This is going to make me sound like an old man, but I have fond memories of going to horse racing tracks! Seeing hundreds of people cram into a stadium to watch trained horses run around a large circle was surprisingly captivating, and the atmosphere near the end of each race was electrifying! With how positive of an impression it left on me, I’m grateful this didn’t lead me to developing a horse betting addiction! …but what if it did? And what if the motivation to trigger it was by turning the horses into anime girls!? Well, Umamusume: Pretty Derby is that concept brought to life!
Umamusume: Pretty Derby is a gacha game developed and published by Cygames. They’re no strangers to gacha games, as Cygames previously released the immensely successful mobile game, Granblue Fantasy. This new game is one that’s been a long time coming, as it was originally released in Japan back in 2021. Since then, the Umamusume franchise has become a gigantic hit, and it’s now finally available to play worldwide! Was it worth the wait or should it have been brought back to the stables?
Story
Umamusume: Pretty Derby is set in the real world, only with one key difference: horses don’t exist… technically. The souls of famous racehorses from our world have reincarnated into a cross between a girl and a horse, or an Uma for short. Still with me? It gets weirder… These Uma can enrol in a specially-designed school for them called Tracen Academy. This not only gives them an education, but also allows them to participate in specially designed races that take advantage of their heightened physical ability and stamina called The Twinkle Series. Not only can the Uma participate in races for fame and glory, but the winners then perform a live musical act in a similar style to Japanese idols! Did you get all that? I sure hope so, because it’s going to be on the test later!
On the surface, this premise sounds like the most absurd thing you could possibly imagine! When I first heard of Umamusume, I was utterly baffled by it and completely wrote it off. But here’s the craziest thing of all: It actually works! The Japanese horse racing scene is much larger than you might expect, and Cygame didn’t just implement this theme, utilise moe anthropomorphism techniques, and called it a day. Every single Uma is based on a real horse; down to their design, personality, and even their gender being signified by an ornament on their ear. That’s the kind of appreciation for the sport I can truly admire!
As for the game’s actual story, Umamusume currently only has one main story arc: the URA Finale. The chairman of Tracen Academy is a young girl named Yayoi Akikawa. She announces this new competition to allow every Uma the chance to shine in all kinds of race types and distances! This main story is intertwined within the arc of the Uma you’ve selected to train, eventually leading to them participating in the URA Finale if you manage to train them well enough.
While this arc is fun to see unfold and delves into Yayoi’s earnest love for the sport, one campaign may not sound like much at launch. However, using the Japanese release as a reference, more story campaigns will be added to the game in the future, allowing opportunities to introduce new characters and expand the world further!
As for the stories of the Uma you select, they vary dramatically! Some of them are plots I got really invested in, such as Vodka’s goal to win the Japanese Derby after being motivated by her father, while also dealing with her everlasting rival: Daiwa Scarlet. Others feel like they never really get going, such as Mayano Top Gun’s motivation to become an adult while wanting to inspire Narita Brian, a senior student at Tracen Academy.
Regardless of the quality of a character’s story, what’s really neat is that they feel somewhat modular depending on your performance. I can’t tell you how soul crushing it was when I lost the Japanese Derby while playing Vodka! What made it worse was the fact it was all my fault because I didn’t properly train her! Being responsible for whether or not your Uma’s goals are achieved has led to some of the most engaging storytelling I’ve experienced this year! Not bad for a game who’s main draw is cute horse girls that’re also pop idols!
One issue some people may have is that story sequences often repeat, especially because the URA Finale segments remain the same across each Uma’s story. While I’ll explain why you’d want to replay the campaign a little later, this is definitely a game where you’ll need to go through the story more than once. Thankfully, the game has a Quick Mode feature which allows you to abridge the story of the URA Finale if you’ve already experienced it. This can also be applied to an Uma’s own personal story if you’re training them again.
There’s even a skip button that just lets you fast-forward through everything. If you’re worried you’ll miss a story segment you haven’t seen before, Cygames have got you covered! There’s a toggleable option that prevents new story moments from being skipped when you’ve turned on the fast-forward option. I’m really grateful this quality of life feature was implemented, especially considering the game’s design! Speaking of, let’s talk about it!
