I love this community, but I hope you dwarves don't fall into the pitfall of Tribalism & Toxic positivity.

Oftentimes when people read a game review, a question that may come up is: "What gives you the right to critique my game?". The 9000 hours they've spent in DRG or other roguelite games serve as their answers to that question. It shows that they have enough knowledge & experience in order to construct their feedback.

You can have fun with Rogue Core, but "fun" should never be used as an excuse to silence criticism. Game companies are not your friend. In order to gain trust they have to deliver a good product, and feedback, whether positive or negative, is necessary for Ghost Ship Games to improve the game.

Rock and Stone!

TLDR: Despite Cygames' typical generosity with pulls, Umamusume has a highly predatory game design that drains dedicated players' time and wallets through a hyper-competitive, PvP-focused endgame.

To be competitive in PvP, the game requires multiple MLB support cards acquired through archaic JP gacha system with severe lack of universal Support card LB resource, and typical gacha powercreep that will eventually make old units obsolete in PvP.

Then, Torena-san must spend lots of hours going through a brutal, RNG-heavy grind just to get "1 bottle of Uma glue" every 30 minutes. Rather than improving the RNG for free, Cygames monetizes player frustration by selling QoL subscriptions.

While casual fans can enjoy the game as a free, high-quality visual novel, the deep parasocial relationship fostered by cute horse girls & excellent storywriting, combined with Cygames' freebies, further reinforces tribalism, with many players using "fun" as an argument to silence criticisms from dedicated players who got burned out by a time-consuming, expensive, and highly P2W endgame loop.

(Disclaimer: English isn't my first language, and my knowledge of the JP servers comes from internet search rather than firsthand experience.)

450+ hours spent making Uma Glue. Perhaps I'm addicted to horse girls.

Quick Introduction

Umamusume: Pretty Derby is a gacha game where real-life elite Japanese thoroughbreds are anthropomorphized into funny horse girls. The game is renowned for its excellent character design, storywriting & filled with attention to details. The franchise also has top-tier anime, manga, and music production, rivaling Japanese giants like Idolm@ster & Love Live; while breathing new life into horse racing. On top of that, Cygames reinvests back into horse racing through sponsorships & donations. The game won the "Best Mobile Game" award at The Game Awards 2025.

The gameplay loop involves training a character in Career mode while reading the stories of that character, from slice of life to all sorts of drama & rivalries inspired by their real-life counterparts' legacy, resembling a Tamagotchi-style raising sim. After that, you use the result of a career run (Veteran Umamusume) to do other content. (Career mode tutorial)

We all know that Cygames has the reputation of giving away lots of freebies & randomly throwing pulls out of nowhere (Glory to Cygames!!!). However, game development is a business, and oftentimes such generosity is merely an illusion. If the developers shower you with pulls, there's a high chance they're gonna design the game in a way to drain your savings. Umamusume is no exception.

Despite Cygames being "generous" with pulls, the game is still considered unforgiving by many Torena-san. This is the result of multiple intertwined design choices:

• A highly competitive, PvP-focused endgame
• Dupe-reliant support cards with a severe lack of universal limit-break currency
• A bloated gacha pool and typical powercreep
• A tedious, RNG-heavy gameplay loop "alleviated" by expensive microtransactions and QoL subscriptions (in JP).

1: The PvP Endgame

The excitement of winning your first career races will eventually fade away, and once you've read all available stories, the Endgame is there to provide long-term engagement.

Besides typical story events there are some gameplay events, but they don't add much in terms of gameplay:

• Golshi Week, 37.6 pulls login rewards & a more difficult Career mode with 1.2M gold rewards
• Fuji Kiseki's Show Time, more difficult career mode with random rewards
• Trainer Aptitude Test, career mode with side objectives
• Racing Carnival, harder Legend Races & a bunch of repetitive menu clicks

Naturally, like many sports games, PvP is the main repeatable content. Watching hyper-optimized umas battle for position, meet skill conditions, and backliners executing late-race overtakes (ft. The Unsinkable Gold Ship) can be an adrenaline-pumping experience. Competition is one hell of a drug.

