The Yard Sale
Just jotting down some thoughts about the game. Take it as you will. A hint of a spoiler for S2 of the anime down there but it’s not much of one.
Also this is one of those annoying articles with an image. in. between. every. paragraph.
Continue readingThe theme song “GIRLS’ LEGEND U” from the game Umamusme Pretty Derby starts with this phrase: ã‚„ã£ã¨ã¿ã‚“ãªä¼šãˆãŸã! It translates loosely to “We finally get to see everyone.” Mixed into that is the marching horns and battle cries of the cast in an anthem. It is the banner theme song of the core product in a media-mix property years in the making–partly due to a multi-year delay between the initial release date and the actual release date. It’s really cute that the song tips the hat to the delay. In fact, in a way this song tips a hat to the strange journey of the video game from conception to coming out on our phones, tablets and PCs: Don’t stop until you finish.
But we can farm a lot more out of GIRLS’ LEGEND U than all that. Much more. Woven into the instrumentals are these thematic strings that you can also get a good glimpse in the bridge, as well as different parts of the game as background music. Having the theme song of a thing synchronize musically with the other background pieces of the thing isn’t unusual–it’s rather expected, especially in video games. But also the song itself tells us more up front–really, what I want to write about isn’t the song, but horses.
Umamusme is about horses…girls, of course, but it’s really about horses. Specifically, the legends of horses IRT to horse racing. I would call Umamusme a game about HORSE GIRLS’ LEGEND but the titular song is, instead of HORSE it’s… U for Uma? Umapyoi Densetsu (ã†ã¾ã´ã‚‡ã„ä¼èª¬) is the first theme song for the franchise from 2016 and the title really says more or less the same thing, just more horse than girl.
On paper, the conceit of these alternative character-based franchises (ships, guns, katanas, cities, appliances, etc.) are as database as it gets. You put these things (and animals in our case) in the otaku database machine and create a character story out of it. Bundle a bunch of these and tie it together with a setting and a few themes, and out comes a media franchise.
In that sense, Umamusume is no different. But the big difference that I can see between Umamusume and the garden variety ones out and about, is that Umamusume has been imbued, at least from what I can tell, a spirit that is horse-like. Horses are large, majestic, temperamental and sensitive land mammals. Horses are social, in that they exhibit social behaviors such as pact mentality, dominance, individuality, competitiveness, and others (such as being able to be domesticated). They play and court. It’s easy to translate a particular natural aspect of horses into anime characters, and I see that being a very strong underlying pattern in the Umamusme franchise.
It’s easy to see this in the characterizations of all the horsegirls. It also helps that the “good girl” trope resonate well with the audience–our racing horses all are good horses (and presumably their rights owners wouldn’t allow otherwise). I mean there are so many of them (even just in Japan alone) and the ones that people commemorate enough to put in a video game are already legends themselves. Of course they are good girls. Even if you run into problems like making El Condor Pasa into a she… Doesn’t that break grammar LOL.
Contrast this with, say, things that are based on WWII heroes or weapons of destruction. How do you channel “the military” except only superficially? You can do a lot more when you’re channeling legends about racing horses, it turns out, maybe because it’s not problematic.
And I think this is where Cygames really flexed their muscles. You can directly take what is lovely and endearing about these horses and put them right in the game, down to the way their tails wag or the way their ears twitch. It’s beyond the whole sexual aspect of furry appeal–we are talking about making fiction where you combine the best of what racing horses have to offer with typical otaku tropes. (And including the sex appeal as appropriate, as it never was gone, just not in the fore.)
This to me comes across like all the strings in the instruments throughout the game BGM. Cygames was tasked to make Umamusume a game that conservative Japanese businessmen would gladly sign over their legendary horse brands over to, so I think a certain level of restraint was needed throughout the entire Umamusume experience. The characters (and the cast, FWIW) are still going to do the same rigmarole, the same toe taps and dance routines. Tracen Academy is extremely generic but it does adhere to a classy all-girls school vibe. Symboli Rudolf and Meijiro McQueen can walk down the school yard gracefully, while Vtuber Gold Ship can jump kick the trainer while it happens.