Gameplay
At its core, Umamusume: Pretty Derby is a gacha game, but that’s selling it somewhat short. The game’s mechanics revolve around a roguelite gameplay loop mixed with a visual novel; a combination that works extremely well!
After selecting your Uma, it’s up to you to train them across their time at Tracen Academy, which takes around three years in-universe. Each Uma can be trained in five different stats: Speed, Stamina, Power, Guts, and Wit. Each Uma has specific racing preferences, such as ones that are proficient at long races or ones that excel at being at the front of the pack. Depending on what your Uma is best at, you’ll need to increase specific stats through training to allow them to take advantage of them, which in turn, will lead to them winning more races!
The challenge comes from the game’s turn-based time system. Each action takes up a turn, so if you want to increase an Uma’s speed through training, you’ll need to use a turn. It isn’t that simple though, as your Uma has a stamina bar that decreases when training or participating in non-story races. The lower their stamina, the more likely your Uma will fail at training, so you’ll need to take a turn for them to recover.
Then there’s the mood mechanic which highlights how your Uma is feeling. If she’s happy, she’ll gain boosted stats during training and will perform better in races. If you fail at training or are unlucky enough to have a random event that sours their mood, the opposite will happen. You can spend a turn to improve her mood or leave it up to chance and hope a random event will make her feel better.
Lastly, there’s the ailments. If your Uma gets a negative ailment, you’ll need to spend a turn to heal it to prevent your run potentially being ruined. Sometimes, you’ll gain a positive ailment, so it’s not just a hindering mechanic!
But why even train an Uma in the first place? After finishing a campaign, their stats are saved and can then be used in other game modes. If you want to improve your run, any improvements to your Uma’s stats are recorded in a different slot. Your efforts are absolutely worth it, as a different Uma can then be influenced by two previously-built Uma to pass on their stat growths and even abilities to use mid-race! This, in turn, will lead them becoming even stronger and this process repeats ad infinitum.
All the mechanics within Umamusume: Pretty Derby work in harmony with each other and help add weight to your decisions! This is especially prevalent when you have an important race coming up and have to plan ahead. There are even events such as a Summer training segment that grants boosted stats, but you’ll need enough stamina to take advantage of it, which the game thankfully reminds you to do. You can even participate in non-story races to increase your number of fans, which is pivotal to levelling up your Uma’s ultimate ability, while also gaining skill points to unlock skills.
On that note, let me introduce the final piece of the puzzle: Skill Cards! Before each run, you can equip up to six skill cards; one of which belongs to another player you can borrow a strong card from. Each card is tailor-made to improve a specific stat, which is where the build crafting comes in. Want to focus purely on speed? Equip a bunch of speed cards! Need to ensure an Uma can break through the pack effectively? Put on a power card or two! Want a means to ensure skills are more frequently performed in a race? Add some Wit cards!
Speaking of skills, each card is equipped with a list of skills which can be learned during your runs. Each card also comes with new story sequences based around that character, who will also grant bonus stats and are how you unlock their skills you can buy for your Uma. Specific skills can only activate depending on the racing preferences of your Uma, so it’s up to you to build a deck that’ll take advantage of their playstyle. Finally, you can level up these card’s friendship levels in a run. If you train with them after reaching 80% of their friendship gauge, you’ll gain even more bonus stats to make your Uma even stronger!
When putting this all together, it can be incredibly addicting to train an Uma and experiment with crafting a build that works best for them! Seeing your Uma naturally grow and perform better in races is extremely gratifying, because it’s all due to your decisions! You built them up to succeed and that sense of accomplishment feels so rewarding!
The drawback is that luck often plays a role. Sometimes, you’ll get extremely unlucky and constantly get negative story events that drop your Uma’s mood, so you’ll need to spend a turn to bring it back up. However, there’s a chance an event that boosts their mood will directly follow it, so it feels like you just wasted a turn, and that can be annoying! Just because a Skill Card has a skill you want, that doesn’t automatically guarantee you’ll get the chance to unlock it for your Uma, requiring you to do another run to hopefully get the skills you want.
