The Horse Girl Gacha Game That’s Taking The Internet By Storm
If, like me, you’ve noticed an uptick in anime girls with horse ears running around your social media timeline, you might be confused as to what the hell is going on. The game causing all this commotion, my friends, is Umamusume: Pretty Derby, a gacha game that has finally made its way to the West after originally launching in Japan back in 2021. The game is based on the titular media franchise in which racehorses are reincarnated as literal horse girls who do what racehorses do best, just as bipedal humans with horse ears on their heads. Given that there are dozens of horse girls in the series, the premise is ripe for a gacha game in which people gamble to unlock their favorite. But what do you do when you’ve got them? The same thing you’d do with a regular racehorse, of course: train them to be the very best.
Like a lot of people, I had never heard of Umamusume Pretty Derby before the game’s launch in this part of the world last week. Despite its preposterous premise, the game plays its horse girl races pretty straight and with the kind of gusto and earnest determination you’d expect from any sports anime. As the girls run around the track, there’s spirited commentary, rivalries, and narratives unfolding. If I didn’t see that the girls had horse ears on their heads, I wouldn’t know it wasn’t just a straightforward racing show. Well, at least I wouldn’t until after the girls have crossed the finish line, at which point they put on an idol concert for a crowd of adoring fans. Sure, pop off, queens.
After Umamusume draws you in with all the glitz and glamour, it does what every one of these games does and bombards you with menus, currencies, and random drops. When I started to navigate these abundant, colorful menus, they crashed my iPhone 12. Maybe it’s time for an upgrade. Wait, is the horse girl gacha game going to get me to an AT&T store to join modern times? What an odd turn of events.
Anyway, these random drops come in two forms: trainees and support cards. The former are the actual horse girls you’ll be training; the rest are supplementary cards that will give your primary character a boost. Each horse girl has a career that, once completed, allows them to be registered as a Veteran Umamusume and Legacy character, in order to grant stat boosts and other perks to other characters. So you can see how the grind feeds into itself and incentivizes you to train several racers rather than just your favorites.
When you get set up in your career, parts of the game feel more like playing with a digital pet than I expected. Each girl has different goals, requiring different training regimens to make progress in their story. You’ll also monitor their energy levels, interact with other students at the horse girl academy, and eventually, you’ll send her off to the races. The only real input you get into the competitions themselves is the training you put your horse girl through and the game plan you give her ahead of time. You can make some strategic decisions, like telling her to prioritize pacing herself instead of sprinting like her life depends on it, but the optimal strat is determined by the stats she’s gained through training ahead of races, Ultimately, your goal is to set her up for success; if you were hoping for a more direct racing game, you will not find that here.
All that being said, there’s potential here for some real sicko grinding and optimizing your racer’s stats, especially as you import legacy characters to boost those attributes and collect support cards through drops. It can make going through the careers feel almost like a rogue-like run in which you try to figure out the best build to claim victory. I see the various hooks Umamusume has lowered into the sea, and while I know the kind of people who gravitate towards these kinds of games might bite, I don’t know if the bait is quite to my liking, personally. I still find its barrage of mechanics and menus overwhelming, though, and there isn’t much else here pulling me in, so I don’t think I’ll be staring into the abyss long enough to get caught up in the gacha mechanics here. Gacha games are all about risk and reward, and I don’t think its wacky concept is enough reward for the risk of opening myself to gambling.
After spending a couple of hours with Umamusume, its bizarre premise seems to be the most compelling thing it has going for it. It’s got plenty of the drawbacks of other gacha games on the market: full of currencies that you can purchase for ungodly amounts of real-world money, rewards incentivizing you to log in every day, enough menus to overstimulate anyone who dares to install it, and character design so generic I couldn’t identify any of these girls in a line-up with a gun to my head. Lucky for it, the thing that makes it stand out is a memetic absurdist premise that helps it pierce through the oversaturated gacha market. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s just silly enough to catch the eye of those who aren’t usually paying attention. Huge streamers like Ludwig and Northernlion are playing it, so it’s broken the barrier and reached huge concurrent numbers on Steam alone. Shoutout to horse girls. Y’all haven’t had a win this good since Barbie Horse Adventure.