That is the framework that allows things to happen, but what endears us is the individual stories themselves, and how it’s executed. For me, the game taught me the one behind Rice Shower, who was put down during her final race due to injury. It’s sad, sure, but the story in the anime and game makes it a lot more approachable due to the execution and details. The most famous of them all–Haru Urara–only got as popular as she did because of marketing/promotion and production, after all. In a way, Umamusume is the same pitch, but for a lot more horses besides Haru Urara. When these horsegirls channel their named legends, it’s where the magic happens. Even if it’s extremely normal/boring like Special Week, it is still endearing that our mother-loving, Hokkaido born glutton became one of Japan’s best.
Which is all to say, GIRLS’ LEGEND U is a great piece of music, and you can tell by hearing someone playing it on the piano. This is some great composition fit for a sweeping orchestra. Instead we have a bunch of seiyuu grunting calls about winning races. No matter how you cloak it, a good story will shine through–and that’s what Umamusume really is about, putting into character-stories of racing horses, their lives, and their struggles.
PS. There are other finer points to Umamsume Pretty Derby. So far it has largely inherited many of the QOL stuff that I love about Princess Connect! Re:Dive. It being a raising game doesn’t quite translate into how not to make it into the same kind of “menu hell” that JRPGs can be, but I see some small glimpses of hope here as is. It is also kind of time consuming given each raising run takes a good half hour, at least. There are many little touches in the game and in the IP generally that I wish I can highlight but it will make several post at least. Anyways, I’ll end with this video.
As of this writing, we are about 12 days since the launch of the Umamusme Pretty Derby video game service. I probably won’t make many updates to this guide to keep up with changes, but I will fix any errors that I am made aware after the fact.
For a very high level intro to the game, please see this post or this post. More translations and data can be found in this subreddit. Gamewith (reroll tierlist) seems to be the first spot to check JP-side updates. Gamewith’s raising guide is probably a good starting point before reading this article as well as the reddit thread.
The raising scenario URA Finals puts you as the trainer and your Umamusume (horse henceforth) through a scenario of about 72 turns. Each turn you can do one action. For every horse, there are a set of goals you need to clear to first complete the raising goals, then three URA races. If you win them all, you have cleared the URA Finals scenario (congrats you’ve beaten the game…not really).
Beating the scenario is just one desirable outcome. Currently this is also the only way to breed and create horses with more powerful or desirable traits that can be used to raise new horses. If you are going after breeding, completing the scenario is not necessary, but more traits will be passed down the higher rank your horse is at the time the scenario ends (which is just to say, it’s possible to have zero traits passed down if you end the scenario by the first year).
When you begin the scenario, you will need to pick two horses that you have already raised (or the 2 the game prepped you for from the start), or one of horses from trainers that you follow. I will cover breeding more extensively at the end of this post. For newbies, the “osusume” or auto-select button (green button underneath the rectangle in the middle) is fine.
You will also need to select up to 6 support cards to begin the scenario. First, get some and level them up. Needless to say the higher the level the better they are, but that’s in very general terms. Once you get the hang of it, you can figure out what levels and which cards to use better, since there is a lot of nuance and during early game, money is scarce without massive whaling. You can also use auto select here, but generally it doesn’t quite do it.
Without going deep into which training to do with your horse every turn, the key things to know are:
Supporters Tazuna and Kiyruin: If you play their support cards, they will appear as characters that you can power up. At high enough levels (3 bubbles), random events with them will appear in which you can then go out on a date with them, up to 5 times. In general these dates replaces the “rest” action since it recovers a large amount of stamina and give a variety of other benefits such as condition up and adding stats. More over it eliminates the risk of the negative side effect of regular rest action.
The supporters also affects your training action normally when they appear under one. Specifically, Tazuna reduces the stamina cost of the action she appears for, in addition to the random proc bonus she gives. The 2 aforementioned supporter cards, reporter, and the principal all will have extra event(s) at the end of the URA Finals after you beat it, as a bonus, if you level them up to the final bubble.
There are always 2 summer camps that happens on the second and third July/August turns. While they may be interrupted with checkpoint races for a particular horse, during camp, all training are at level 5 (and conversely, you can’t level up the training during camp). When you rest during camp, it is guaranteed 35 energy back with a condition up.
On the first new years turn (first half Jan.), you get to pick between 20 energy, 20 skill points, or randomly some stats. On the second new years turn (Christmas, second half december), you also get the same option but the stats may be improved to 5 points per stat type. There is also a kanshasai event for all the horses, with different benefits (usually 5 stamina loss for 25 skill points). In addition, there is a street raffle event on the second half of January on the second year. You either get some energy back, some energy and some stats, and more energy, stats, and onsen trip tickets. The trip tickets unlock a special ending for your horse if you also beat URA Finals.
