Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash Review

thesixthaxis.com:

I love horse girls, y’all. No, not the financially stable honours students from high-school who made horseback riding and dressage their whole personality, but the anthropomorphised equine anime girls from multi-media smash hit Umamusume. That name doesn’t mean much in the West, but in Japan it’s been a rising star for years as one of the top-earning gacha games since 2021. Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash marks the console-game debut for the series, and while overseas fans still won’t be able to play the original mobile game in English until next year, this pixelated party-game spinoff is a massive love-letter to fans that will absolutely whet that horse-sized hunger for Umamusume content.

So, horse girls. In the world of Umamusume, horse-racing is replaced with more of a track-and-field running sport that is exclusively competed in by horse girls – think your standard anime cat-girl, except with horse features. In lore, each of these horse girls inherits their name from a distant horse from a far-off world. In reality, it means that they’re all based on real-life famous horse-racing horses, not unlike how Azur Lane creates anime women based on real warships or how Fate will introduce sparkly anime heroes based on historical icons.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash touches on all of this very briefly, but that introduction is the only thing the game does to try and warm up to newcomers unfamiliar with the series. Dozens of characters are present in this game, with some being from the anime, others from the mobile game or manga, and yet more are entirely new. You’ll have to be an existing fan to understand their relationships and personalities, though – as well as to understand the fact that their normal routine of racing for gold and competing on the turf has been interrupted for the summer festival hijinks of this game.

Party Dash is a big shift from the main Umamusume game. You aren’t doing any intense racing or stat-building here, but are instead