The stats that can influence other Umas are also completely random, so if you want someone who can pass on powerful traits, you’ll need to regularly do multiple runs in the hopes of getting lucky. Some may find all of this too taxing to try and manage, but I wouldn’t pay it much mind, as this will only be important if you want Umas who are built to compete within the game’s meta. Considering you’ll also need to dip into the gacha system to take advantage of this, it wasn’t really that much of a concern for me.
But I’ve gone on this long without even talking about the races themselves, which, alongside the characters, is what I consider to be the main draw of Umamusume: Pretty Derby! Your Uma participates in races with other Umas as you see them literally run out of a gate onto a track. The way your Uma will race will determine where they excel. So, if you pick an Uma who’s better at longer races into a short sprint, they’re not going to perform at their best.
Now, this is no lie: I haven’t been this hyped up when playing a game in years! The level of anticipation seeing your Uma reach the final corner with a mix of fear and excitement is something not many games can accomplish, and this happens in virtually every race! This is amplified when the racing tracker that shows your Uma’s position disappears in the final stretch and you only have the race itself to work off. As stated earlier, each Uma has an ultimate ability that activates in a race if certain conditions are met. Seeing them perform this ability could completely change the outcome, so they’re a joy to see activated every time! The final cherry on top are the racing commentators. They increasingly get more excited as the race goes on and it reaches a fever pitch by the end, and that excitement is very infectious and greatly amplifies the moment!
After winning a race, you’re rewarded with your Uma performing the main role in a choreographed idol song sequence. I’ll admit this is not my thing in the slightest, so I regularly skipped them. But if you do find this appealing, you’ll be happy to learn that you can access these within the main menu and can even replay any of the songs within the menus.
That’s what I like quite a lot about Umamusume: You can adjust the experience to your own preferences! If you don’t want to bother with the story or dialogue, you can just activate Quick Mode and skip it to get back to raising your Uma. Don’t care about the song performances? You can skip them without hassle. And if, for whatever reason, you don’t want to watch a race, you can skip all of them too so you can see the results.
Game Modes
After raising an Uma, just how do you go about using them? That’s where the Race mode comes in! In Team Trials, you’re able to build a team of Umas to go up against other players as you rise the ranks. Each slot determines the kind of race they’ll participate in, such as a long race, a short race, a race on a dirt, track, etc. Depending on how high the score you get is, you’ll go up in ranks and get premium currency. You also have Daily Races to get consumables to increase the levels of your Skill Cards, as well as Race Events that occasionally will go live.
Sometimes, an in-game event will be active where you can get plenty of items, premium currency, and event exclusive Skill Cards. You can accomplish the quests in either campaign mode or the race mode, encouraging you to play them at least once a day, which keeps you motivated to come back. If you want an easier time progressing your account, playing these modes are just the ticket to do so!
As you train Umas, their Bond Level increases and grants you access to their character stories. Other than a one-time reward of premium currency, these can easily be skipped, but are available if you want to experience a new story for your favorite characters! While all of this can be incredibly overwhelming at first, you soon come to terms with the kinds of rewards you can get and how to progress your account. That being said, some of the higher levels of Skill Cards and increasing the skills of your Umas take up a ton of resources.
In the early game, this isn’t much of an issue as the game gives out a plentiful amount of them for free to get you started. But when they dry up, you’ll need to grind and the amount you get per day isn’t that much. This is a free game after all; one which recommends you spend a short amount of time each day to do your daily tasks. Despite this, the small amount of daily rewards you get will make some players think they can’t make progress at a satisfying rate and will likely lose patience with Umamusume! Honestly, I can’t exactly blame them.
Gacha System
But now comes the elephant in the room: the gacha system. I’ve been playing gacha games for almost a decade and I’ve seen the highs and lows of this genre’s monetization systems. So, where does Umamusume fall in that spectrum? Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s not great. Let’s break it down!
There are two types of banners (pools of available obtainables): ones for getting new Umas to play as and another for collecting Skill Cards. If you get duplicate Umas, you can use the stars obtained from them to raise their star level, thereby granting them more bonuses. Whereas getting copies of Skill Cards allows you to uncap them to raise their level higher and increase their effectiveness.