Every start of the year (year 2 and year 3, and I suppose also year 1 as that’s the start of the scenario), your horse inherit some traits from her parents and grandparents. The second and third year inheritance is random, but it will always pick from the stats side with 0-3 skills and attributes also passed down. Stats are based on each procced inheritance from 1 star to 3 stars.
When you take a rest action, 3 outcomes can occur: 30 energy recovery, 50 energy recovery, or 70 energy recovery. In the case when you get 30, there is also a random chance of getting a bad effect, which can be cured using the heal feature (it will be greyed out normally until you have an ailment). Generally you want to heal negative effects ASAP as they negatively affect you every turn.
That said I don’t know how big the energy bar is at the start–some events (support cards, doctor event) can increase your max energy bar.
Healing action procs a commu choice and you have a chance of removing the negative effect. You also gain 20 energy. On that note, when you fail a training action, there’s also a chance of getting a negative effect, although the odds of that is much lower than getting it from rest. Also, when you fail a study action, you typically only don’t gain any wiz points.
Yes, you can fail anything that has a fail rate of greater than zero percent. Just because it says 1% or 4% and it fails don’t be mad, it’s just how RNG works.
Here is the rare doctor event explained (similar to Shinymas’s reporter)–you have 5 choices, every choice has something like 50-60% fail rate. 5th choice has 100% success rate.
The below chart, sourced here, is what you need to get to the URA Finals. I tested it a bunch of times with half a dozen horses, and it looks pretty spot on. Just don’t take the numbers too literally–RNG is always ever-present to mess you up, so buffer is always good. That said you can also fly in under these but that’ll make the URA Finals harder. Lastly, this chart is not gospel–there are other ways to beat the scenario while not adhering to this. High power breeding is a big way you can get a leg up against your competing horses. Some set of skills also will give a great advantage, especially when paired with a specific strategy–although often that requires specific race horse or support SSRs.
| Strategy | Speed | Power | Guts | Wiz |
| Nige/Escape | 750 | 350 | 300+ | 300+ |
| Senkou/Runner | 650 | 500 | 300+ | 300+ |
| Sashi/In-between | 550 | 600 | 300+ | 300+ |
| Oi/Chase (Goldship) | 550 | 600 | 300+ | 300+ |
| Stamina | Short course | Mile course | Medium course | Long course: Arima Kinen (2500m) | Long course: >3000m |
| Mid game | 150 | 200 | 250 | 300 | 300 |
| Before URA | 3000 | 400 | 450 | 500 | 550 |
I’m not going to explain in detail how the stats work, but that table will work for a majority of horses. Why not? Because nobody really knows the full picture. In a nutshell, think stamina as an energy tank that depletes as the horse run the full course, the more stressful and faster the horse runs, the more it depletes. If the horse is in front the whole time, they will need to keep up the chase. Being crowded by horses, having to run through a crowd, and being chased all deplete stamina faster.
If the horse is chasing at the end, the horse needs a lot of power to make up the difference. If the horse is in front, it needs to have a high speed to avoid being taken over at the end. That’s really the two stats with a clear interplay between strategy and application. Smarter horses have more skill procs and don’t get flustered when crowded by other horses, so it affects stamina. Horses give up chasing if their guts is too low.
Again, these are just broad strokes since I don’t know (does anyone know?) all the details. These are basic info that you can apply to the skills that you pick up over time–as far as skills go, whatever reads good, go for it. More skills, more skills procs. Some are synergetic, some directly increase proc rates of others, some are upgrades of others. Some depends on other procs.
Lastly, note this section deals with just getting to the URA Finals. If you want a ballpark stat hint, look at the other horses in your races to know about what you should be at in terms of your core stats. To be safe you should get another 50 points more in speed, power and/or stamina to be truly successful in URA Finals.
It doesn’t hurt to be conservative, but it also doesn’t hurt to try being aggressive–ultimately you want to raise many horses for the purpose of passing down good traits. However you should have objectives planned out every run. This way, if RNG screws you up, you know when to stop (and not waste any alarm clocks), or how to make up for the key stats you need to continue raising.
This means, you should check out the raising goals for every horse at the start, knowing which races and what each one is, before she has to run them. That will let you figure out which cell in the above table to aim for. Obviously you won’t get all the stats from the get go, but do try to get through them without neglecting any one stat too much, it will make losing races in the intermediate much less likely.