However, as we all know, Gacha + PvP has always been a disastrous combo, especially when premium currency is on the line.

Wisdom shared by The Mun

Many modern KR/CN gacha games either front-load their rewards on lower ranks & have high-rank rewards mostly just flexing rights (title, small premium currency bonus) so that casuals don't feel bad when losing, or no PvP at all. Here are some examples:

Blue Archive director Kim Yong Ha shared at a conference that the importance of PVP elements in BA has been intentionally set low to avoid ruining the players' love for the characters. His development philosophies are also reflected in how premium currency (Pyroxene) rewards are distributed:

• Pyroxenes in Total Assault (Leaderboard Raid) are frontloaded, with Gold -> Platinum rank netting you only 200 pyroxene (1.67 pulls). Grand Assault gives you a 10-pull ticket regardless of ranks. Unless you're in a club with rank requirements, reaching Platinum is mostly for sense of pride & accomplishment.
• Joint Firing Drill (Roster check) & Final Restriction Release (Tower Raid) has no pyroxene rewards.
• Tactical Challenge (PvP) splits the playerbase into brackets. You can reach Top 500 (takes 10 battles every 6 months) & never touch it again, treating it as daily free 20 pyroxenes (0.16 pulls). Many clubs don't have Tactical Challenge rank requirements. PvP is arse anyways.
• During story events, all 12 event stages can be 3★'d using 3★ students, while difficult challenge stages give only 2 pulls total.

He also stated that this is not limited to Blue Archive, other games are also moving in the direction of reducing PVP and even reducing the importance of cooperative play. Genshin Impact is another pioneer example with how the game being intentionally designed towards casual players:

• There's no combat PvP
• Domain Co-op is mostly just for fun or to help new players.
• Most events are very casual-friendly, with all primogems rewards being front-loaded into the easiest objectives.
• You can 9★ Spiral Abyss floor 12 if you follow the guides on KeqingMains & have good artifacts. Imaginarium Theatre is a roster check that allows you to borrow trial characters & characters from your friends. Stygian Onslaught has rewards front-loaded into the lower difficulties.

Umamusume, on the other hand, incentivizes tryharding and spending by giving more premium currency toward high ranks.

Below are the PvP modes & their rewards. To summarize: an average player can get about 30 pulls every month from PvP & Clubs, assuming you have good game knowledge & put effort grinding, which is a considerable amount for F2Ps & low spenders. Cygames really wants you to grind PvP.

1.1: Team Trials

Game8 Tutorial

You form 5 teams of 3 veteran umamusume to run against other players. Your umas accumulate scores by activating skills, placing higher & winning multiple races in a row. Your high score of the week decides whether you get promoted, keep your rank, or demoted at weekly reset. AFAIK the strategy is to activate as many skills as possible.

Carats are awarded weekly depending on your Team Trials Class. There's a daily challenge that requires you to play 1 game of Team Trials, and is a pre-requisite for full daily completion rewards. Story events require you to play 40 times. Steam Achievement requires 500.

Rewards (x1.5 for Global's accelerated schedule)

Class	Carats
1	0
2	25
3	50
4	75
5	150
6	250

1.2: Champions' Meeting

GameTora Tutorial

Monthly competitive 3v3v3 PvP with limited entries per day. Whoever finishes 1st wins. Track layout & conditions are announced weeks prior, so that torena-san can research & prepare specialized umamusume for the event.

This is where Umamusume's gameplay truly shines, which involves studying a specific track's layout, understanding how skills interact with the track & with each other, choosing the right Support Cards for the right skills, grinding parent umas that pass down the correct traits,... You can spend hours researching & building your own playstyle.

There are 2 brackets:

• Open League: will be A+ max in Global. There are min-maxxers who use calculators & race simulators to engineer their uma while remaining under the rating cap. (example run by LinhSaky)
• Graded League: no restrictions, filled with high-rollers & meta slaves

Qualifiers (You earn rewards based on the amount of wins in an entry & qualify to group A by winning 3/5 races in a single entry.)

