games out there) so as best I can explain Uma Musume to the people who aren't aware of how it plays: the gameplay is in the style of raising sim games like Princess Maker or Long Live the Queen or Magical Diary or Trillion, where you pick an activity and it raises a stat, and there are events between those choices which further affect your stats and mood and skills. I've seen no less than 3 people asking when the game part starts, seemingly out of a misunderstanding that you might have any control over the horse races like that one Dragon Quest 11 minigame. The horses race automatically and you watch it like you'd watch horse racing on TV. This is typical of horse racing games, but none of those have ever been translated as far as I can tell. koei tecmo please localize winning post.
I don't know what else there is to say about the game. Everything about the game should be repulsive, but I think Cygames is operating at hitherto uncomprehended frequencies. They are so unbelievably bought into the appeal of idols and horse racing, so obsessed with the indomitable triumph of hard work, so absolutely dedicated to overcoming the odds, so committed to making them shine, that it's difficult to not get swept up in it, especially as they've replaced the metaphorical horse race of the idol industry with a literal one.
I made it to group A finals in Gemini Cup and came in third. I think if I'd spent some more time working on improving my uma's power stat I might have been able to do a bit better, but I ended up matched up against some insane S rank 5-star Narita Brian so I don't know that I would have been able to get first. I ended up at third place out of 7387, which is a decent enough result. The placement there is based on the number of opponents the opponents you beat managed to beat in turn, I believe. I'm not sure what I'll do for Cancer Cup. I got a pretty good Seiun Sky for it last night, with Mile S and 1200 speed and 1000 power, but she's missing Groundwork and the green skills for the course, so I think I need to keep working at it. I'll probably need to build a Nice Nature to do debuff work at some point, but I hate doing debuff runs so I'm going to put it off for a while.
On JP I've pretty much been in maintenance mode. I managed to get Believe in four tenners, which was a nice reprieve after having to go to pity for Espoir City. Believe's not as cracked as the last couple of banner umas, but she is cool. I have no idea what I'm going to do for the CM on JP. Lose, probably.
My phone tells me I've been putting in a full-time job's worth of time on Uma Musume this week. On JP I've pretty much finished all the master's challenges except for tier 3 dirt. Cheval Grand (summer) did a pretty good job clearing out long, and Seiun Sky managed to clinch out medium once I stopped trying to run frontrunners that had the Great Escape skill that uses up way more stamina. JP's also announced Espoir City for tonight and she looks crazy good, and also her skills are really strong. I will probably get baited into rolling for her. On NA my Seiun Sky rolls went pretty well and I only had to spend a little bit instead of a lot. I've got three horses I'm pretty confident in for Gemini since I assume the 1200/1000 long S Goldships I'm seeing in test rooms are a minority, considering how many people I've seen struggling to hit the stat thresholds at all. I'll probably start working on Suzuka and Sky and maybe Maruzensky or someone for Cancer Cup. That one should be a bit more interesting since it's actually a matter of getting the right skills instead of just fishing for enough stamina and an okay speed stat.
I ended up coming in second place in Taurus Cup finals on NA. I just got beaten by a better Goldship that was a bit more optimized. It went alright, all told. I've mostly been fucking around on JP since then, gradually chipping away at clearing out the masters challenges while trying to get the carats to get Stay Gold to max limit break. The Fusaichi Pandora they've got in the medium slot is crazy. Reverie said "yeah that pandora is literally like chanme winning tier". I've been trying to throw some of the meta horses at it but my best Chrono Genesis still lost by a length and a half, and my best Still in Love so far lost by three lengths, though there's some room to improve there, since I didn't get Medium S that run, and a few of my support card's event chains didn't finish.
And then NA went and announced that Gemini Cup is going to start two weeks after Taurus Cup ended so I immediately shifted my focus to NA to work on building up my umas there. I got a decent improvement over my previous best Oguri, but no Long S, and just a minute ago I got a pretty solid 1055/923/672/377/357 Taishin with Turf S and Long S and three gold heals that seems to handily beat my 1172/947/703/362/414 Oguri with three gold heals and some good green skills (but no S) in the simulator. I think those two will be my aces for it, provisionally. If I can get Daiwa's Race Planner skill unlocked I think I'll switch to doing some runs with her, since that opens up the possibility of four gold heals in a run, which should make things a lot more consistent. I thought about using Tachyon for the same reason since she gets one more gold heal, but Daiwa fills the same niche and has an ult that might do anything.