After trying out training a horse for the first time, come up with a plan. First start with your supports, then breeding (optional at first). Know which stat your horse has a bonus to (usually every horse has a 10% bonus in one stat and 20% in another) and plan accordingly. If it helps, set intermediate goals for key stats so you can pass every race easily. I keep a spreadsheet for some of the trickier ones like El Condor Pasa.
Use the int/wiz training/studying to your advantage–since a set amount of wiz is needed anyway, you will have to train in studying. Training the horse’s brains/wiz also has the side benefit of gaining energy instead of using energy. Early in the scenario and during summer camp 1, use this to your advantage and increase your level with your supports while preserving energy. The more you have to rest the less you can train. On the other hand, once you are close to maxing out your supports, use that energy to get the maximum amount of stats, especially the stats you need immediately (sometimes over the training that might be more efficient).
Early on, the stats tips Tazuna gives you in the main screen is helpful, but at the end she will complain about your low brains and guts even if you don’t really need much more than 300.
I typically pick up skills on the turn of the race, after checking out the weather. This way I can pick up the skill most relevant to my horse’s immediate passing chances. Some skills depend on weather and track condition, as well as which specific track. If you know what you’re doing, you can pick whatever in advance if you would like.
At the end of every raising scenario, the horse that finished may get some traits that she can pass on. These are like tags that have 1, 2 or 3 stars. If it is a stats tag, it will be blue. If it is a skill tag, it will be green. If it is a attribute tag, it will be red. Lastly if it is a hint tag, it will be grey/white.
Stats tags are the most straightforward. 3* tags adds 21 points. 2* tags adds 12. 1* tag adds 5. Add all the tags the parent and grandparents have, and your scenario will begin with that bonus.
Also straightforward, the number of stars in a skill trait provides a default level when it becomes available for the horse during the raising scenario. Just to mention it in case it’s not clear, every level a skill has reduces the skill point cost to obtain it by 10%.
I don’t know how hint tags work besides it might make some skills available to the horse.
Attribute tags are a mystery, but it does improve the baseline stat of the horse up one grade for every * up to grade A. You can’t start beyond grade A.
Some horses, when paired with other horses, increases the amount of traits inherited by the raised horse. This compatibility is still being documented, and it involves grandparents–generally speaking we’re talking about inbreeding.
Finally, the pain-in-the-butt parts. The traits and things that gets assigned to the horse is entirely random. If you got far enough, you’ll at least get one of each type. But it could be a 1* stat that you don’t care about. Which is most of the time. It could be your F rank dirt ability or C rank mile course ability when you are A in everything else.
The other pain in the butt is that when the parents and grandparents pass their tags down to the child horse, it’s all random after the start of the scenario, during the two goddess events in April. Even if you have a bunch of 3* speed tags, it might skip that more than you’d like. Or that one grass or long course 3* never get passed down. Again, completely RNG other than categorical bias towards stats, and if there is double-circle compatibility, more tags get passed down.
While each Umamusme has similar set of stats and capabilities from any other, which can be changed by inheritance, as well as support cards and the guidance of the trainer, each horse still has her own eccentricities. Play around and learn about each horse to be a proper trainer. Of course, the starting kit and the list of racing checkpoints to clear will guide your play largely for each horse, but do take care to learn about their other eccentricities.
In a similar way, this applies to the process of learning which skills are worth buying and for who.
Some horses are easy to train and beat URA, like Special Week, Sakura Bakushin O (spam stam/power at nige short/mile courses), or Silence Suzuka. Others are varying amount of from easy to hard. The current banner, TM Opera O is also a strong, easy-to-train horse girl. I think El Condor Pasa is somewhat difficult. Harder would be, maybe, Grass Wonder. By far the hardest, though, is Rice Shower.
There is a lot of RNG. Don’t be surprised. There are a lot of negative traits and bad things that could happen outside the racetrack, and inside. There are also good things that could happen. You can choose to ride the RNG or reduce its impact by using some strategies. You can play it loose or play it safe. Each have their pros and cons. At the end of the day we all are likely going to sleep in the bed we made, so there’s that.
That’s it! Feedback and corrections are welcome in the comments, or ping me at @omonomono.