Round	0 Wins	1 Win	2 Wins	3 Wins	4 Wins	5 Wins
Open Round 1	5	10	15	20	25	30
Open Round 2 Group B	10	15	20	30	40	50
Open Round 2 Group A	15	20	30	40	50	100
Graded Round 1	10	15	20	30	40	50
Graded Round 2 Group B	15	20	30	40	50	100
Graded Round 2 Group A	20	30	40	50	75	150

As you can see, 5/5 wins gives you more carats.

The Finals (1 race, may the RNG god bless you)

Finals	3rd Place	2nd Place	1st Place
Open Group B	500	600	700
Open Group A	700	850	1000
Graded Group B	700	900	1200
Graded Group A	1200	1800	2500

1.3: League Of Heroes (JP)

GameWith JP Tutorial

Welcome to Torena-san's Rift. What a name choice.

Competitive 3v3 (+6 AI) Ranked PvP with limited entries per day similar to Champions' Meeting. Fixed track layout, but weather & track conditions rotate every 5 races.

You gain score & rank up depending on placements of your 3 uma. Top 96 players are qualified for an "extra stage".

Placement	Score
1st	100 pt
2nd	60 pt
3rd	40 pt
4th	30 pt
5th	20 pt
6th - 12th	10 pt

Rank up Rewards

Rank	Total Score	Carats
Bronze 2	1,000	30
Bronze 3	2,000	30
Bronze 4	3,000	30
Silver 1	4,000	50
Silver 2	5,500	50
Silver 3	7,000	100
Silver 4	8,500	100
Gold 1	10,000	150
Gold 2	12,500	150
Gold 3	15,000	300
Gold 4	17,500	300
Platinum 1	20,000	500
Platinum 2	23,000	500
Platinum 3	26,000	500
Platinum 4	30,000	500
Platinum 4+	Every 2000 points	100

Score Leaderboard Rewards

Top	Carats
1	5000
2	4000
3	3000
96	1500
300	1200
1000	900
10000	750
30000	500

1.4: Club Leaderboards

Game8 Tutorial

If you're a dedicated player you may as well join a club, trade dirt shoes & earn some rewards. Every month clubs gets awarded depending on the total amount of "fans" all 30 members earned during that month. Many clubs have specific daily/weekly fan quota required in order to stay in the club, for top clubs it can be 5-7 runs per day.

You gain Fans by racing in Career or playing Team Trials. You can just prepare PvP umamusume & earn fans naturally, or do specialized runs aimed to maximize fans earned.

Rewards (x1.5 for Global's accelerated schedule)

Top	Carats & Club Points
10	3000
30	2400
100	2100
500	1800
1000	1500
3000	1200
5000	900
7000	600
10000	300
10001+	150

2: The Gacha

Some basic information about the gacha:

• 3% for 3-stars/SSRs, with 0.5-0.75% for featured units
• All units remain in gacha pools
• 1 pull = 150 carats. There are daily discounted pulls which costs 50 paid carats.
• No pity. Spark at 200 pulls with no carryover. You can reach spark without getting a single copy of featured unit. Example tweet of Torena-san reaching spark 2 times without having pulled a single featured unit
• A full spark (200 pulls) in this game costs ~$420 without any purchase bonuses.
• New banners drop every 2 weeks. Most units only get one rerun; some never get reran at all.

2.1: Umamusume (Pretty Derby) Gacha

Once pulled, all characters are immediately playable in Career without needing to upgrade, allowing you to instantly have fun & umapyoi the girls. Most of their power comes from support cards.

However, as good as their storywriting is, you cannot experience their career stories without pulling them first. LARPing is a common lifestyle.

The banners are also filled with alternate costumes. In JP, more than 50% of the 3★ units are just alts. Each alt only has a new unique skill, a new potential skill set, and 3 new story events related to the costume. Same career & stories as original versions. Pulling an alt costume has minimal value unless you haven't pulled any version of that character, you really like the costume/character, or the alt is strong in PvP. (data from GameTora, change server to Japan)

Duplicates grant Star Pieces for the pulled Uma, and Goddess Statues for universal star piece exchange. However, almost all Umamusume are perfectly viable at 3★. Additionally, if you're an Open League min-maxxer, NEVER star up your umamusume beyond 3★. Starring up adds +1 unique skill level (+170 rating), almost equal to a green skill (+174) for negligible bonuses, which cannot be undone. Many min-maxxers avoid upgrading unique skills by avoiding starring up & intentionally failing scenario requirements to ensure their uma remains under the Open League rating cap.

