A Review of Umamusume: Pretty Derby
Conclusion
All in all, it has been a lot of fun delving into this franchise and its fanbase. It's a strange IP, but there's a lot to love about it if you can get onto its wavelength. If you enjoy character studies and competition and cute girls, this series is pretty easy to recommend. If you can engage with the series through the anime, manga, and online community engagement and steer clear of the game, I'd recommend it for now. If the game's economy becomes less miserable, or you're less susceptible to gambling issues and misery from the gacha grind, these girls' multifacetedness is explored in greater detail there.
I feel that these last couple months engaging with Umamusume have been a net positive. I've found characters that I really like, whose stories have stuck with me and make me think. I especially like how the series handles personal struggles surrounding injuries and invisible disability and how they can affect athletes. It's a consistent throughline and I think they handle it gracefully.
It's also cute. The girls are cute, their relationships with each other are cute, and they're just a lot of fun. It's not surprising that fans have declared different characters their surrogate daughters. If you have any sort of maternal/paternal/mentoring instincts, you'll likely find yourself grafting to one or more of them.
So yeah, I recommend digging into the series. Horse-girl madness is a lot of fun, if you can rock with it.
Run Your Own Race: Mourning Haru Urara
If any singular experience captured the ups and downs of the Uma enthusiast community online, the passing of IRL race horse Haru Urara would be it. She passed away on September 9, 2025, after a long life. She had previously had a cult following among race horsing fans as the "crown champion of losers everywhere," famed for a winless career, though she did win an exhibition with other retired horses late in life. She was adapted by Cygames into the character of a plucky, pink-haired dimwit with a heart of gold and relentless spirit.
I happened to catch her passing via Reddi. In the hours that followed the announcement, folks posted fanart and screenshots from the game, either showcasing that they featured Urara as their main menu uma, or that they were doing a career run in memoriam. Those with the adequate preparations maximized their Urara builds to win the Arima Kinen, a race she's usually doomed to lose by a wide margin. Granting her in-game avatar the glory of victory beyond anything she ever experienced was the best way some folks knew to pay their respects.
Haru Urara's life was a refutation of the use of the term "try-hard" as a pejorative. You should make an effort, strive to be the best you can be, even if your best isn't the objective best.
Some users lamented her passing, but expressed thanks to Cygames for their depiction of her. One in particular stood out to me. They mentioned that they had experienced a lot of setbacks and hardship these last couple years, but that Urara's particular brand of "never give up" cheer has been motivating them to rediscover their ambitions and goals and start making plans to improve their situation.
One of my friends, proofreading this section for me, commentated on Urara's legacy and resonance beautifully:
we saw the things that terrified us, the cave bears and lions, the plagues, the diseases, the disasters, and we chased them down over and over again until we’d chased them into the hole where nightmares go to die.The mark of human exceptionalism is not who we are at our peak it’s who we are as we’re chasing things that we can’t reach
We climbed down from trees and then up into the sky and onward into the stars, and it took us millions of years but now a bunch of dumb apes fly metal birds for fun.
She might have been the crown champion of losers but we are a species of losers at everything except building ladders so she was in good company.
It is remarkable to see a patently unsuccessful race horse from half a world away, whose media portrayal can inspire people to start pursuing their dreams again. Her whole thing, both in life and in her Umamusume rendition, is that, no matter how long the odds or how many times she'd failed before, she never gave up. She kept running, being the best she could possibly be, and ended up finding an audience who found her tenacity compelling. At her old stables, her fans poured out their love and support by sending flowers and gifts, and here's what that ultimately looked like:
Had I not gotten neck-deep into one of the silliest franchises I'd ever heard of, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to feel big feelings about a creature that insipred folks to keep trying in the face of hardship. I wouldn't have gotten to see the outpouring of love folks had for her, and how her memory living on through this silly game is continuing to carry that legacy onward. It's really cool. If I got abolutely nothing else from the experience, I am glad to have mourned with other fans as we mutually cherished our opportunity to feel for a horse that we'd otherwise have never heard of.
Her story has even found its way into my subconcious. I had a dream recently where I ended up at an awards ceremony for a sports team, but it was at the school gym in my old home town. For whatever reason, I was given recognition for building others up. Though I'd never been a particularly capable athlete, I had been a key supporter in pushing the people around me to strive for greatness.
I have no idea why my subconcious casted me into the role of crown champion of losers everywhere, especially considering I didn't really participate in school sports. It's such an odd blend of self-agrandizing and self-deprecating, and I have not yet unpacked what that means to me. But, clearly, I have internalized something of Haru Urara in how I see myself.
So, as I step away from this franchise, I hope to carry her legacy through a more charitable outlook at the things I kinda suck at. Between writing and music, and new ventures into coding and web development, I am prone to perfectionism, thinkin that whatever I do needs to meet an unfairly high standard to justify itself. I'd like to be a bit more like Haru Urara: I've got things I love, and I should pursue them with my whole heart because I want to be my very best at it. Even if my best is just okay.