Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Game Review
Umamusume: Pretty Derby – After a series of resounding successes in the fields of mobile games and anime, Cygames – the name behind famous brands such as Granblue Fantasy, Shadowverse nice Princess Connect! Re:Dive – has once again proven his unlimited ambition with Umamusume: Pretty Derby.
Up to now, Umamusume: Pretty Derby has reached the milestone… tens of millions of downloads, reaped countless awards in the gaming and anime industries, and has a loyal fan community spread across Asia.
It’s hard to believe that a game just about… horse racing, and also a “horse racing anime girl”, achieved such an outstanding success, almost creating an unbelievable effect across many social networking platforms!
So, Umamusume: Pretty Derby What qualities do gamers have that make them so crazy? What’s so great about “Race Horse Girl”? Let’s find out the truth with Vietgame.asia.
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Welcome to Tracen Academy!
In Umamusume: Pretty Derbyyou will play the role of a trainer specifically for “horses” – human individuals who possess the souls of “horses from another world”, with features such as horse ears instead of human ears and a cute tail, but possess speed and strength far beyond normal people, and it seems they were born to race.
In fact, the game’s “story” mode is divided into two different parts. On one side is “Story Mode”, where the plot is told in a “visual novel” style, telling about the lives and efforts of cute ladies to win, and on the other side is “Career Mode”, where you really show off your coaching talent to train girls to become great runners.
In Career Mode, you will play in roguelite style and training simulator. Before each turn, you will prepare two “parents” to pass on stats and skills to the girl, then choose 6 cards to help the students practice – this is very important and can decide whether our girl can overcome the challenge or not.
Each horse will have 5 separate indicators, namely Speed (speed), Stamina (stamina), Power (strength), Guts (courage), Wit (intelligence), along with a set of skills that the coach can arbitrarily choose to use Skill Points to buy, and your mission is to go from a young horse just entering school to becoming a great runner.
The game takes place in turns, each turn you can choose a training method to “practice” for her, or give her a day of rest to recover her energy, or even take her out to help her mood become more comfortable.
Interspersed between each turn will be unexpected and random events, which can be events directly related to the student (thereby expressing their personality) or originating from the support cards that the player chooses at the beginning of a “turn”. These random events are what make the turns completely different and players will have to react to unexpected events that occur in each turn.
In each turn, the player will have to compete with other knights, and the task is usually to be in the top 5, top 3 or even the champion. If they fail, the turn will be stopped immediately. In this race, players will not need to do anything, they can only… cheer for their student, and “pray to God” that she has enough stats to win or activate her skills at the right time.
Actually, I wrote it without even playing it Umamusume: Pretty Derby I didn’t think the game could be so… addictive, but the random element has made the game a bottomless “black hole of time” if you don’t manage your time well. Even if you have a “top of the top” support deck and superior parents, just one failed practice can cause you to get the full combo of “poor mood, reduced stats, bad effects” and even lose an important race in the story line.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby brings great addiction
At the end of a turn, the nurse will become a “Veteran Umamusume” with stats and skills called “spark” that can be used to pass on to a future practitioner. The special thing is that “spark” is completely random, so if you want a strong girl, you will have to “find” a strong parent to increase your starting stats, but if you want strong parents, you have to “plow” random spark to hope to get strong enough spark, creating an endless and extremely attractive loop.
Of course, the results are also extremely worthy. In Umamusume: Pretty Derby, there are two main PvP modes: “Team Trial” and “Champion’s Meeting”, Team Trial is a mode that is more… comfortable and relaxing, while “Champions Meeting” is a mode where you are forced to train a top horse to stand on the podium – and what’s better than seeing the girl you worked so hard to train to be in the top 1?
In the final battle of the first Champions Meeting, Taurus Cup, when entering the final race, the opponent’s Agnes Tachyon was leading with a distance of 6 horse lengths, but then Symboli Rudolf accelerated. A little more, a little more… Symboli Rudolf is taking over! Can she make it happen? Just a little more… and Rudolf wins! The distance is a neck! Symboli Rudolf from behind brought glorious glory to the writer! An indescribable feeling, both proud and happy.
It is because of these moments, the urge to stand on that peak, that the writer evaluates Umamusume: Pretty Derby brings great addiction.
Extremely high production quality!
What is worth mentioning is the production quality of Umamusume: Pretty Derby is very high, and the writer’s rating is probably higher than most current popular gacha games.