At some point after the 3rd anniversary, there will be semi-limited umamusume during anni/half-anni. They can't be acquired from selectors, or selectable in step-up gacha, and have reduced rate of being spooked. Here are all semi-limited umas currently in JP:

• Jungle Pocket
• Gentildonna
• Orfevre
• Still in Love
• Cinderella Gray Oguri Cap (Alt)
• Stay Gold
• Almond Eye

All umamusume are limited by their aptitudes, potential/evolution skill sets, and unique skill conditions. Some will excel on specific tracks while being weak/okay in others. Some are meta for a long time.

What about powercreep? While any Uma can theoretically win PvP with a decent support deck & good parents (Example tweet), new Uma/alts in JP are built to be stronger & sometimes even more specialized towards specific tracks/playstyles with better potential skill sets, very specific skill conditions & better activation consistency, especially the semi-limited ones. Here's an example of difference between year 1 & latest JP uma:

Christmas Oguri Cap (Year 1 & Year 2 medium/long meta)

• Unique skill: +Max Speed, Acceleration & HP in 2nd half of the raceafter activating 3 recovery skills, requiring proper skill activation timing. Her potential skill set includes Triple 7s (+HP at 777m left), which can be used to time her unique.
• "First-hand Christmas Miracle" evolution skill (Long): +Max Speed & HP at final corner while being near the inner fence.

Cinderella Gray Oguri Cap (4.5 anniversary, strong in Mile + Arima Kinen)

• Unique skill: +Max Speed while in between top 20% & 70%, stronger in in Mile races and on the Arima Kinen course with at least 146738 fans (reference to 1990 Arima Kinen)
• "Undying Flame" evolution skill (Mile, Long): +Max Speed at a random point in Mid-race while being in top 50%. Then, +Max Speed at 200m remaining if you've done at least 1 dueling at final straight.
• "Let Your Name Shake Heaven and Earth" evolution skill (Pace Chaser・Long・2500 m・Nakayama Racecourse, a.k.a Arima Kinen): +Acceleration at Late race, stronger if she were within 10 lengths from the lead around the end of the Mid race.
• Basically historic horse racing moments being weaponized to make money.

Almond Eye (5th Anniversary, absolute menace in Medium tracks)

• Unique skill: +Current Speed when in top 50%, stronger in Medium race, instant speed boost without needing to accelerate. Then, +Acceleration in Zenkai Spurt (late-rate acceleration if speed stat is at least 2000)
• "The Next Phase" evolution skill (Pace Chaser): +Max Speed If you're in top 50% at a random point during the second half of mid-race, stronger if your Speed stat is at least 1200.
• "Assured Victory" Evolution skill (Pace Chaser): +Max Speed at a random point during the second half of mid-race, then +Acceleration at last spurt

Ironically, while the cute horse girls are the franchise's main selling point, in order to have a smooth career experience, complete difficult event challenges, or be competitive in PvP, you need good support cards.

2.2: Support card gacha

Unlike character banners where pulling the first copy of an uma is worthy for celebration, for support cards, it is just the beginning. Most support cards require 3LB or MLB to be viable, as crucial stats like Training Effectiveness and Specialty Priority are locked behind dupes.

There are currently 200+ SSRs in JP, many of which are fillers & niches. Getting "spooked" by an off-banner SSR grants zero benefits unless it miraculously happens to be a card you want. This is why "SSR Guaranteed" tickets and banners are often considered scams by players. (data from GameTora, change server to Japan)

You can use Uncap Crystals to limit break any card, requiring 20 Shards to exchange 1 Crystal. However, you still need to pull for duplicates because:

• You cannot exchange Cleats, the currency acquired from destroying unused duplicates, for shards.
• Events and battle passes only hand out enough Shards for roughly 4 crystals per year (JP), making those crystals extremely rare & valuable

Additionally, there are scenario support cards, designed to be very strong in a specific scenario only. With Cygames releasing new scenarios every 4 months instead of 6, F2Ps/Low Spenders are expected to borrow them instead of pulling.

