And by that I mean aeons ago when I was playing things like Granblue Fantasy and had all the time in the world for long dialogues, excessive loading screens and repetitive grinds. Umamusume finally came out in English recently. I’ve been playing it for the past couple of days and I like it quite a bit… but not enough to keep playing. It’s not a bad game. It’s just… not much of a game.
Gameplay loop
You pull an umamusume (horse girl), train her for three years and then you can put her in your deck for other game modes like team PVP and races. Then you train another character, and another. The base character remains the same, so you can train them as many times as you want. In theory you can create tons of different builds of the same character, e.g. a high speed Haru Urara, a high stamina Haru Urara, a high wit Haru, and so on. And you can transfer (delete) any builds you no longer want.
Where the excitement supposedly comes in is the high levels of luck and randomness in the raising and racing process. Sometimes your umamusume gets an ailment, sometimes she fails when there’s only a 6% chance of failure, sometimes her mood randomly goes down. Sometimes she loses a race she was the clear favorite for, and that for no discernable reason either. And so on, and so forth. If you’re obsessed with getting perfect builds and good endings for every umamusume, there is plenty of room for replays.
Initially I was really enjoying that process of training my girls, trying to win the races and figuring things out for myself. That was on day one and two of playing the game, just learning the ropes and seeing how things went. Then I got a bit frustrated by failing all the career modes and went online to get some tips. That… was a serious mistake. I won’t say it ruined Umamusume for me, but it did take away a good portion of the fun, because it turns out almost every umamusume should be built in the same way: lots and lots of speed, a good amount of stamina and wit, a little power depending on their type, and just ignore guts. Yes, Tazuna is a filthy liar always trying to get you to focus on the wrong stats.
Don’t try to build them evenly, that way lies madness.
As I said, this discovery didn’t extinguish my interest entirely, but it came pretty close because raising characters is all the same now. You want the same deck of support cards for everyone (Kitasan Black, Sweep Tosho, sUPER Creek, i.e. mostly speed and some stamina), you’re raising them in largely the same way, buying the same gold skills, and on and on.
It didn’t help that I stopped reading the story very early on, so while I got snippets of each umamusume’s personality from the fast-forwarded skits and their comments, they still felt similar overall for me. This is why I say the game should have come out years ago: back then I had way more energy and interest in gacha game stories so maybe my love for the characters would have overcome my distaste for the reptitive gameplay and kept me going.
TL;DR Umamusume is fun for a while but then it gets tiresome. Unless you really care about the characters, it’s not something to play for a long time. Okay, you won the URA Finale with this girl. And with this other girl. And with this one too. All right, now what? I’m going to assume that Cygames eventually comes up with more interesting things for players to do and more varied career paths, because otherwise I can’t see how Umamusume has been running for four years and is still going strong.
Well okay, actually I do get it a little bit. Just a little. The characters are really charming, even the ones I thought I wouldn’t like, like Air Groove and Haru Urara. I’m going to try the anime, since it should give me the same “hit” without the frustration of the boring gameplay loop. And I’ll check back in with Umamusume during the various anniversaries to see if anything changes because there has to be a reason why it’s still so popular. …Right?
Signature look of superiority.
What I liked about Umamusume
🐎The umamusume characters are charming, and very different from each other. I like their personalities and the way they interact with each other.
🐎The game isn’t creepy about the horse girls in the least. You know what I mean, this being a Japanese game and all. The relationship between the trainer and the trainees is very wholesome and respectful, no weird romances or blushing scenes or fanservice or anything funky like that. Everyone is relatively professional.
🐎It feels really good when your umamusume trains her tail off and wins a prestigious race. I was like “Yes! Yes! That’s my girl!” when Silence Suzuka became my first character to win the URA finale. I did it without borrowing any powerful support cards or Legacies so it really felt like I’d earned it. Yes!
🐎Bright happy colors! They’re my thing. Especially since I tried Limbus Company around the same time and I could not stand that game AT ALL.
🐎The localization is excellent, as is usual for Cygames.
What I disliked
👎The character differentiation does not extend to their career routes. Every career feels the same, with identical activities and stats. And since you’ll use the “best” support cards if you want to be meta, you’ll be interacting with the same characters and triggering the same events every time.
👎There isn’t enough to do in the game outside of Career Mode and some pointless, unrewarding PVP. I have a number of umamusume, but they’re all just kinda there.
👎Each route takes too long because dialogues and events aren’t fully skippable.
👎Too much talking. I’m not exactly happy about how hard I find it to read game dialogue these days, so I made a good faith attempt to read the various events in Umamusume, but I had to give up because there’s just so much text. Must there be an event after every single turn? It’s too much!
👎Frequent loading screens ruin immersion.
👎Game income is stingy. 30 carats here, 50 carats there when it takes 30,000 to spark a single character is frustratingly slow. And these little drops will dry up once I’ve done all the early achievements.
👎My gacha luck was bad. It took everything I had to pull one Super Creek SSR and spark one LB for her. This means I’ll have to save for months and months before trying to pull anyone else. What’s worse, after completing all the beginner tasks, I used the SSR ticket and got the same Silence Suzuka I had chosen at the begining of the game. Not only that, but they only gave me 60 statue pieces for her, i.e. not enough to use as a dupe to uncap her star. Stingy game is stingy!
Conclusion
Umamusume was fun for a while, and I’m really glad I tried it to see what all the fuss was about, but it doesn’t contain enough variety to hold my interest. You either like the horse girls so much that you want to play with them over and over again, or you don’t. In my case, I’ll stick to the anime and check back at anniversary time to see what QoL and gameplay improvements they’ve made. Don’t let me down, Cygames!
I was surprised to find this blog and see that it is active! I was looking into a game called “Another Time Another Leaf” on the Nintendo DS because I was thinking about Lux-Pain again and wanted to see more about Killaware’s other games while I was at it. I am being off topic, but thank you for archiving and taking the time to give your thoughts on all the different games!
Also, Uma Musume is pretty grindy and I could see myself burning out of it eventually. I do like how it reminds me of dating sims in vein of “Tokimeki Memorial” where instead of training your character you are training your Uma with the random events that keep things interesting. It seems like the game gets crazier with gimmicks in the current year in JP from what I have, quickly, seen so we’ll see how it plays out.
Again, thank you for all the work you have done in bringing to light all the games!
Thank you for stopping by and for the kind comments! Both Lux-Pain and Another Time weren’t really my cup of tea, but it’s nice to see they have their fans.
i could say the same for me; i think i’ll be taking a few months’ break.
Keep up the good work.
Yeah. I gotta believe there’s more to Umamusume than what we’re currently seeing.
I didn’t like the game because it’s clear that it’s just another idol game aimed at the average Japanese male idol otaku. Pretty boring and souless overall.
I haven’t played a lot of idol games, to be honest, but this didn’t feel very pandering to me.
The girls are more interested in hanging out with each other than in sucking up to their trainer. The player character is very much just a teacher and coach, and the relationship ends there. No romance, no creepiness, no blushing, nothing.
I liked that about Umamusume a lot. I’m watching some of the shorts on Youtube where there’s no player character at all, and it’s a lot of fun. Unfortunately the game was just… not game-ful enough for me.