I’ve been thinking a lot about Mikey, Plague and Graham the past few days. I’m actually putting together an altar for them that I’ll share when it’s done, but it’s just a little corner of my room that I can reflect and think about them. I can say in general that two things resonate and feel right:
- The average advice given may distill down to “you should play video games about that.”
- I should keep playing new stuff, because they’re not around to.
So, the pitch: The game is horse racing, but the horses are cute anime girls and they just run around the track. The concessions to them being horse people are a tail and horse ears.
It is Umamusume: Pretty Derby, it’s on Steam and mobile and, this should be mentioned, it rules.
It’s basically Monster Rancher’s gameplay loop where the battles and tournaments are replaced with races, which has a decently deep strategy element, and also is about half slice-of-life anime. I thought about it and thought about it some more, and decided that Graham would absolutely play the horse game. I’ve been playing for a few hours and I may be the best horse person trainer that ever lived.
Front and center is Silence Suzuka, the quiet, reserved horse girl that just thinks the scenery looks best when there’s nobody in front of her. Her hobbies include running, her special skill is running, and on her downtime, she likes to go running. Committed to the grind. She’s currently singing and dancing because the winner of the race is also the star performer in the post-race concert, because that makes sense.
On the right is the actual Silence Suzuka, circa 1998. Yeah apparently all of the characters are actual racehorses of greater or lesser renown. So that’s neat. I like that they incorporated the design elements the way they did.
Honestly it’s just a solid formula. I loved OG Monster Rancher on PSX, grabbing different CDs to make monsters with and loving the incremental progress, the planning the final weeks up to the next big event, it’s just a good system. The gacha elements feel completely optional and concern themselves with areas of the game other than the main story and career modes.
So yeah, I recommend it, it’s very approachable and cute and a good time.