There are free support cards, and here are how to acquire & limit break them:

Main story support cards:

• First copy granted by finishing a story chapter
• Join a club, trade dirt shoes to get club points, then grind fans to get your club into higher ranks to get more club points, which can be used to exchange for support card duplicates.
• You get more fans for winning career races -> pull & upgrade support cards for better chance winning

Event support cards:

• Play career mode, level up the event "battle pass" & roll the Prize Derby roulette.
• Progress depend on your career results + event bonuses from unlocked umamusume & support cards -> pull & upgrade support cards for faster event progression.

Your support card collection gains a buff to your Team Trials score, depending on their levels (up to 50%):

Card Level	Bonus (Per Card)
20	+0.01%
25-35	+0.02%
40	+0.03%
50	+0.05%

(Note: In JP, this system was updated to be based purely on the rarity of MLB cards: R cards give +0.03%, while MLB SR and SSR cards give +0.05%.)

SR cards are viable for endgame & PvP at the moment in Global, but in the future full MLB SSR decks will become the norm when veterans manage to build a decent support collection.

Eventually Support cards will get powercrept with new ones having better stats, skill point bonuses, granting 2 gold skills instead of 1, with many skills having better activation conditions. Even the old "Human Rights" ones like SSR Speed Kitasan Black will eventually fall out of the PvP meta. In the future, cards released during anni/half-anni are usually "Human Rights" tier, pressuring competitive players to pull & MLB them. Your SRs & free welfare SSRs will eventually be obsolete at high-tier PvP.

You cannot escape the support gacha.

2.3: Free pull events

There are daily free pull events during special events like Anniversary, about 100-120 pulls per event. However:

• Unused free pulls are lost at daily reset. Some events have a system that stores unused free pulls, but only if you didn't login from before the start of the event, essentially functioning as a returning player mechanic.
• Some events only give 1 pull per day instead of 10 pulls. At that point, why not just give players 150 Carats so they can actually save them?
• Some events split the free pulls between between 2 different banners with different spark progression. You can't select which banner to use those pulls, which means guaranteeing wasted pulls unless you get incredibly lucky or continue pulling until spark/MLB.

3: The RNG

Horse racing is chaotic & unpredictable. A superstar horse with multiple victories may randomly lose for whatever reasons at any time (ft. Gold Ship's 12 billion yen incident & Mejiro McQueen topping with 14 billion yen). Cygames tries to recreate this chaos by making the RNG in this game incredibly punishing:

• Random mood downs & negative conditions. Some uma have negative conditions baked into their career [e.g. Super Creek's "Under the Weather" (+5% failure chance), Meisho Doto's "Not Ready" (random -5 energy after racing)]
• Resting may grant less energy, with a Night Owl condition (random energy loss)
• Your training stat gain is influenced by whether Support cards appear in a training category or not. Sometimes they may not appear in crucial turns like Summer training, then appear when your Uma's energy is low, forcing you to gamble. Failing 1 or 2 important turns can brick your PvP training run.
• Infirmary does not guarantee removing negative conditions.
• Support card events' appearance is not guaranteed. Some events require you to gamble for desired skills.
• Some characters like Gold Ship may randomly restrict your training options.
• Praying for "Fast Learner" buff (-10% skill points cost) in JP, where average uma has roughly 20-30 skills thanks to scenario stat inflation.
• Inheriting sparks from parent uma is RNG.
• Start reaction time is RNG.
• Skill activation chance is determined by your Uma's Wit stat
• "If you're blocked, you're blocked." Not placing 1st in a career race costs more energy + grant less skill points, and placing 6th or below in may inflict a purple self-debuff skill.

While this unpredictability helps with immersion in casual story runs, it can destroy your PvP Ace training. Imagine 30 minutes wasted because of missing important skills, failed important training turns, or not reaching stat thresholds.

