In a world of overly complicated gacha games. Where you are grinding an ever growing list of materials and equipment with randomized stats. Stories that seemingly won’t end. Umamusume brings us back to a simpler time in gacha games. The stories are short and sweet. The gameplay is just a couple of clicks and the payoffs are still so freaking good.

It was the mid 90s. I went to see my first horse race as a kid at the Bay Meadows racetrack. It was fun! I got to ride a train for the first time. I saw all these cool horses running across the racetrack. But it just never stuck with me. Sure, I enjoy horse racing over NASCAR and F1, but there was still something missing with horse racing. Then a couple of days ago I found out what that was. It was horse girls!

Okay, sorry, we should probably talk about the game right? The game is great. The main mode is career mode. You choose horse girl to train over the course of 3 years & win races that increase in difficulty. Across the 3 years there are major races that act as checkpoints as you ascend the races to the URA finale cup. If you’ve failed the conditions of any of these checkpoint races, your career is over.

To win these checkpoint races you’ll be spending a set amount of in game time to level up the stats of your chosen horse girl while also balancing their energy levels and mood levels. But their mood can drop and they can get injured, which will affect not only their stat gains but also their races.

And this loop is so exciting because what really grabbed me about this is because you are spending days after days training this horse girl to basically win races, you start to become more invested in their success. As you are training you are getting this brief slice of life moment and it’s fully voiced. Cutscenes of them just hanging out with other horse girls, of them training, of them being sad or happy. You’re at the beach one day. It is just so much fun to watch them improve and train to win races.

So after spending all of this time training and watching them go through their life, they are now thrown into a race competing to be the best horse racer. As you perform more races, you also develop a closer bond with your horse girl, which unlocks unique character stories. And these character stories aren’t like an hour long, or 30 minutes. They’ll take you about 10, 15 minutes to get through. And if you don’t like the story, there are skip buttons. So you know you have to pay attention. You could just enjoy the actual gameplay.

Now, if you fail a career run, you can still use the skills and experience gained from that previous career run to support future career runs on different horse girls via Legacies. Legacies are basically like utilizing the skills of your horse girls to then create other horse girls with additional stats. Look, I’m still new to this game. It’s weird, but you know what? It’s okay because it makes us stronger. And I won’t dive too much into the actual biology of a horse girl mating.

Either way, oh, also, I forgot when you win races, there’s also an Idol concert that plays. And as you win certain races, you’ll unlock different songs for different concerts. It’s really cool because each of the concerts involve all of the horse racers, but the top three characters who are singing are the top three racers. All of the songs are sung by every single one of the horse girls. And so depending on who gets first, second, and third, the voice lines all switch up and change so naturally.

So if I’m listening to the same song, it could be sung by different girls and it’s absolutely amazing the way they’ve been able to piece together the lyrics and make it sound so smooth. It’s just, it’s so good.

Anyways, that’s all I wanted to say about Umamusume. It has just basically taken over my life. It’s basically very similar to the time I played Monster Musume, which, hey, there is a video of it here. And so far I put in zero money onto this, spent about 16 hours playing this game. I’m having an absolute blast. Okay, goodbye now, bye.