If, like me, you’ve observed an uptick in anime women with horse ears working round your social media timeline, you may be confused as to what the hell is happening. The sport inflicting all this commotion, my pals, is Umamusume: Fairly Derby, a gacha sport that has lastly made its method to the West after initially launching in Japan again in 2021. The sport is predicated on the titular media franchise wherein racehorses are reincarnated as literal horse women who do what racehorses do finest, simply as bipedal people with horse ears on their heads. Provided that there are dozens of horse women within the collection, the premise is ripe for a gacha sport wherein folks gamble to unlock their favourite. However what do you do whenever you’ve obtained them? The identical factor you’d do with an everyday racehorse, after all: prepare them to be the easiest.
Like lots of people, I had by no means heard of Umamusume Fairly Derby earlier than the sport’s launch on this a part of the world final week. Regardless of its preposterous premise, the sport performs its horse lady races fairly straight and with the type of gusto and earnest dedication you’d anticipate from any sports activities anime. As the women run across the observe, there’s spirited commentary, rivalries, and narratives unfolding. If I didn’t see that the women had horse ears on their heads, I wouldn’t realize it wasn’t only a easy racing present. Effectively, at the very least I wouldn’t till after the women have crossed the end line, at which level they placed on an idol live performance for a crowd of adoring followers. Certain, pop off, queens.
After Umamusume attracts you in with all of the glitz and glamour, it does what each one among these video games does and bombards you with menus, currencies, and random drops. After I began to navigate these ample, colourful menus, they crashed my iPhone 12. Possibly it’s time for an improve. Wait, is the horse lady gacha sport going to get me to an AT&T retailer to hitch trendy occasions? What an odd flip of occasions.
Anyway, these random drops are available in two varieties: trainees and assist playing cards. The previous are the precise horse women you’ll be coaching; the remaining are supplementary playing cards that may give your major character a lift. Every horse lady has a profession that, as soon as accomplished, permits them to be registered as a Veteran Umamusume and Legacy character, with a purpose to grant stat boosts and different perks to different characters. So you may see how the grind feeds into itself and incentivizes you to coach a number of racers quite than simply your favorites.
While you get arrange in your profession, components of the sport really feel extra like taking part in with a digital pet than I anticipated. Every lady has completely different objectives, requiring completely different coaching regimens to make progress of their story. You’ll additionally monitor their vitality ranges, work together with different college students on the horse lady academy, and finally, you’ll ship her off to the races. The one actual enter you get into the competitions themselves is the coaching you place your horse lady by and the sport plan you give her forward of time. You may make some strategic selections, like telling her to prioritize pacing herself as an alternative of sprinting like her life depends upon it, however the optimum strat is set by the stats she’s gained by coaching forward of races, Finally, your aim is to set her up for achievement; in case you had been hoping for a extra direct racing sport, you’ll not discover that right here.
All that being mentioned, there’s potential right here for some actual sicko grinding and optimizing your racer’s stats, particularly as you import legacy characters to spice up these attributes and acquire assist playing cards by drops. It might make going by the careers really feel virtually like a rogue-like run wherein you attempt to determine the very best construct to assert victory. I see the varied hooks Umamusume has lowered into the ocean, and whereas I do know the type of people that gravitate in direction of these sorts of video games may chunk, I don’t know if the bait is sort of to my liking, personally. I nonetheless discover its barrage of mechanics and menus overwhelming, although, and there isn’t a lot else right here pulling me in, so I don’t assume I’ll be staring into the abyss lengthy sufficient to get caught up within the gacha mechanics right here. Gacha video games are all about threat and reward, and I don’t assume its wacky idea is sufficient reward for the chance of opening myself to playing.
After spending a few hours with Umamusume, its weird premise appears to be essentially the most compelling factor it has going for it. It’s obtained loads of the drawbacks of different gacha video games available on the market: filled with currencies that you may buy for ungodly quantities of real-world cash, rewards incentivizing you to log in daily, sufficient menus to overstimulate anybody who dares to put in it, and character design so generic I couldn’t establish any of those women in a line-up with a gun to my head. Fortunate for it, the factor that makes it stand out is a memetic absurdist premise that helps it pierce by the oversaturated gacha market. It’s nothing groundbreaking, nevertheless it’s simply foolish sufficient to catch the attention of those that aren’t normally paying consideration. Large streamers like Ludwig and Northernlion are taking part in it, so it’s damaged the barrier and reached enormous concurrent numbers on Steam alone. Shoutout to horse women. Y’all haven’t had a win this good since Barbie Horse Journey.