Given a merely 10 days since launch as of this writing, there has not been a lot of detail writeup yet. Why? Probably because we’re all busy playing the game, and the developers have not released the game early enough to professional media types (the folks that work behind sites like gamewith/etc) that the pros do not have it all up yet. And if Japan authorities are behind, it’s free for all on twitter in terms farming various nuggets of info. EN players have to farm it from the game and social just like JP players.
This primer is more for new players–I will still skip the “download Japanese game” portion because that is the same for every Japanese mobile game on Android and iOS. The PC version will be available from DMM in a week or so, to get that, use the Princess Connect Redive guide. For helpful links, read this post.
It is a Cygames franchise about raising racing horse girls (horse henceforth). Each horse is based, in various degree of looseness, on existing race horses in Japan’s horse racing scene and history. Best example primer I can give is this ESPN short. This article is about the video game, but there are some TV anime stuff related to this which gives you a crash course on the setting and some characters.
There are many horses in Umamusume. They are all Japanese race horses (but their heritage do span across overseas). There are 70 of them on the official site. They are all voiced except 4 (who are not debuted). The game do not yet feature all 70 of them as far as we know.
TL;DR: It is a raising/breeding game with a social/team competition component.
TL;DR2: It’s Priconne x Shiny Colors
It is a raising game with a competitive stats “racing” component. Players control a set of racing horses and a set of support horses. The goal is to make the best states on your horses, and then they can go on to win races. The actual racing part is just back end math calculation (think rolling the dice in Risk, but with 4d chess variables with different horses, and a pretty visualization). Almost all the game play is in how you run a raising scenario.
It’s just like IDOLM@STER Shiny Colors, but for people unfamiliar, you pick a race horse (or idol), select some support horses to go with that race horse, and you go through a period of up to 72 turns in order to complete the scenario. At different points in the scenario you have to clear various objectives–usually winning or placing above a certain place in a race on a certain turn. All the races in the game are loosely based on real races, or actually based on real races–just like the horses (if their rights owner let Cygames do it).
At the end of the scenario, either you win or you lost prematurely, you end up with a “raised horse” which can be used in PVP races, as well as daily races (basically 3 free races to earn money or support points), clear races in the main story, and for “breeding” (I guess it’s called inheritance system). Completing the full training gives you a horse that has more stats, since you had more time to train it.
The racing horses are rated from one star to five stars, and the gacha system drops horses based on 1* to 3*, 3* being rarest. You can upgrade racing horses up to 5*, including all 1*. To upgrade them, you need to feed it money and memory pieces from the specific horse. When you roll a horse you get some pieces for that horse, and if you roll a dupe you get some pieces for that horse plus a megami figurine token, which can be traded for memory pieces of any horse.
Racing horses with more * level gets more powerful–higher stats, mostly. You can also “social link” or affection-up with them, by using them in races and in the horse raising scenario, as it unlock the character story for that horse. You can also rank them up using drops from races which give them more skills.
Support horses are ranked R, SR, or SSR. For each dupe up to 5 you can level break 5 levels. SSR by default caps at level 30, SR at 25, R at 20. Dupes beyond the 5th card can be sold for other tokens. Support horses are used during the raising scenario (currently, the URA racing scenario) to help you increase the stats on the race horse. Leveling up support horses gives them more powers, and you can do so using support points, money, or via use in the raising scenario.
As for rolling gacha, there are one pool for race horses and one pool for support horses. They are separate. You can spark at 200 rolls for race horses and 200 rolls for support horses. You can only spark the banner at any time, which is its own thing that you ought to read closely before trying for it. Besides that, both support gacha and race gacha follow the “150 for 1 roll, daily once paid 50 for 1 roll, 1500 for 10 roll with guaranteed 2*” model. Just remember the pool is separate for their sparks.
Racing horses can also be obtained through trading in memory pieces of a specific horse at certain quantities, starting at 50 for 1* horses. I’m assuming they’ll follow the Priconne template and allow this for all non-limited horses. You can buy memory pieces in the shop for all non-limited horses currently, and it has an incremental system where the first 25 pieces for a horse costs 1 megami figurine piece (or 25 for 25 of them), the next 25 cost 2 (25 pieces for 50), etc, up to 5(?), which is the prices for all subsequent memory pieces for that horse.
For support horses, there isn’t an obvious way to obtain them besides rolling, but you can get free ones from events and the main story.