Example of support cards appearing when The Mun's energy is low. Luckily this is a casual story run & not PvP Ace training.

And there's the infamous Trackblazer/MANT scenario. An average run takes 1 hour, where you're expected to win more than 30 races to collect epithet bonuses, watch a bunch of loading screens & UI animations, while praying for the item shop to drop something good. Deck building is restrictive, requiring stacking Race Bonus to more then 50%, making inheriting skills from parent uma important. Cygames made no adjustments to Trackblazer's global release, so Global players have to suffer through it for 4 months. (Game8 Tutorial)

Example of a Trackblazer/MANT run's Race Agenda

To make matters worse, just 1 month before Trackblazer was sunset by Grand Live, Cygames dropped The Throne's Assemblage Group card, a very good scenario card for Trackblazer, in hope of draining players' Carat savings before the next scenario. Reddit post for reference

What about parent/legacy farming? Think a good parent umamusume as god roll artifacts in Genshin. A Kitasan Black level stud in real-life is rare (she got dried just like BA's Sensei), so Cygames also tries to mimic this with multiple layers of RNG:

Blue spark:

• 20% chance for 1 of the 5 stats, then 5% to get 3★ at 600 stats or 10% at 1200.
• They direcly give you stats at the start of career & during inspiration events. Having 8★ or 9★ stamina sparks can save you a stamina card slot, and in some Medium distance races can substitute a recovery skill.

Red spark:

• Randomly chosen between your character’s A-rank aptitudes. Track aptitudes affect Acceleration, Distance affects Speed, Strategy affects Wit stat
• These Can be used to increase an Uma's aptitude, especially ones with B or below, up to A at career start, up to S during inspiration events (and the main way to make Haru Urara win Arima Kinen)

White spark:

• 20% for white skills learned, 25% for ◎ white, 40% for gold, increases by 2.5% (white) to 5% (gold) when grandparents have it.
• Those sparks grant skill hints and are used for inheriting important skills like Groundwork, strategy/distance corners, Nimble Navigator,...

Not to mention that you may have to redo the same thing for different uma, or when a new scenario drops with higher stat limit, forcing everyone to move on to the next scenario while soft-sunsetting your existing trained roster.

The result is an MMO-level grind where even with the best support deck, majority of your time will be spent making "Uma glue" while praying your next run will be something decent, but instead of being showered with glue, the game proudly awards you "1 bottle of Uma glue" every 30-minute run, and your veteran umamusume gets soft-sunset every scenario release.

(Note: The "Uma glue" joke is a dark community reference to the historical fate of unsuccessful or injured racehorses, as raising them is incredibly expensive and only a fraction ever win a debut race. Here's a Reddit post about why retirement farms need fundraising.)

You can borrow parent umamusume by following other Torena-san, but strong parents are highly sought after that they can reach followers cap very quickly.

4: The paid packs

Game development is a business, and developers need food on their table. With how competitive PvP is, it can be tempting to swipe your credit card.

4.1 Currency subscriptions

Standard light spender goodies in gacha

Daily carats pack (980 yen, $6,99)

• Good old monthly pack. Instant 500 "Paid" carats + 1500 carats drip-fed over 30 days. Unclaimed carats are sent to mail box when expired
• (JP) X2 career rewards (excluding fans & bonds)
• (JP) +3 Daily race tickets
• Cygames doesn't adjust the pack to accommodate global schedule acceleration

Premium monthly battle pass (JP) (800 yen, ~$5)

• Instant 300 "Paid" carats, unlocks premium track of the battle pass.
• You can get legacy support card tickets, which can be used to exchange featured Year 1 & 2 SSR support cards that have been powercrept (including SSR Speed Kitasan Black)
• Notable rewards:
  • 1300 free carats
  • 25 legacy support tickets (10 to exchange 1 copy)
  • 4 Uma pull tickets
  • 4 Support pull tickets
  • 1 Crystal shard (20 to exchange 1 Uncap Crystal)

4.2 QoL subscriptions

Instead of fixing the stupid RNG I mentioned in section 3 for every torena-san, Cygames decided to monetize QoL features. Having all three of these subscriptions saves you hundreds of hours of parent farming. These are features that would be free baseline QoL updates in almost any other modern video game.

