This summer time, I used to be sitting in my pal’s lounge doing what we name “parallel play,” the place we every take pleasure in a separate exercise whereas in the identical room. She was portray, and I used to be taking part in Umamusume: Fairly Derby. Regardless of her exercise being altogether extra cultured than mine, it solely took a number of races for her, her associate, and her roommate to all collect round my telephone to cheer on my racer prefer it was a high-stakes sport. It’s plain: Umamusume makes everybody a horse woman, and that’s precisely what occurred for lots of informal avid gamers in 2025.
In case you one way or the other missed the fever that swept the nation this 12 months, let me try to clarify what’s undeniably a bizarre idea. Umamusume: Fairly Derby is a sport all about managing an anime horse woman — they’re quite a bit like regular women, however with horse ears and tails and a penchant for carrots — as they make their approach by means of a season of racing. You’ll have to steadiness bettering their varied stats, managing their relaxation and happiness, together with different particulars like their expertise and complete variety of followers. The sport has existed in Japan since 2021, however solely arrived elsewhere for cell and PC in 2025.
It makes extra sense to think about it as a form of roguelike, the place each run you decide a racer and attempt to do a bit higher than final time. Profitable previous horses will also be used to type the lineage of a brand new one, giving them a greater head begin to success. The actual hook of the sport comes within the races themselves, which gamers have the choice to look at play out in full. You’ll see absolute blow-out victories, last-minute bursts to the entrance from an underdog, and out of the blue end up desperately shouting full-volume at an anime horse woman to activate their particular final ability.
These heart-pounding races made the sport an absolute hit on Twitch. In keeping with TwitchTracker, the sport noticed a 1.1K% achieve in viewers, and 944% achieve in streams. Even content material creators you wouldn’t count on to see taking part in the sport, like Ludwig and Northernlion, have been pogging up over anime horse women.
It went far past Twitch, too. I’d by no means actually been what I’d contemplate a horse woman — I had a quiet respect for these devoted to the life-style who would spend elementary faculty recess whinnying, but it surely by no means hooked me. All of that modified with Umamusume, nevertheless, and never only for me. Your entire world caught horse fever, each for the digital racers and real-life creatures.
That’s as a result of each horse woman within the sport is definitely based mostly on real-life Japanese race horses, with the builders even together with present relationships between horses which have shared lineage. Although most of the horses have handed on (my private favourite racer, Silence Suzuka, handed away in 1998), some like Gold Ship are nonetheless round, and have garnered a large new following due to Umamusume. Earlier than the horse Haru Urara handed away this September, for instance, she was gifted 2.5 tons of grass — roughly the load of two vehicles — by followers. She was beloved by many for her unenviable document on the observe: zero wins and 113 losses.
The love for the horse women of Umamusume additionally grew to become a viral web sensation in nearly each capability. As somebody who had by no means expressed to the algorithm any earlier curiosity in horses, I used to be out of the blue getting fan cams in regards to the real-life Gold Ship and movies of the horse woman Agnes Tachyon set to the music of Demise Grips on my feed.
It wasn’t simply edits, both — Umamusume spilled over into actual life greater than many different in style video games this 12 months, and a variety of it was truthfully heartwarming. Followers are having meet-ups at racetracks the place they costume in costume and cheer on actual horses, and I’ve seen a number of movies about followers dressing up as horse women to attend Denver Broncos video games. The Worldwide Museum of the Horse in Kentucky even devoted a whole exhibit to the horse women and their counterparts.
It’s necessary to notice that the general library of Umamusume media goes nicely past the sport. There are a number of anime sequence and manga, however neither (notably the manga, because it’s arduous to seek out translated bodily variations) had brought about a lot stir in the USA till the discharge of Umamusume: Fairly Derby. All of that has now given followers much more lore and horse woman goodness to latch on to, and a second situation — the form of profession path framework utilized in every run — was simply added to the sport in November, reigniting the fireplace inside many gamers.
The influence of Umamusume: Fairly Derby on popular culture in 2025 was plain — that’s a serious motive why it ranked inside the prime 20 of Polygon’s prime 50 video games of the 12 months. Many gamers wound up studying in regards to the historical past of horse racing, despatched grass, dressed up with mates, and even made new ones — all due to a shared love of anime horse women.