I have continued playing Uma Musume. I dug out my old JP account and started playing there again too, after watching all of the anime. Now, since this is my website, I will be writing about the shows for a bit. The short version is that Uma Musume is pretty good on the whole.
The first season was fine enough, but I was more invested in the side characters than Special Week. Seiun Sky is my favorite uma as I've written below, and that's mostly maintained despite some strong competition from some of the other umas I've learned about. A lot of this is just that I like her personality and design a bit more at base, and part of it is learning more about the real horses and developing a growing appreciation for how totally dedicated Seiun Sky's real life owners are to believing in his sire line in spite of results that would make weaker trainers give up. I hope Nishiyama Stud finds some success with Nishino Daisy's line, but it'll probably take a few years to see how that'll start shaking out.
Season 2 of Uma Musume was a pretty marked improvement over the first one, though it helps that Tokai Teio's story has a bit more meat to tear at than Special Week. Like, if I'm comparing it to sumo since that's my one reference point for sports, Hakuho is the best to ever do it and redefined what it meant to be a yokozuna, yes (this comparison is inaccurate, the comparison for hakuho would probably be a horse like tokino minoru or almond eye or something), but Terunofuji's story of falling from the second highest rank in the highest division to the lowest division before climbing all the way back up and reaching the peak has a lot more going on narratively than "the best to ever do it continued to be the best to ever do it for longer than anyone else". Similarly, Teio managing to come back and compete at the highest level after her leg broke multiple times has a bit more going on than Special Week just wanting to be the best and then winning a bunch. Teio's a pretty good main character, as these umas go.
Season 3 was a bit more confused with its characters. I feel like the whole thing and most of the beats would work a lot better with Cheval Grand as the focal character and Kitasan Black as a friendly rival, though I get it. It's hard to read about Kitasan Black and not go "that's a shounen main character". In real life Kitasan Black was an overlooked horse that their owner struggled to sell until a recruiter came over, left, and then couldn't get the way Kitasan Black looked at him out of his head; immediately going back and saying "I need that horse!" or something to that effect. Kitasan Black started out scrawny but he turned out to be remarkably sturdy, working harder than the other horses, doing multiple runs up and down a hill every day that other horses struggled to get up once. Kitasan Black was this relentless gym rat of a horse who was constantly working at becoming stronger, which paid off in his seven G1 wins. After his seventh win, in his prime, they retired him. After his retirement he continued training relentlessly. His trainers tried putting heavier horseshoes on him and this did not slow him down in the slightest, it only made him stronger. He was always working out and challenging the other horses to partner racing. He probably could've won even more. Kitasan Black is just deeply main character coded. Most of his appeal, his tireless desire to improve, is missing in the show. I can only assume it's missing because this character type would not ever just retire in their prime and the writers were trying to wring something coherent out of it. Season 3 improves a bit when it actually starts to show off some parts of how relentlessly determined Kitasan Black really was, and that was also around the point they started giving some of the spotlight to my favorite loser, Cheval Grand. Cheval Grand in real life was a strong competitor who struggled to actually get wins. If you go down the racing records you'll see a lot of second and third place finishes, but only a couple of proper wins in graded races. I think this parallels a bit better with Nice Nature's record, and with how much of Uma season 3 is about Nice Nature giving advice on how to handle losing, I think it would've landed a bit better if she were talking to Cheval Grand than Kitasan Black. On the whole though season 3 ends pretty well. I was completely taken by Cheval Grand, and the reason I started playing the JP version again was because I couldn't wait for her to get to NA and she'd just gotten a summer alt there.
