If, like me, you’ve seen an uptick in anime ladies with horse ears working round your social media timeline, you is likely to be confused as to what the hell is occurring. The sport inflicting all this commotion, my mates, is Umamusume: Fairly Derby, a gacha recreation that has lastly made its solution to the West after initially launching in Japan again in 2021. The sport is predicated on the titular media franchise during which racehorses are reincarnated as literal horse ladies who do what racehorses do finest, simply as bipedal people with horse ears on their heads. Provided that there are dozens of horse ladies within the collection, the premise is ripe for a gacha recreation during which individuals gamble to unlock their favourite. However what do you do if you’ve obtained them? The identical factor you’d do with a daily racehorse, in fact: practice 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 woman races fairly straight and with the type of gusto and earnest willpower you’d count on 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 simple racing present. Effectively, a minimum of 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. Positive, 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 plentiful, colourful menus, they crashed my iPhone 12. Perhaps it’s time for an improve. Wait, is the horse woman gacha recreation going to get me to an AT&T retailer to hitch trendy instances? What an odd flip of occasions.
Anyway, these random drops are available two varieties: trainees and assist playing cards. The previous are the precise horse ladies you’ll be coaching; the remainder are supplementary playing cards that may give your major character a lift. Every horse woman has a profession that, as soon as accomplished, permits them to be registered as a Veteran Umamusume and Legacy character, so as to grant stat boosts and different perks to different characters. So you possibly can see how the grind feeds into itself and incentivizes you to coach a number of racers moderately than simply your favorites.
Once 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 woman has totally different targets, requiring totally 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 woman academy, and ultimately, you’ll ship her off to the races. The one actual enter you get into the competitions themselves is the coaching you set your horse woman by means of and the sport plan you give her forward of time. You may make some strategic choices, like telling her to prioritize pacing herself as a substitute of sprinting like her life is dependent upon it, however the optimum strat is set by the stats she’s gained by means of coaching forward of races, In the end, your objective is to set her up for fulfillment; in case you have been hoping for a extra direct racing recreation, 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 accumulate assist playing cards by means of drops. It could actually make going by means of the careers really feel nearly like a rogue-like run during which you strive to determine the most effective construct to assert victory. I see the assorted 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 chew, 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 suppose 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 suppose 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 in the marketplace: stuffed with currencies which you could buy for ungodly quantities of real-world cash, rewards incentivizing you to log in on daily basis, sufficient menus to overstimulate anybody who dares to put in it, and character design so generic I couldn’t establish any of those ladies 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 means of the oversaturated gacha market. It’s nothing groundbreaking, nevertheless it’s simply foolish sufficient to catch the attention of those that aren’t often paying consideration. Enormous streamers like Ludwig and Northernlion are taking part in it, so it’s damaged the barrier and reached large concurrent numbers on Steam alone. Shoutout to horse ladies. Y’all haven’t had a win this good since Barbie Horse Journey.
