Trending games are about as unpredictable as they come. Who makes them, who their target audience is, or even their remote similarity to other things, are ultimately completely unhelpful in predicting what will take the world by storm. But today’s title has had a truly meteoric rise in spite of its niche subject matter, and we’d be fools not to give you the full-rundown on it. So place your bets and settle into your bleachers, because this review is off to the races!

Developed and published by Cygames and released worldwide in June 2025, Umamusume: Pretty Derby is an equine daughter crashout simulator available on mobile and PC. Its premise involves the player training a variety of anthropomorphic horse girls in the racing arts and following their journeys to make their mark on the history of the sport. Players interact with the game mostly through dialogue boxes and planning schedules. Please note the Steam version of the game was used for this review.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby doesn’t quite have a central story so much as it has a main premise. The setting appears to be a world much like our own, except regular horses don’t exist (how the HECK did history play out roughly the same?!) and instead there is regularly born a set of all-female horse-human hybrids called umamusume. These carrot-munchers inherit their identities and personalities from real-life racehorses from Japanese horse racing history, and they spend their days training to run in races whilst attending a high school. From this premise, the game dedicates itself to essentially enshrining the legacies of the real racehorses by retelling their stories through an anime sports drama lens, with certain details changed to keep the brand’s theme and tone consistent as well as more relatable to a human audience. This leaves Pretty Derby in a rather unique spot where the real fun of the game’s story usually takes place after the whole thing is concluded, when you go look up the real history of the racehorse whose anime girl counterpart you just read and discover the history that created the fiction. Don’t get me wrong, some of the character stories are genuinely good on their own with well-developed character arcs and emotional pay-offs such as the story of my signature horse girl King Halo, but these stories are best enjoyed when you do your homework and pick out the similarities and differences to the real horses. In this regard Umamusume can and will successfully trick you into learning more about the sport it is based on, and that’s a pretty impressive feat in itself.

Where the story falters is in the overall delivery. The presentation and such is nice of course, but the narrative is heavily gated behind account progression and roguelike gameplay which can make it hard to actually enjoy these stories in a timely and satisfying way. The game’s “main story” content for now mostly covers arcs featured in the anime that aired some time before the release, and the individual character stories are mostly slice-of-life bits gated by major bond level requirements. This leaves the trainee stories in the core campaign mode as the main attraction, but it can be hard to enjoy these when you have to reread them from the start every time you fail to clear a career goal. You are given skip functions to help you make repeat runs easier, but this can definitely be annoying if you’ve failed several times. Trainee stories themselves are locked behind you owning the characters from the gacha too, so on the whole the game by design makes it virtually impossible to experience all the story that it has to offer unless you happen to be a day-one whale. This is a rather unique downside that I certainly learned to live with overtime, but it stings that some pretty decent horse girl anthologies and even better tangential learning opportunities are made so inaccessible in a way that few gacha games, let alone games as a whole, can really compare to.

As for the gameplay itself, it’s a fairly passive affair but not one without strategy. When starting the main campaign you’ll pick a horse to train, set Legacies based on your previous attempts (basically a PG-rated means of incorporating the practice of horse breeding), and select a deck of Support Cards to strengthen her as the campaign goes on. Quite a bit of your viability for the run is going to be based on these early decisions, and is the reason why the Support Card gacha is generally a higher priority for serious players. It can be fun to strategize around whether you should pick cards that support key stats or have a chance to drop certain skills, though within the run themselves I can’t say I’m a huge fan of their narrative implementation. They’re depicted as side stories which regularly pop-up parallel to your own trainee’s tale, but these stories are the same every single time and are just begging to be fast-forwarded through considering you’re often going to use your best cards over and over. It’s not particularly inconvenient, but they definitely could have been more engaging if you got more content out of sticking with a certain deck from run to run.

