Hashire, hashire, U... Uma!
This right here was a gift game from my good friend MegaFreak400 (shoutouts). He needed other people to appreciate this game with its banger soundtrack and clever combination of game types. I needed a little game to pick up in the midst of a bunch of daily check ins to spice up entertainment, and so with that, here we are!
I first described this game as one of those games that just kinda does one thing. Like think about Tetris, Dig Dug, Pac-Man, something like that. Those games do one thing, you do that one thing over and over and over again. This is not a bad thing, nor a good thing, it just is.
This game's One Thing is horse racing + solitaire. It's absolutely crazy how well they combined the two concepts. Solitaire is solitaire. You can make crazy combos of cards and it's cool. But they give you a timer based on your horse's mood. The difficulty is based on how close to your horse's ideal positioning you are. The better you do the more of a buff your horse gets in the homestretch + mood and stamina management. It's actually really cool how well it works together. The actual horse racing has other bits too, like deciding where to position yourself during the race, or actually controlling your horse during the final homestretch which adds a bit more action into the surprisingly intense pacing of this solitaire game. I also can't confirm this, but I swear the harder races give you more difficult boards of solitaire to clear with worse luck. It really makes you feel outclassed, somehow.
This is what you're gonna be doing. Over and over and over again. You run your horse through its lifetime running races, winning different grades of trophies depending on how good you do, and eventually breeding your retired horses with each other to make new horses to do the same thing again. It's a great formula. Though personally I will admit I was burnt out by the end, and was kinda like "ok I'm a little sick of solitaire", but I don't think that's a bad thing for a One Thing game, you're gonna wanna move on eventually and that's ok, and if I ever wanna come back it's got plenty of space to work on.
I think one of the things that I really don't care for is the lifemap and winning trophies. Depending on what races you win or don't win, you're kinda forced into the next race. This sucks when you want to collect the GIII and GII trophies, cause you kinda have to throw to make it to those? Especially when you're in year 4+ and the whole thing is "lose 3 races and you're forced to retire", having to lose to make progress feels bad.
The other bit that irritated me more often than not was horse's base skills. As you level them up, they get actually useful skills, but those initial things generally feel more useless than not. Like a lot of the ones I encountered were positioning based charge skills, but it was so hard to actually get into those positionings, so it kinda just felt like "if you're lucky you get a power boost".
When you first start the game, you are greeted by the fact that you, a really terrible jockey with dreams of the Derby, are (very nearly) killed in a horse accident. Holy shit, what the fuck. You meet an angel who loves to gamble on the races who brings you back to life, on the condition that you attain your dream, or else you get sent to Heck for eternal dangnation. (you then say that your dream is to one day play catch with your son who loves you and would never be mean to you). The angel, knowing you're hopeless at racing, gives you the power to be as good at racing as you are at solitaire (the only hobby you really have), and lo, you are revived.
All this to say, absolutely wild introduction from a cute horse racing game made by fucking Game Freak of all things (did I mention Game Freak made this). The "plot" of this game (which really is just a catalyst reason to justify solitaire horse racing) covers some absolutely out of left field topics in an extremely funny wrapping of writing. This doesn't go away. This whole game is hilarious. As you race different horses, you get to meet the different owners, all with their own backstories and personalities, all way more detailed than they really needed to be, so making progress does feel like a joy when you get to be rewarded with comedy gold.
The last two characters are Truman and Richie, but to be perfectly honest in my journey to collect trophies, I didn't actually get to interact with them much at all. Truman's a game developer, and Richie's a delinquent type. Their owned horses never aligned with my goals much, so I can't comment on them, but knowing this game, they're probably just as entertaining as the others.
Other than being funny, these bits of dialogue are also good knowledge of the horse racing world, which leads into my next segment of thoughts-.
Obviously before playing this game I got struck with the Umamusume virus, which proceeded into me gaining knowledge on the horse racing scene (mostly Japanese) that I don't think I ever would have gained before. I think this was great, cause it allowed me to appreciate some of those horse-flavored details that I wouldn't have picked out before, really showing me how much of a labor of love this game was.
Like I said, the bits of dialogue give you some information into how some of the world of horse racing works, like what a clocker is, or what farms do, or what an owner's role in the horse's life is. You get to learn what graded races are, and with my super limited knowledge recognizing the important bits, I can only assume that this stuff is in fact accurate.
The races you can participate in (at least the GIs) actually match up with IRL Japanese equivalents, even if they're under slightly different names. I could point out the Triple Crown and Triple Tiara, I noticed the Tenno Shos (called Equinox Cups), the Arima Kinen was the All-Star Cup, the Japan Cup was the International Cup, and so on. I really enjoyed being able to spot real life reflected into this game.
There's also horse names. God I love racehorse names they're so fucking stupid (half the fun of this game was seeing other horse names/making my own). But to actually tie this into this section's theming, your very first horse's pedigree reveals that they're a descendant of Saturday Silence; AKA Sunday Silence, who was EVERYONE'S dad among big famous Japanese racehorses, so like, OF COURSE it would be him LMFAO. I got to notice other real life inspired names, like Special Weak or Brian's Thyme. Nobody would really care about the pedigree of fake horses, but the fact that there was actual mirroring of real life in there shows you the level of detail they went into and didn't need to.
This game's soundtrack is incredible. This was of course, from the same hands as Pokémon, which doesn't have a bad song, and that really continues onto here. Some of those big GI songs are gonna live in my head. The soundtrack uses a lot of the same sounds as Sword and Shield, which made me really happy cause I love that game's OST.
Pocket Card Jockey is not a complicated game. There's really not much to it. But what is there is super charming and surprisingly well put together.
I mentioned off hand that Game Freak made this game. After also watching Mega (shoutouts) play Little Town Hero, a game that wasn't perfect but had some cool ideas, I'm really realizing how underappreciated their non-Pokémon projects are. Game Freak really was destined to be a fun small indie company that sadly suffers from success of being the creator of the biggest media franchise fucking ever. I wish more people would appreciate these little games, cause you can tell through these that those developers aren't lazy, they have a lot of good ideas in there, they just can't keep up with the ravenous masses.
Again, it also really helps that I've suddenly become horsepilled (The fucking Preakness Stakes were gonna happen near me and I missed them because I'm POOR!), so I got to enjoy this game in a light that a lot of others wouldn't.
I may have felt the burnout due to the repetition at the end, but that doesn't really change this:
8/10. A hilariously written game that expertly combines two worlds you wouldn't think could go anywhere near each other.