I Played the Horse Game
I need that Phineas & Ferb meme about the nickels right about now, because this would be the second time I've been surprised and enchanted by cartoon horses in my lifetime! Weirdest part? I don't even like real-life horses all that much.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby is a game didn't have to be anything special. I don't think there was any initial expectation for it to take any other country by storm, let alone in the English world. I sincerely think the goal was: "There are a lot of superfans who are playing our game over a VPN despite not knowing a lick of Japanese nor being able to pay for our microtransactions. Let's do a service to outrselves, these players, and maybe attract just as many new players by localizing this game".
What we're talking about is not only another mobile gacha game, but a mobile gacha game that released in 2021 in Japan before coming globally about two months ago... And based on a manga that was written in 2016.
I've never really been one for mobile games. If any of you know me and my interests, it would be fair to say I'm not super well-versed in the most widely-played of mobile games, though I have at least tried or been exposed to them in some manner. I don't play many popular gacha like Goddness of Victory: Nikke, Fire Emblem Heroes, or Blue Archive, so Umamusume's mobile outing had a lot to prove to me about how these games work. We've all heard about the dirty laundry gacha games constantly have to wring out.
Needless to say, my worries are behind me: there are a myriad of ways to set up a greedy or poorly-designed gacha game, and Pretty Derby is not one of them!
The game has all the fixings you'd expect from a gacha game: main units you pull for in the gacha, support units you "equip" to the main units for certain benefits, and then either a story mode and/or a PvP mode that puts those units and configs to the test. We all know the other predatory details - be it the time-gated mechanics, the excessive amount of grind, or the selective offers for premium currency discounts. Things like that.
Pretty Derby has these usual mechanics and inclusions, but with one extra feature that completely balances out this slippery slope: the Career Mode.
For those of you who quite literally have been living away from the internet for the last month or so, Umamusume is a sports series about horse racing. The only real twist on this concept is the anthropomorphism of the real racehorses, turning them into horsegirls attending a school that... teaches them to race, I guess. As a result, the game includes a Career Mode not all that dissimilar to other sports titles. What this introduces is essentially a Roguelike Visual Novel to the game.
The Career Mode takes your racer through plenty of races over the curse of an in-game three year campaign, sharpening skills and making placements in major milestone races in an attempt to be URA Finale Champion! If you can't place appropriately with that racer's goals - unique to each character - then the career ends. When the career ends, your racer becomes what the game calls a "veteran Umamusume". This has two really cool implications:
- Your Veteran Umamusume becomes a unit you can select for story mode and PvP races! Just because you pull a racer from the gacha, doesn't mean you can immediately use it;
- Your Veteran Umamusume becomes a unit you can pass legacies through! Although the game doesn't present it as such, this is essentially the equivalent of pedigree breeding in real horseracing - letting champion racehorses stud out so they can rear young which inherit their genes.
This dimension of turning Umamusume into Veterans does absolute WONDERS in managing the balance of the game.
Since Veteran Umamusume require a playthrough of the Career Mode in order to be used in other modes, it means first and foremost that players must excel in the Career Mode in order to have a successful unit. There are no uses for the game's premium currency once the Career has begun, so there's not really any way to cheat or cheese the mode. You simply need to have a bit of good luck and some knowledge of the Career Mode's mechanics in order to be successful.
This reliance of the game's overall experience being this silo'd-off gamemode has a trickle-down effect into the rest of the game that prevents the premium currency from being required to play the game well. It places less importance on SSR units and supports, since they're unusable in PvP until you complete Career Mode with it. Careers take at least 30-40 minutes to complete if you have a good run going, meaning the "energy" resources that take time to refill are much less taxing on the game's pace.
It almost makes me wonder why the game has these extra mobile game resources in the first place. For 99% of use cases, they're not really needed and feel superfluous. Though in this case, it's a good thing that they feel pointless!
All of this praise is also not counting how good the dialogue and writing in the game is too. The winning concerts boast a surprisingly high production value, and in typical J-Pop fashion the OST is crammed full with earworms that are impossible to ignore. Needless to say - you'll very quickly find yourself latching on to a handful of these plucky gals as your favourite characters in the series through this game.
It's been an absolute pleasure to play Pretty Derby. It's a very charming game that's the perfect mixture of easy to play but hard to master, and is exactly the sort of game that requires attention but not focus, making it a great game in my experience to sit down and play in my downtime outside of work.
My only real critique of the game is that, while the pace is great and above what you'd expect of a mobile game, the size and production value of the game itself does bog down a lot of the loading of the game. It's not outrageously long by any means, but I would say it just barely pushes the game out of the bound of "pick-up-and-play". It does feel different from other mobile games in this way, and probably why CyGames saw it as no bother to port the game to PC on Steam.
Give the game a try if you haven't yet - I really do recommend it! Especially if you've enjoyed the company's other mobile ventures such as The IdolMaster or Dragalia Lost, you'll be right at home here and no doubt find the formula pleasantly familiar. This also may be a desperate last appeal on my end, but I've never seen a company be SO generous with rewards in a game upon starting, and even still being quite fair and generous after you leave that honeymoon period.
Very little about this game feels predatory, money-grabby; none of that. It truly does feel like someone took the gacha concept and just built a really good "pay-what-you-can" Visual Novel around it.
... If they're horses that get turned into horsegirls who are otherwise human like us, doesn't that mean they're just doing track-and-field?