Once you begin the campaign in earnest, you will be tasked with planning training activities and race schedules in order to meet whatever personal goals your umamusume wishes to achieve. On any given day you can train one of your five stats at an energy cost and a risk of injury, rest to recover energy, recreate to improve your trainee’s mood, go to the infirmary to remove negative status effects, and compete in races primarily to win fans among other smaller benefits. Your goal races are mandatory when their turn arrives, and you must place within a specific range of positions to avoid ending the run early. Between all of that there are story events from the campaign, your trainee, and the Support Cards, and these will often include small choices that affect your stats a little depending on what you pick. And really… that’s it. Probably the most accurate description of Umamusume: Pretty Derby is that it’s a roguelike idle game where all the game truly asks of you is to strategically pick where and when to participate in certain activities, but for the most part you simply act as an observer to the life and times of your horse girl. This is particularly emphasized in the races themselves, which for all their fancy presentation is really just a computer running the numbers and you hoping the trainee races smart and tries her best. It is definitely more fun than it looks if you go into it with the right mindset, but for anyone looking for more in-depth gameplay you’re not going to find it here.

And really that’s where the game’s biggest flaw is, because outside of the campaign mode there really isn’t much to do. Aside from reading main and character stories which aren’t even the main draw, the only other true mode is a daily racing section that lets you pit horses from completed runs against those of other players in a bid for rewards. A pvp mode, toxic as they typically are in gacha games, wouldn’t be the worst idea in a horse racing game, but considering races do not have any true player input it’s mostly just a matter of flexing your horse’s stats and luck against those of other players. The most fun additional mode for me was the concert hall, as each race in the game is followed by an optional concert sequence where the runners perform an upbeat musical number. While similarly passive to the rest of the game, the concert animations and music are actually good enough that I wanted to unlock all the songs via playing through different campaigns so I could organize my own concerts. On the whole the gameplay of Umamusume is unexpectedly barebones, and while there is appeal in a game where you can just relax and watch action unfold through more passive input, it comes at the cost of any particularly great long-term reasons to play the game.

Of course no discussion of a gacha game could be complete without an overview of its gambling mechanics, so let’s go over those now. Pretty Derby is running on design principles that predate the modern concept of pity, so the rarest items are at a fixed 3% chance to obtain and the individual chance at gaining any particular SSR horse or Support Card being under 1%, so not great. There is a points system where after dumping 200 pulls into any one banner, you may directly select one of the rate-up items, but these points do not carry over between banners. 200 is already more pulls than the infamous Hoyo gachas, but it gets even worse. The most amount of gacha currency you can buy after exhausting special deals is 5,000 carats for $70, about 3 and ⅓ ten-pulls, so a desperate and unlucky player can guarantee the item of their choice for the low low price of six carat packs for… $420. That’s $20 more than guaranteeing a 5-star character in Honkai: Star Rail, and since pulling duplicates of Support Cards is generally very important in high level competitive play, a mega-desperate and unlucky player might be tempted to spend up to $2,100 on one banner! This of course is just the worst case scenario, but it does highlight just how far the game is willing to exploit the player at worst, and the truly confusing thing is that I don’t understand why people would go this far for Pretty Derby of all things. The gameplay is so shallow, and the pvp even moreso, that I struggle to imagine what in the game is exactly worth such a potentially huge investment. My advice is if you do play the game, pull on the horse banners specifically to get duplicate stars to upgrade the low-rarity characters and unlock their unique outfits using your free currency, because you can more reliably pull those ones and the rare stuff only provides so much extra content at the end of the day. Set aside some of your free carats to pull whatever amount of Support Cards you need to win the campaign, but no need to be picky about them overall and just grab Kitasan Black from the support list to streamline things.

