1 Jan 2026
Today is the start of year 2026. Just the past few weeks, my work colleague had introduced me to a smartphone video game where you can train humanized racehorses. The game is called Umamusume: Pretty Derby.
To summarize the game, it is a video game created by Japanese publisher Cygames, which centralizes on moe anthropomorphized racehorses known as Umamusume.
The Japanese characters for umamusume are ウマ娘, in which ウマ means horse while 娘 (kanji for musume) means girls, thus the literal translation is "Horse Girls" with the individual words taken into account.
In this video game, the horse-girl characters, called Umamusume, are to compete in races at various racetracks inspired by real-life race tracks managed by the Japan Racing Association. The umamusumes are named and inspired from actual racehorses, where they reflects namesakes' personalities, racing records, and relationships with other racehorses.
Players are to play as trainers. A trainer is responsible for raising and training horse-girl characters called Umamusume to compete in races whilst achieving the Umamusume's individual goals.
In the single person "Career" mode, players are allowed to choose their desired trainee or a scenario such as URA Finale or Unity Cup. After choosing, they have to meet various goals such as hitting a certain amount of fans or get top 5 or 3 place in certain races when their turns are up. To meet the goals, players can take turns to increase their trainee's five attributes (speed, stamina, power, guts, and wit), rest or recreation to restore energy or mood, or enter races to earn skill points and fans. In addition, unforeseen events between the goals throughout the Career can also impact the trainee's mood, attributes, and skills, which will in turn impact the performance of the trainee.
Besides the single person option, players can also utilize their best trainees and compete with other players in a set of races for various rewards via the PvP "Team Trials", "Legend Races", and "Champion's Meeting" races.