Spark reroll subscription (JP) (500 yen, ~$3)

• Lets you reroll the sparks 3 times for "free" instead of spending 30 Energy -> 30 carats -> 30 carats, basically 4 parent runs in 1.
• You can select your preferred results.

Blue/Pink spark selector subscription (JP) (980 yen, ~$7)

• Selects which blue/pink spark type you want to get for your Umamusume at the end of their career run for "free" instead of 100 carats. No more praying for RNG to drop your preferred spark category.
• The stars of those sparks are still RNG

Uma Plan (JP) (1980 yen, ~$12)

• "Sweep" the career mode & instantly get 5 parent-only umamusume daily, 10 with the spark reroll pass. Yes, they're monetizing a basic feature of a gacha game.
• During Inspiration/Inheritance (Classic/Senior Early April turns) events you can choose 1 of 2 spark rolls, alleviating inspiration RNG.
• +5 Parent borrows per day
• Permanent +100 follow slots (probably to lure players into subscribing)

There were mixed reactions regarding the Uma Plan subscription.

• Torena-san defending the new Uma Plan, arguing that paying for QoL advantages is normal
• Torena-san explaining why Uma Plan is worth it, that paying for time-saving QoLs allows them to play other games
• Torena-san being against it, arguing that QoL subscriptions shorten the game's life span
• Torena-san bragging about spending $110 for annual Uma Plan
• Reddit's reactions

4.3: Selectors/Guaranteed Banners

Selector tickets (Uma/SSR)

• Can be exchanged for 1 copy of an 3★/SSR unit. Because of the bloated banners, these have very high value.
• The first ones cost $21, standard selector prices. Includes 1500 paid carats.
• The second ones cost $70, equal to a modern AAA game. Includes 5000 paid carats.
• The fact that Global players actively map out months of pull plans around these tickets proves how demanding PvP is.

Guaranteed 3-star/SSR banners

• Costs 1,500 Paid Carats ($20). Because there is no duplicate protection against a bloated pool, this is widely considered a scam.

Step-up gacha (JP)

• Available during anni/half-anni
• Costs 5000 paid carats total. You can buy a $70 selector ticket & dump the bonus carats on this.
• Select 10 units for rate-up, then do 5 steps of 10-pulls:
  • 1 (500 paid carats): Guaranteed 2★/SR
  • 2 (700): Guaranteed 2★/SR
  • 3 (1000): Guaranteed 3★/SSR
  • 4 (1300): Guaranteed 3★/SSR
  • 5 (1500): Guaranteed Selector 3★/SSR

Overall, If you're a dedicated PvP player, you're expected to buy all 5 subscriptions (total $30+ monthly), plus selector tickets & step up gacha.

EX: What if I'm F2P & ignore PvP?

If you step away from PvP, you will save a massive amount of money and sanity. In fact, a considerable portion of the playerbase treats Umamusume purely as a casual game.

• Support card requirements are low for story enjoyers. Rental decks will come in 4th anniversary.
• URA Finale is the fastest scenario for story runs with no extra gimmicks (yet).
• You can ignore farming parent uma

Until Autoplay comes to global, you can do a botched run to complete dailies:

• Pick any uma with a fan objective as second career objective
• Win debut race
• Spam recreation until the 2nd objective deadline and lose career
• Or slot 4 speed cards, turn your brain off & Bakushin Bakushin Bakushinshin.

There are players who focus on self-made achievements like grind 1 billion fans for their oshi, collect epithets, or pulling off the legendary feat of making Haru Urara win the Arima Kinen career race. It's not everyone's cup of tea, though.

