what the fuck happened to me man
I think it was like. August, or so. This anime game keeps popping up on my internet pages. My friend begins to post about. Horses. I dip my toe in as a joke, as a lost bet, and then suddenly.
The affliction begins.
What do you mean I'm growing to like this. What do you mean the gameplay is locking me in. What do you MEAN THIS GAME IS ANYTHING MORE THAN WAIFU GACHA SLOP WHAT THE FUCK
I hate it. I LOVE it.
I've been playing it basically daily since then, and while I usually only write my thoughts about games after I've beaten them or beaten my little conditions, this doesn't really fall into it, but I feel like it'd do myself a disservice to NOT talk about it like the other games I've played this year.
Visual novel roguelike. Never in my life did I think that would be a type of game that exists, yet here we are. When you choose a horse (I know they are called Umamusume or Umas, but I just find it WAY funnier to just call them horses), your job is to train them over a 3 year period, picking 1 of 5 stat training things to make their numbers go up, or to send them to different races. Each horse has specific goal races to meet and place properly, or you fail the run. Between all of this though, is story events and random events where you not only get dialogue, but different stats, skills, or effects on your horse's mood which affects how they train and run and so on. On top of that are support cards, which you make a deck out of to give your horse extra events, skills, and boosts during training to really specialize them and help them grow. There's also different career types that add on extra gameplay modifiers on top of the base gameplay, but we only have one bonus mode right now in the global game, so I don't know what the others are like yet.
This is already pretty fun, as any roguelike is. Number go up is great! But what adds on extra sauce to really fuel the machine is what happens after. When you finish your horse career, you get to use who you've made to build your own team to race against other people in the Team Trials mode, or to give a new base to whatever next horse you decide to train. This is awesome cause you have more of a goal beyond just make it to the end: I want to push further and further, and the better I get, the easier it gets to reach those higher heights, and it fuels itself. I really like how this works. Generally.
My personal hell exists in sparks. When you complete a career, in order to exist as a "parent" for your next run, they get these different things to pass down called sparks. These increase your next horse's stats, affinities, or give them hints towards skills. They are also totally random, and despite the best career ever where you make the fastest horse in the world, the game will decide to make this horse's legacy to pass on their abominable test scores and brain. WHY. Well, I know why, cause it's a live service gacha game with PVP so engagement and being active is important so RNG makes longer. Grumble.
Anyways. It's a very low energy game. You select buttons, or the right dialogue option, and you MAYBE watch a race (which has revealed to me and many others how actually exciting horse racing is when you have stakes in the race), which I appreciate and need sometimes. I think my one complaint about the actual career itself, not the after the fact stuff, is that they take a while. But thinking about it, I think that's tied to the after the fact stuff, cause why else am I speeding through a career if not to get better sparks or to work on a horse for Team Trials?
So. Visual novel roguelike was already enough to make my time in Umamusume actually enjoyable. But on top of that? The writing in this game is GENUINELY outstanding. I have legitimately laughed out loud or actually shed tears at this stupid anime horse girl game, SOMEHOW.
When you have a large cast of characters, it's very easy to have them distilled down to a couple tropes. This is the funny one. This is the absent minded one. This is the hungry one. This is the pervert one. So on and so on whatever; and on the surface, the Umas COULD fall into this. But when you delve into their stories, you tend to find a little... more?
Since all of them are based off real racehorses, they follow the actual careers of those horses and their jockeys, which is already a dramatic story, so it translates really well into telling a story in the game. It hits the low points of failure or rejection, it hits the high points of success and overcoming trials, it actually gives these characters more than just a couple traits to exist on. Sure, not all of them hit, but I'd say it generally has like, an 85%-90% success ratio in at least making you care a LITTLE bit, if not absolutely adoring the horse when you're done.
But then of course beyond the heartfelt, the humor in the game really is good. I think some of that comes up to a great translation; the way that some of the characters speak can bring joy themselves with modern slang or verbal typing quirks, somehow. A lot of the scenes you'll read are very slice of life anime flavored, so you get a lot of good character interactions bouncing off each other. Which, as I type this, makes me realize:
A lot of comedy bits in anime I dislike tend to come from deplorable behavior without much redemption. You don't root for the person. But here, I feel like generally all of the Umas are pretty likeable? Your mileage may vary of course. I won't say I like EVERYONE but it's an overall success. I think because they have that real life basis, there's a need to pay respect to the real history, so you can't just make a horrible character. This leads to likeable characters, which leads to more enjoyable interactions. It's a kind of cycle of positive fuel, or something.