For most people, this means raising a horse or three or fifteen, or all of them. In reality, this is a raising game with a breeding component. Each turn in the URA scenario you pick one action, and bare the consequences of that action. This is also one of the more random raising game I have ever played, and while some random events do benefit you, most do not. A lot of the randomness comes in how horses win races–skills have to proc, your horse have to have the right gate, the other horses can’t be blocking yours too much, your strongest opponents might also be blocked or not, your horse might have a bad start out of the gate, whatever. There are so many ways you can lose a race, and generally completing the scenario means you have to take first place in a series of races against 16 opponents. Oh, there are also the usual raising game negative events too. Managing a kid through high school is rough, even if she is a horse!
Every time you start the raising scenario you have to pick 2 horses to be your horse’s ancestors, and some traits from those horses (and their grandparents, so 6 total) will get passed down to the horse you are raising. In the URA scenario, this happens on the 2nd and 3rd April First Half turns. Raising horses through inheriting is very important because not only you can get some limited/rare skills, but you can also increase the horse’s basic parameters, like their innate strength and weakness versus different track types and race strategy. Unfortunately, the way skill passes down from one horse to the next is largely random.
But because it is only largely random, there are things that are not random in which you can manipulate.
Once you produce five raised mares, you can put them in the racing team and start to enjoy that side of the game.
Or, read the Japanese explainer.
Lastly, the horses do a music number after some races, which you can unlock. Songs have interchangeable vocals!
First, reset marathon for what you want–I actually recommend rolling support first since it feels like good support makes the game notably easier, even if you have fewer strong horses to raise. It’s more fun when the game is not nails-tough, trust me. Once you get some good supports, get your guaranteed 3* race horses and roll the race horse gacha once so you get some 1* and 2* horses too, because some of them are pretty good. This game is so easy to resemara, since the menu has a build in player data wipe plus a tutorial skip.
Follow 10 players with good support cards, pick an easy horse–I recommend Sakura Bakushin O, Mayano Top Gun, Silence Suzuka, or Special Week–build a support deck, and go raise her.
When you set up your raising scenario you can also breed from other player’s horses (with a fee). May be worth it sometimes!
Repeat until you get tired of losing, move on to another horse, and keep doing it until you get a feel how the raising game works. Meanwhile, collect support points and money, and upgrade your support cards too.
TL;DR: Circles are guilds, PVP as much as you want, free bonus.
Players in Umamusume can form “circles.” Circles are basically guilds. Players in the guild collectively earn scoring (in terms of fans) when they raise horses. Later on they probably will introduce team racing.
Individually, there is some kind of ladder (also like Shiny Colors) where you assemble team of horses in a showdown with random opponents. It is set up as a ladder. Each horse is assigned a point value based on how powerful it is, and players are assigned a letter grade based on the total point value of their racing team. Players around the same letter grade then randomly match with each other. You can initiate a race using racing points (which recovers one point per 2 hours, up to 5 total). The race is consisted of actually 5 matches: Long, Medium, Mile, Short, and Dirt Mile. When you build your team you have to put from 1-3 horses in each of the matches (most people are only class 2 so only 2 horses per match), and each match unfold with the horse winning the race winning the match. After 5 matches the player with the most won matches wins the race.
Win or lose, all that matters is the loot that drops (random) and the highest score (when you win against the toughest team). A ranking is generated about once a week and reward is given out to players based on the high score. Players can also advance in class based on their high score ranks, which unlock more benefit.
In addition, there is a bonus to your support horses based on the strength of your racing team. So there is no reason to not put up a team (and let us beat on it).
There’s so much more to say about the game, but I’ll let the people making money or fame from it do the talking. I got horses to raise, I don’t know about you.
I’ll leave you with this.
It’s been a while since I wrote about my seasonal watches. Having MLB back on TV seems to provide me a kind of anchor, rhythm-wise. It is arguable that pro team sports is a good or bad idea in the US, in mid-2020, when/where the pandemic is still raging strong. But that seems like just par for the course in 2020, a year that the lowest of bars in politics, health, and communication are all up for argument.
The lowest of bars in anime is also up for arguments. I have some baseline opinions about Uzaki and how generally cutesy anime with sexual overtones have some link to pedophilia or grooming. But that also seems like an overtly obtuse argument used by tribalists who are not really interested in talking about anime. It’s like, just because you can use candies to lure kids into unmarked vans, they are bad? So let’s forget about the main use cases for candies and just say they are for pedophiles? I guess that is the low bar of media literacy up for grabs, in this era of our 2020. I mean, the candy industry does way more money than the anime industry (and tons of Aniplex titles, well), so maybe we can let that pass. Unmarked vans, though, tsk tsk tsk.