The issues come in with the pity system. For those unaware, a pity system in a gacha game is when you pull enough on a banner and are guaranteed the chase character or item, which is a limited obtainable heavily promoted on the banners. For instance, in Honkai Star Rail, you have a chance to soft pity at 30 pulls, and if you fail to get it then, you go to hard pity at around 80 pulls. This then guarantees you’ll get a five-star character but have a 50/50 chance to not get the one you want. What this means is that to 100% guarantee the chase banner, you’ll need to pull at least 160 times.
How many pulls are required to guarantee a chase item in Umamusume? 200 pulls with no soft pity system to speak of… not off to a strong start, are we? But wait! It gets worse!
Some gacha games carry over the amount of pulls you’ve done on a banner onto a new banner or provide a consumable item you can use to get the new banner character/item you want, such as in Goddess of Victory: NIKKE. Umamusume doesn’t do either of these things! If you happen to pull 180 times on a banner and it closes, that’s too bad! Your pull progression is reset and you get items called Clovers that sadly don’t provide worthwhile rewards for the amount of pulls you put into getting them.
All this does is promote a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) mindset and could lead to someone potentially spending hundreds of dollars just to get one copy of an Uma they want! What makes it worse is that premium currency isn’t that easy to come by the further you get into the game, encouraging you to spend money. I understand that’s part of what makes it a gacha game, but it seems extremely egregious in this case!
Presentation
Originally starting off as a mobile exclusive title, Umamusume is now available to play on PC, so don’t expect it to be a visual powerhouse. Even so, Umamusume looks really nice!
All of the characters are visually distinct and all emote wonderfully; adding to their individuality! This is elevated through the character designs; all of which perfectly capture their personality with just a glance. You’re sure to find some favorites among this massive cast of distinct Umas!
The game runs at around 30fps, even on PC. There aren’t many options to fully customize the performance, as it’s clear they just brought the options over from the mobile version. Not a deal breaker by any means, but the UI elements all move at 60fps, so it’s a little odd that the 3D assets don’t share this level of performance.
Outside of the characters, most of the attention was put into the animations, and it shows! All the animations when training your Umas have success and failure versions, all the concerts are choreographed really well, and each three-star character has a unique ultimate animation that look incredible! Even despite the limited visuals, Cygames knew that high-quality animations help make up the difference, and it shows!
As for the audio, it’s a strong showing too! Every Uma has a distinct voice and while they aren’t fully voiced within the campaign mode, they are in the story sequences you can unlock. The game only has Japanese voiceovers, which when you consider the game has already been running for four years in Japan is completely understandable. But here’s the crazy part: You know how if your Uma wins a race, they perform front and center in a song routine? What if I told you that every single Uma has their own vocal track depending on who’s leading the song? That’s an insane amount of work to do for a part of the game some people may have no interest in, but that’s extremely impressive!
The soundtrack is also solid too. Mixing both emotional music tracks with triumphant melodies that match the racing theme. Even the pop idol songs sound nice too, even though I won’t exactly be playing them in the middle of a campaign run.
Verdict
There are so many things going for Umamusume: Pretty Derby! Despite its off-the-wall premise, it has engaging story sequences with memorable characters, well-built roguelite mechanics, and above-average production values for a mobile game. It also helps that the races the game revolves around are always a thrill to watch!
This quality is sadly marred by sluggish progression and an awful gacha system that is less consumer friendly than its contemporaries. But at the end of the day, it’s a free game meant to be played over a prolonged period and the foundation surrounding its monetary system is sturdily built. The fact I’ve already invested over 40 hours into it is proof of this! If you were like me and dismissed the game just off the premise alone, give it a try; you might just end up as a fan!
UMAMUSUME: PRETTY DERBY IS RECOMMENDED
If you would like to see more racing games, you may be interested in our review of Mario Kart World.
The reviewer played Umamusume: Pretty Derby on PC.
An anime/gaming aficionado, experienced content creator and lovable goofball. Name a game genre and Seamus has likely played it… yes, even that one. Follow him @TrueStorySeamus
