Episode 195 - You Can Lead a Horse to Fanta - Uma Musume: Pretty Derby

NOCLIP finishes the URA Finale and stands above all other podcasts.
Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking
about… a currently popular gacha game about horse racing anime
girls. Uma Musume (or Umamusume depending on who you ask) is a sort
of sports management roguelike game where you build stats on
characters and then, in combination with a small six-card deck of
support cards, use them to run races in hopes they can better build
another character in the future. Add to that one of the most
duplicate intensive gacha systems I’ve ever seen attached, and you
have the bones of what makes up this game. The roguelike mode of
this game, the career, is honestly pretty lenient, which is good
given the amount of cards and characters you would have to pull to
make a top-tier team. However, it is interesting where the game
chooses to spend its resources. Runs are bogged down with enormous
amounts of text, every race has an optional “concert” you can watch
afterward (which will repeat often, understandably as each contains
a bespoke song and animation to accompany it), and character
costumes, while unique for each horse girl, are locked for the
lower tier rarity characters until you either pull enough
duplicates or buy one the games many currencies one at a time from
limited shops. The result is a game that you can sink a lot of time
into without spending a lot of money, but with limited growth
unless you start “swiping” or become friends with someone who does.
These kinds of things are expected to an extent within the genre,
and it isn’t one with which we have a ton of familiarity, so
prepare for a bit of an exploration of our interpretations of the
model as we go through it. We’re going to be talking about the time
commitment required of you to make the most of your time with this
game, what parts of the game could be appealing to what kinds of
people, and which of our favorite real life horse stories make an
appearance in this game. Thank you for joining us again this week!
I want to use this paragraph to note that there is a bit of a
companion video to go along with this episode over on our YouTube
channel exploring the actual length of the dialogue, so check out
like maybe 10 minutes of that if you’re interested. Are you a
dedicated gacha player with an understanding of banners and when
and how to pull on them, or are you tourists like us coming in with
various, but mostly low, levels of understanding of the model? Let
us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re
going to be talking about last year’s most popular roguelike,
Balatro, so I hope you’ll join us then.