The BNW OVA was just not very good at showing off the appeal of the trio there. Uma Musume is at its best when it's totally fixated on showing off the appeal of the real horses and the OVA here is about a fictional relay race and not based on a real horse race (as far as i know. i dunno maybe it's buried somewhere in the giant 600 page trivia doc.) It really did the trio dirty. pre-emptive edit: I'm checking the trivia doc and there's some rationale to what's going on in the BNW OVA rooted in some minutiae about who won which of the three classic triple crown races, but it is a bit abstracted from the real thing. I wonder if the reaction to this OVA got Cygames to focus more on sticking to being accurate to the real races for Season 2 onwards. That bit in Season 2 where basically everything in Twin Turbo's race down to the camera cuts and the commentary were basically 1:1 with the real race was really great.
The first movie, Road to the Top, is: fine. Narita Top Road's story is a pretty standard sports story about a local kid working hard and becoming a contender, and that's fine. she's fine. Normally I'd be pretty down for this. But. Admire Vega is over there in the corner being haunted by the ghost of her dead twin sister who lives in her skull and TM Opera O is the most flamboyant campy motherfucker I've seen since Valvatorez. It's a little bit hard to focus on the most normal sports story happening right next door to Freak City. The fact that these three are a trio is unhinged.
The second movie, Beginning of a New Era, is much better. Everyone in this cast is a freak, and Agnes Tachyon is freak supreme. Most of the animations people post of Uma Musume come out of this movie. It's great, but
The cap, as in peak, of Uma Musume for now has to be Cinderella Gray. In the same kind of way that putting the spotlight on Tokai Teio in Season 2 gave them a bit more meat to work with, it's pretty much the same with spotlighting an entire series around Oguri Cap, who was singularly responsible for making like an entire generation of horseracing fans in real life. The series is a Cinderella story about this one horse who was plucked from obscurity in regional dirt races and brought to the big leagues, and who became one of the most dominant racers of the era. Oguri is charismatic and charming in a simple kind of way. She eats a lot and gets lost easily. She doesn't understand her opponent's taunts and responds in earnest to everything. She runs because she likes to run, since she couldn't when she was younger. The show left the first cour off right around when the prologue was ending and it was starting to get into the real meat of the rivalry between Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross. Cygames Pictures has been steadily improving their craft over the last few movies and shows so it should be pretty exciting to see what they do with the second cour starting in October.
Gamewise I've just continued working on building my horses. I've mostly got some horses ready for the Champion's Meet on NA, though I could stand to improve my ace by doing some more runs fishing for 1200 speed and Medium S, though the one I have right now is doing pretty well in the simulator. On JP I've been trying to figure out how the later scenarios work. Twinkle Legends has a lot going on, but with how much Design Your Island got buffed and with how much easier it is it's a bit hard to justify reading the 20 pages of online guides going over how to get a decent score in scenario 10 when a bad run in scenario 11 clears it almost effortlessly. Today I tried changing my build order to prioritize Guts and Power over Speed and got a new scenario record of UC7. Previously I was capping out around UC4 or so.
I've also tried playing the party game on console. It's alright. It does its job there, though not quite as well as a Mario Party or Mario Kart.
They got me. I've been playing the global version since it released the other week and it turns out the game's way better when you can read what's going on. I'm still not big on most of the horse's designs and the lobby music is still way too high-energy for my tastes and rolling on the support card banners instead of the character banner still feels bad, but I've always thought the core loop was really solid outside of that, and it's even better when you can read the skill text and make decisions off of that. I've hit the good ending on 21 characters and my team trials squad on week 3 is better than my JP team was when I stopped playing it a few months into the JP release. I whaled the Kitasan Black card to 3 limit breaks and stopped when the amount I'd spent was starting to get a bit too high for my liking. The rates are ass.
None of the trainees currently in the game have really grabbed me yet, though I know Seiun Sky's coming down the pipe in a month or two and she's going to hit my wallet like a truck.
reinstalled uma musume and did my free pulls for anni. eleven hours later i remembered why i dropped uma musume in the first place, mostly having to do with not liking the lobby music, not liking the look of most of the horses, not liking how time-consuming a single run of the training mode is, not liking the PVP, and not liking how you mainly need to roll on the equipment banners instead of the character banners. i will probably give the american version a shot whenever that comes out and drop it within twelve hours as i remember that i do not like the presentation of this game very much.