This is of course a Styrm game post, so I can't talk about the writing of a character-based game without talking about:
There's. A lot. A literal ever growing cast that continues to get bigger even as we speak (Japan just got Stay Gold, who I can't believe I have to wait 1 umillion years for). With that said, I'm not gonna go through EVERYONE, but some of my stand out highlights. Before that, a nice little tier based ranking I've prepared for exactly this purpose because I LOVE sorting things into categories:
(I'm not gonna rank someone if I don't own them and haven't played through their career, cause that's not really a fair judge)
Those are my absolute favorites, but just to comment on some others:
It's a lot. I could honestly probably keep going, but I need to at least pretend that I want to keep these posts within reasonable length. But I hope that going through these examples kinda shows how the writing of this game actually hits some real points and is deeper than just "haha anime girl" (it is sometimes that I won't deny), and tends to have an overarching theme of reaching your own goals, being your true self, breaking out of the chains that might hold you back. It's really positive and uplifting. Not to mention, they all have ridiculous horse names??? And despite that I can still get invested??? THEY CALL MY FAVORITE GIRL "THE" HOW DOES THAT NOT HOLD IT BACK FROM BEING AMAZING
I'm really excited for some future not yet playable characters, or currently playable characters that I don't own but got to see their intro story. Gold City seems like someone who wants to prove herself beyond just her looks; Tosen Jordan has a surprisingly deep hit of insecurity. I actually trust this writing team to make a good arc of a character that I don't think I'd care about, or to take a character I appreciate on the surface, and to make them deeper. Nakayama Festa looks cool as fuck, what's beyond that gambler archetype??
The absolute strangest part of this universe is that not only do these horses have to like, be athletes and students, but that they're also... idols???? It's the weirdest part of this game and I'll admit even now I'm not COMPLETELY sold on it, but I have to admit those songs have really grown on me, especially with the right singers. Most of the soundtrack is just instrumental remixes of the sung idol concert songs, but they're all earworms in their own way. Special shoutouts to the absolute BOP that is the summer camp theme.
I've been saying for a while that Umamusume would be my game of the year if it wasn't for one thing. This damned game is a gacha, and it entirely holds it back from being perfect. Despite my hypocritical partaking of them, I do believe gachas are horrible and the practice should be killed off entirely. It really really sucks that I have to depend on RNG and the possibility of real money to see a new story that's probably really good, or to keep up with that meta of going against other people (which luckily isn't my primary goal nor do I care about being #1). Not to mention support cards, which are basically required for getting anywhere in life, yet are the most miserable things to level up and max out BECAUSE it's a gacha system.
I get that it's the culture, it's successful, and in a way it's what allows this game to continue delivering the things that I actually like about it, but I firmly believe the world would be perfect if the system didn't exist. Every day I long for an offline version of this game where I can just play through a career, or something.
I'm probably just as surprised as you are that I'm this into this kind of a game. It's definitely not immune to the usual curses and ridiculousness of anime gacha game; but man, despite that, it still manages to shine as something special and touch my heart, and beyond even THAT I can get a lot of more surface level enjoyment of humor and enjoying the ridiculousness that is this fictional world they've created.
I also just, really appreciate the love and care that's gone into this game and the real life history that's inspired it. I know that I'm certainly not the only one that's looked into the inspirations behind all this and actually started to understand the real sport (did you watch that recent Japan Cup? Fucking hilarious); I honestly want to find a way to appreciate the American end of horse racing more someday, but my brain's got a lot going on so maybe I'll just stick with my anime bullshit.
I'm very excited for future content; to see how the writing of the game evolves, to learn more about these characters that are right now on the side, and to have more shakeups to an already solid formula of gameplay. (also to listen to some of those later songs have you HEARD Tracen Ondo or Ms Victoria they go INSANE actually)
9/10. It might be gacha bullshit, but it has a gameplay loop that's addicting and unique, with unexpectedly outstanding writing all wrapped up in a ridiculous, horse shaped bow.