[Note: Haru Urara is a Dirt umamusume specialized in Sprint & Mile distances. Her final career objective requires participation in the Arima Kinen, where her Turf & Long aptitude is G (-90% Speed & Acceleration), which is basically a guaranteed loss, and then you'll watch this cheerful girl break down & cry for the first time. Many Torena-san consider winning the Arima Kinen with Haru Urara a legendary feat, because it requires not just parents with at least a total of 7★ Turf & 7★ Long sparks, but also luck in inheritance (she has low affinity with every single character), and luck in the race itself (You can't retry the race)]

In the long term, not caring about PvP means you won't have much motivation to deep dive into the game's mechanics. The game essentially transforms into a high-quality visual novel with raising-sim elements where you mostly log in just to do dailies, and maybe eventually become a Cygames seasonal player.

5. When "Fun" becomes an excuse to silence criticism

If you combine all the information, it's obvious that the game's trying to suck players into the PvP grind, then milk dedicated players & whales as hard as possible.

But wait. It gets worse.

Umamusume, like many idol and gacha franchises, is fundamentally built on fostering relationships with their characters. You read their backstories, help them through personal struggles, watch them cry when they lose, all while doing your best being the guiding light towards their success.

Eventually you've followed the franchise for so long that it becomes part of your life. You can't image a day without getting pampered by Super Creek, squishing The Mun, or hearing Mejiro Ardan's alluring ASMR voice. Then, the "Glory to Cygames" meme erupts when the devs continue to hand out free pulls, or do something good to IRL horse racing, further reinforcing Tribalism.

When players express their frustrations about the game (e.g. This tweet), it creates cognitive dissonance for the fans who are still having fun, acting as if criticizing the bad parts of the game is the equivalent of attempting to take their beloved horse girls away. The result is that oftentimes there'll be responses like "Umamusume isn't just PvP", "Try playing more casually", "You're expecting too high", "Just quit if you're not having fun".

Yes, you can have fun with Umamusume in various ways. It's still a great franchise, after all. However, "fun" should never be used as a shield to deflect valid criticism. Game companies are not your friend. Blindly defending the game means you're implicitly allowing them to exploit you even futher for their shareholders' demands. You can love Umamusume, but the game & the real-life horses will never love you back.

The QoL subscriptions, especially Uma Plan, and the barebones $45 spinoff with just 4 minigames called Party Dash, should be the warning shots for everyone. If Cygames can accelerate milking the game without major backlash, they'll do it.

I recently watched a video ranking predatory gacha game monetization tactics. The #1 worst tactic wasn't FOMO or the Gacha system itself. It was Tribalism: passively training the community to defend the multi-million dollar corporation on its behalf.

This phenomenon isn't unique to gacha games. The Destiny 2 community suffered from a similar divide, where casual players routinely shrugged off the complaints of hardcore veterans because they were having fun in different ways (reddit complaint for example). What used to be the king of looter shooters has gone downhill since The Final Shape expansion, from 250K+ players peak during expansion releases & average 50K~80K players daily to less than 10K players daily (Steam charts), due to Bungle's greed & incompetence. Here's a Video made by Aztecross, a veteran Destiny content creator, roasting D2's microtransactions.

Closing Words

Gacha games are predatory by nature, but many players usually tolerate it to a certain extent when the game is good. It seems like Cygames is testing how far they can cross that line without making players too angry. There's no VIP system at the moment, but considering that Cygames isn't shy about being P2W & is ramping up the monetization, who knows?

The franchise is still a faithful adaptation of Japanese horse racing with great characters, stories, attention to details, anime, manga & music. so for average F2P casual multimedia franchise/story enjoyer you can still enjoy it. Let the tryhards, whales beat each other & fund the game. Go buy some merch instead. Your Super Creek shrine will still be there long after the game went EoS.

On the opposite site, the game is constantly trying to lure you into grinding PvP with lucarative rewards back-loaded into high achievements. Falling into PvP rabbit hole means you will have to deal with a tedious & repetitive grind with multiple layers of RNG, where the winners are those who not just whale the hardest, grind the hardest for those god roll umas & parents, but also blessed by RNG. On top of that, Cygames will not stop milking you through powercreep, PvP meta shifting, expensive packs & multiple subscriptions in typical JP gacha fashion. Generosity is an illusion. The freebies are just enough for survival.

Thank you for coming to my UMA Talk.