Normally, when mentioning “visual novels”, people will imagine 2D character “sprites” standing still, at most changing facial expressions to better match the dialogue. Still inside Umamusume: Pretty Derbythe character sprites are all rendered in 3D with shading edges with smooth facial and body movements, and when there are many characters, the character models are rotated appropriately.
To the point, the surrounding scenes will also change and the blur and close-ups, combined with 100% voice acting, make the Story Mode experience more similar to watching an anime than playing a “visual novel” game.
This makes playing “Career Mode” and seeing the knights very enjoyable, and also makes experiencing the game much more pleasant and relaxing.
The next highlight is the music. If you don’t know, every time the girls win a race, they will be “celebrated” by holding a… music concert with songs like true idols.
It can be said that the songs are in Umamusume: Pretty Derby It’s quite good and catchy, with a strong Japanese idol style, and there’s nothing better than watching our favorite horse dancing and singing on a brightly lit stage.
Another point that the writer wants to mention is the quality of the races. The races are designed and followed closely like the real-life version, with racetracks full of components from corners, straights, uphill, downhill… modeled almost “exactly the original” from the real-life racetrack, even the commentators comment like a real horse racing commentator.
The Story Mode experience is more like watching an anime than playing a “visual novel” game.
During the race, the random simulations are also closely followed by reality, from the “late start” phase, to the “traffic jam” phase – when the horse is blocked on all sides and cannot speed up… combined with beautiful graphics and the cuteness of the girls brings a very thrilling experience every time we watch a race.
Coming to the sprint of each race, hearing the audience cheering and the commentator rushing, Biwa Hayahide was leading but his opponent’s Gold Ship was accelerating and closing the gap. 300m… 200m… 100m left… Biwa Hayahide wins by a distance of… a nose! The audience cheered, Biwa waved to the audience… it truly felt like watching a real horse race.
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“Blood sucking”
Of course a gacha game has to be “blood-sucking”, but really Umamusume: Pretty Derby has taken “bloodsucking” to a new level.
You imagine that to have a “usable” support card like Kitasan Black, you must at least “unlock” Limit Break 3, which means… spin this card 4 times. The chance of dropping Kitasan Black is 0.75%, and if you spin enough… 200 times, you will be able to choose 1 Kitasan Black!
That means, if you are unlucky, to get 1 LB3 Kitasan Black you will have to spend… 800 spins, which at the current price is about… 1700 USD! Of course, such a bad luck rate is not too high, but actually the price to buy money to spin cards in this game is very high, much higher than other games.
The writer alone spent about 150 USD, but also had to be relatively lucky, and can only be called having an “acceptable” support deck. Imagine, if you are a “free to play” player, you will probably encounter quite a few obstacles when experiencing the game.
Not to mention the upland codes… which also have to be “rotated”, but at least the upland code does not require 5 copies to operate smoothly.
A gacha game must be “blood-sucking”, but really Umamusume: Pretty Derby has taken “bloodsucking” to a new level
Time-sucking
As mentioned above, the game revolves around training great racers, and that usually means… you have to complete a complete round of play, winning URA Finale to get the highest stats.
But there are many random obstacles that naturally “grow” out of nowhere, like your girl Mejiro McQueen… dreaming of the Gold Ship tying her to a rocket and launching it into space, causing lack of sleep, then getting the bad effect “Night Owl” causing your mood to drop, then before you can go for treatment, “Night Owl” kicks in and your mood and energy drop another level.
Or right before summer training – an extremely important time where training methods increase in effectiveness – your girl gets the “Debauchery” effect that causes her to… skip training for the entire summer.
So one turn is considered a waste…
Even if you complete a turn with an index of 1200 SS, you only have… 2% to receive a 3-star spark, necessary to pass it on strongly to the next generation. If you receive 1 intelligence star, that round is considered abandoned, and you have to do a new round…
And if you want to compete at the top of Champion’s Meeting, your output must be even more meticulous. You will need S level in the race distance, something that must be… random to do, and have all the necessary skills from support cards, something… also random, maybe you won’t have any real skills that turn.
In general, this training is extremely time consuming, and it is even more difficult if you do not deposit money and use cards like “rags” to play the game, so fans will need to think about investing time and money for Umamusume: Pretty Derby.
fans will need to think about investing time and money Umamusume: Pretty Derby
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