On the other hand if there’s one thing worth playing Umamusume: Pretty Derby for, it’s the presentation. Considering this is fundamentally a mobile game, the modeling, animations, and art are really pleasant and show a level of care afforded by the simplicity of the game’s other content. The UI on PC does have to be situated in a strange way in order to preserve the look of a portrait phone screen, but the preservation was overall worth it and the negative space is filled with helpful buttons and shortcuts which make navigation to the more obscure screens quite painless. The races and concerts are displayed in full widescreen if you want as well, and those are easily the highlights. Races emulate the cinematography of real racehorse coverage while throwing in some exciting flourishes when your girl activates her signature strategy in the homestretch, and helps to sell the appeal of the actual sport. The concerts are undoubtedly the best part though, with their fully animated choreography and stage lighting effects keeping the musical number visually interesting. This of course comes with some great music too, as orchestrals proudly dramatize daily life and racing action, while the pop songs performed in concerts are particularly heart-pounding. Each character typically has at least 3 different songs that their actress provides unique vocals for too, so there are a lot of ways to enjoy the music if you manage to collect a decent group of characters from the gacha. It’s all very feel-good and saccharine, but the game commits to its bit and does it with style.

Lastly we come to our spiritual reflection for today, and I think there can be no better topic than the game’s real-world impact. Naturally the game’s popularity was going to foster an interest in the horseracing scene in general, but the influence of Umamusume in particular has led to some dramatic developments. I made regular reference to the game’s draw of getting the player to learn about the real racehorses earlier, and for those horses still alive the game inspired… a lot more. For instance it turns out the stables where the legendary Haru Urara (also known as The Shining Star of Losers Everywhere) resides has a website where you can sponsor the delivery of ryegrass to the horses, and fans of the game managed to get Haru multiple tons of grass. It broke the donation website, and the grass itself had to be shared with the other horses to keep it from expiring! There are many other stories like this: from racecourses seeing new business from the game’s fans, to bleachers getting installed at stables to control visitors come to see horses adapted by the game, to even a genuine period of mourning for the recent passing of the last of the Golden Generation, Grass Wonder. In reflecting on this game and the acts of fandom born of it, it ultimately serves as a strong reminder of the transformative effects that a relationship to God is to have on our lives.

So often in contemporary life we are told that religious beliefs, especially Catholicism, are something to be held privately and shouldn’t impact our civic behavior. From the underlying social pressure not to speak of one’s religion in casual settings all the way to a rejection of even considering using religious beliefs as an informing force in public policymaking, the expectation to avoid bringing God with you into your actions is undeniable. And yet if the revelations we have been given and the faith we hold can never truly impact the way we live for more than an hour a week, is that not functionally the same having no faith at all? If God has truly moved us in our encounters with Him, in the life of the Church and the holy Sacraments in particular, then it stands to reason that we should carry that experience out into the world to make the lives of those around us better. If a bunch of fans of a silly little mobile game about horse girls can stir up a very old sporting scene, imagine what we could do as Christians if we harnessed the hope that Christ has given us. Let this title be a reminder that an encounter with the transcendental, be it a humble story or the greatest Truth, is an opportunity to change the world, and we should never let the fear of social judgement get in the way of doing the right thing.

In conclusion, Umamusume: Pretty Derby is perhaps one of the harder sells I’ve encountered when it comes to video games. Its great presentation and fascinating historical roots are undeniably enchanting, yet the product itself being a pseudo idle game with a truly pernicious monetization system attached leaves a lot to be desired. At best this game might be a decent free testing ground for the Umamusume series as a whole before diving into its animated features and television shows, but long term I don’t see this as a particularly worthy game to revisit unless the series’ other offerings don’t spotlight your favorite characters sufficiently (and even that’s not the strongest reason). I might stick around long enough to finally get my favorite uma the Triple Crowns she deserves, but I wouldn’t be surprised to be checked out of the game entirely shortly thereafter. It’s a cute diversion for what it is, but time will tell if this game can really stay relevant for anything longer than a sprint or a mile.

About PeaceRibbon

A graduate in philosophy from a campus with Benedictine monks, "PeaceRibbon" is just an ordinary introvert looking to put his hours of playing games to good use. He's played games on every Nintendo console since the family Wii and later took up PC games once aware of Steam. He's explored a lot of genres, but his favorites have been story driven RPGs and fighting games. Often finds himself going deep into gaming culture and seeking out low-profile titles over keeping up with big releases.

When not gaming, he enjoys walking in beautiful places, and overthinking just about everything. Also serves as a cantor at Mass whenever he can. Has a twin brother who shares many of the same hobbies and passions.