A Review of Umamusume: Pretty Derby
Part 3: The Mobile Game
As much as I love the characters, stories, online community, and metatext surrounding this series, the game needs some serious attention. I have deliberately avoided gacha games because I find loot boxes and similar gambling mechanics intensely frustrating. If this wasn’t attached to characters who are so damn weird and fun, I would have steered clear. I think a lot of the Zenless Zone Zero characters are appealing too, but I do not feel anywhere near the compulsion toward them that I do towards Umamusume. These girls are like puzzle boxes of anxieties and hopes and desires, and I find them really compelling in their strangeness. Say what you will, but Cygames has pretty much nailed their characterizations, which is essential for making a gacha feel worth playing.
The career mode serves a mechanical role alongside a storyline delivery platform: Upon completing a career, your trainee becomes available for daily races and player-vs-player events. You are incentivized to build a roster of racers who can compete on both dirt and turf, and across different race lengths, to compete against others for rewards. This, naturally, leads players to seek out meta-gaming tips and tricks for individual builds and roster construction. For instance, one character named Sakura Bakushin O is a sprint-race specialist, who can make a deep career run by more-or-less dumping all your stat boosts into speed and forsaking all the others. She is kinda busted with how effortlessly she can win using that strat, and, barring a future patch that nerfs that effect, plenty of teams have a speed-maxxed Bakushin ready to go.
To aide in those races, players will aim to do multiple career playthroughs to optimize their builds, while also unlocking consumables and means to increase the star-level of their trainees, which boosts their starting stats, making optimal builds easier to achieve. Raising an uma’s star level to three out of 5 has the added effect of unlocking her signature race gear: one- and two-star trainees all wear the same generic uniform when they race. Considering the unique race-day fits are a core appeal for the game, building your trainees up to a point where they’re visibly the truer version of themselves is paramount.
As the career goes along, your trainer character builds a relationship with her, and you learn more about her over the course of the game. Scenes before races and between training sessions tell you a lot about her: what matters to her, how she sees herself, how others see her, and what success or failure means to her. Other umas, friend and foe alike, wander into the story as it goes, and you get a full picture of how their relationships intermingle as you play each of their careers.
This creates a compulsive gameplay loop. Keep on trying, make it a bit further each time, gain more star pieces and consumables, play your daily matches, wash and repeat daily. You get three daily race tickets, and enough points to run roughly three career modes per day. A career playthrough takes a couple hours if you are reading through all the content, but if you skip through familiar dialogue, it often takes a half-hour or so.
Each uma has her own story mode, which lets you go through a three-year campaign to try and help her achieve her dreams and ambitions. You play the role of a trainer, planning her regimen and non-story race schedule. Ideally, you will use your time wisely and develop her into a lean, mean racing machine, balancing a handful of stats and skills to prep her for the next big race. How far you get is dependent on a variety of factors: Star level (from 1 to 5), potential, (1 to 4), “legacy” characters who provide inspiration (and stat bonuses), and support cards, which provide events that boost stats depending on the support character and rank. Oh, and luck plays a part as well.
The gameplay loop, all in all, is fun. It's satisfying to go through careers, learn ways to maximize your builds, and plan out runs to make a stable (lol get it?) of legacy umamusume that provides much-needed boosts to all the ones that come after.
This would be a lot of fun in a vacuum, but there is also a big caveat: The core product is a gacha game with a very stingy game economy, which encourages players to spend truly astounding amounts of money. Some umas are incredibly rare, and there is a 200-roll pity system that you have to endure before getting a guaranteed rare pull. From what I have read from fans who also play other gachas like Zenless Zone Zero, this is pretty insane and predatory, even by the standards of this type of mobile game. You will find yourself constantly playing catch-up. In order to get a single gacha pull, you must have 150 credits of premium currency, symbolized by a chromatic carrot, called a Karat. Daily, event, career, and other bonuses give credits out in 5 to 30 carat increments, though a variety of other specialized currencies get doled out too, meaning you get few carats per day. If you exhaust all your career/team/special event races, you're likely to only get enough for one or two pulls. And the further you get, the fewer long-term awards you will get, limiting your daily income.
This wouldn't be a huge deal if the game had a more typical number of pulls needed to get a banner character. However, it takes around 300 pulls before you are guaranteed to win. For context, other games utilizing this mechanic typically set their pity pull rate at around 40 to 50 pulls. That places the pull rate for Umamusume: Pretty Derby at 6 to 7 times the threshold that other games of its ilk. This, according to folks who play AFK Arena, ZZZ, or other games with this sort of setup, is madness.
Put another way, it could cost a player $70 to guarantee a winning pull for the featured character, and you have to move quickly. I can only imagine the sort of money someone truly hooked to this game might spend.
If you have a predisposition that makes gacha gambling an issue for you, PLEASE steer clear of this game. The girls are quirky and fun, but it is absolutely [not] worth your rent money. I will speak to the actual experience of playing the game later, but you deserve this heads up from the outset.
Cygames has already gone through this. The initial Japanese release had the same problem and, over the course of time, got enough quality-of-life improvements that it's not quite so predatory. When the game released on Korea, Cygames apparently released it in more-or-less the same state that it was in for the Japanese market, providing that new market a better experience since the lessons were already learned.
The Global release didn't get that treatment. They introduced the game in a more player-hostile state, and elected to double the rewards and experience points for a limited time. This has led a lot of players to maximize their limited roster, burn through the initial freebies, and stuck with the slow dripfeed of content and Karats to try and keep pace. This strategy seems to be banking on a small core of whales, players willing to spend obscene amounts of money, leaving free-to-play players and players out of the release strategy.
A month later and around ten dollars poorer, I have abandoned the game. The girls’ stories are the chief reason I am invested, and the gameplay loop is fun in the moment but gets stale after a while. I optimized my team about as far as I reasonably could with the umas I had acquired, and did multiple career runs with most of them. I managed to win a couple time-sensitive events, acquired a couple of my favorites, and upgraded several to a point where they performed well and acquired their signature racewear.
Then, budgeting my Karats for a banner period for a character I like, I tried to maximize my odds of pulling her. I played as much as I reasonably could, saved up, and pulled when I could. By the end of the banner period, I ended up dumping the last of my freebie karats to see if I'd get lucky. When nothing came of it, I decided I'd had enough.
TL;DR: I wish I could recommend it. The actual playing experience was solid, the bite-sized story bits were a lot of fun, and the gameplay loop is solid. And it souunds like players in other markets are getting a much better experience. Still, the current game economy is tailor-made to suck you dry financially, and until that changes to make FTP a bit less hostile, I would advise steering clear.