{"id":4532,"date":"2025-12-19T15:00:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T22:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/?p=4532"},"modified":"2025-09-24T21:32:50","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T03:32:50","slug":"video-game-umamusume-pretty-derby-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2025\/12\/19\/video-game-umamusume-pretty-derby-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"VIDEO GAME: Umamusume – Pretty Derby (2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Umamusume:Umamusume: Pretty Derby
<\/u><\/strong>Year: 2025
Rating: T
Time Played: ~36 hours<\/p>\n

I was first introduced to Umamusume<\/em> a few months ago when I saw a random Reddit post about an anime girl running on a track like a racehorse. When I looked into it a little more, I found there was a whole anime and mobile game called Umamusume: Pretty Derby<\/em> that basically boils down to famous Japanese racehorses re-imagined as pop-idol anime girls racing to be the best. Of course, I had to try it out. While it\u2019s a pretty standard gatcha game containing tons of characters with lots of personality, Umamusume<\/em> doesn\u2019t have much going on for a free-to-play player.<\/p>\n

Just like other gatcha games, Umamusume<\/em> allows you to pull for characters and cards, which are used to give these horse girls abilities to help them race better. The real issue is that there seems to be one card that\u2019s overpowered, which makes doing a career run fairly easy. Sure, I still had to figure out which skills to prioritize, but once I got a hang of winning the career mode (which is sometimes like a dating sim), the part that remained was to upgrade my horse girls. This was the biggest issue with the game.<\/p>\n

In most gatchas, the materials needed to upgrade a character are not locked to an individual character. While my fundamental problem is how much of the currency is needed to do any upgrades at all, powering up individual characters requires a ton of \u201cstars,\u201d which are only for that character and are pretty rare to obtain. As such, while this is a \u201clong game\u201d gatcha that requires months of steady progress, it gets boring pretty quickly (especially when a career run takes 30 minutes each). For now, I can\u2019t compete with any other players\u2019 buildouts, and that\u2019s just fine.<\/p>\n

An amusing concept trapped behind a terrible in-game economy, I give Umamusume: Pretty Derby<\/em> 3.0 stars out of 5.<\/p>\n

\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\"\u00a0\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\"\u00a0\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\"<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Umamusume: Pretty DerbyYear: 2025Rating: TTime Played: ~36 hours I was first introduced to Umamusume a few months ago when I saw a random Reddit post about an anime girl running on a track like a racehorse. When I looked into it a little more, I found there was a whole anime and mobile game called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,3353,1900],"tags":[4189,4351,4349,3522,4350,4352,688,4347,4348,8,4346,4345,906],"class_list":["post-4532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3-0-stars","category-free-to-play","category-video-game","tag-4189","tag-anime-girls","tag-dating-sim","tag-gatcha","tag-horse-racing","tag-idols","tag-japanese","tag-pretty-derby","tag-racehorse","tag-review","tag-umamusume","tag-umamusume-pretty-derby","tag-video-game"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4532"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4539,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4532\/revisions\/4539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}