That being said, it is a strawman that I encountered–I have yet talk to any live human who would hold the opinion about Uzaki in such a way (in connection to pedophilia). The original complaint back last year about Red Cross Japan using Uzaki to promote a blood donation drive comes down to TPO, so it turns out, which is really nothing controversial. National, high profile charities should not perpetrate sexist stereotypes is a no-brainer. Need more blood, I guess.
The anime itself is surprisingly watchable. Uzaki is an irritating character that gets increasingly charming, and the cast also gets increasingly self-aware. Nothing to write home about, other than having a so-to-speak controversial urn where piss takes go into the huge drain in the internet sky. Maybe Uzaki’s …uzai-ness is part of the ethos behind those poopy takes.
Some anime on hiatus from last season have resumed. I think the best out of those I am enjoying is Major 2nd second season and Food Wars. It’s kind of odd that my tastes lately have shifted onto these arguably mainstream works. Major 2nd is especially praiseworthy with interesting characters and articulate, if a bit too convenient, baseball knowhow. The level of baseball IQ demonstrated by the show is beyond any middle schooler team, even if it’s one of those things coaches and parents who are hardcore baseball types would know. If you have kids this is not a bad watch to teach them about baseball. The way it plays up gender in teenage sports leagues gives me a Disney channel vibe.
Another last-season pickup is the historical fiction racing anime Appare-Ranman. Talk about weird character dynamics. A literal child is in this anime, a literal chinese woman is in this anime. A bunch of Americans, literally, are in this anime. And Japanese people, of course. It is extremely Japanese in a lot of ways, especially for an anime that takes place in a fictional world where America is a thing, that being the country they are in. But I guess these are not really relevant since everyone speaks Japanese or English in this anime, or whichever dub track you select. Is it post-racial or racist-but-who-cares? I don’t know if I care at this point. The premise is so whack that any appeal to historical underpinnings will be lost in all the noise. As an aside, BNW, Iron, and GM? One is not like the other two. Also that guy is French! LMAO.
Along the same line, something is remarkable about Deca-Dence, but the overall thing felt really slippery. I don’t quite have a grasp on the story or the characters–like I get what’s happening, but the post-humanity humanity of it is hard to sympathize. Like, robots are just robots. It’s the risk when you set up a setting that is quite smart but the level of discourse is not much more advanced than Spongebob Squarepants. The setting is visually grand and a bit all over the place at first. It features a sort of cyberspace kind of thing and a sort of meatspace kind of thing, but I wish they would just explain it to us in the way I just phrased it, as inverted.
Picking things up again is the new season of Oregairu and it is the most beautiful image of codependence ever. But it is a pretty neat non-binary depiction of relationships in which things are clear enough that words can describe, but you’re struggling to find them. It’s not so much a story with any emotional investment on my end, given how these really wordy stories play out over a long period (the first season started in 2013, if you forgot like me). It is simply a thing of beauty that came and will pass, again, like the autumn leaves or melting snow or whichever passing-of-four-seasons analogy you’d like.
As far as fanservice goes, Monster Girl Doctor and Kanokari are probably the top picks. Kanokari story is easily the most problematic thing by a country mile this season, it’s so bad that I really didn’t want to watch it at times. On the plus side, it has a fair amount of cultural cache and ultimately the episodes tend to turn out to be enjoyable overall. Once the story gets on its groove I think it will fall victim to general relationship polygonalism and dull its lame-brain, protagonist-takes-for-story-sakes kind of plot justifications.
Maybe the real reason why Kanokari has legs is that it is controversial, as opposed to Monster Girl Doctor which is just WYSIWYG. It is definitely a work where the element of surprise is not its forte, yet it can still occasionally deliver.
In a different programming track, the fantasy light-novel-anime adaptation flavor this season for me is Maoh Gakuin or Misfit of Demon Academy or whatever. It’s absurd in a fun way and plays on your preconceptions. The power fantasy is on the boring side of things but it does a good job withholding information to keep you interested. I also like how the anime tries to cram a lot of information in terms of last minute reveals.
I’m watching Gibiate. It’s sort of interesting if you look at it as an anime watcher’s anime. In premise, time-traveling samurai, ninja, and warrior monk kicks apocalyptic ass seems like a perfectly cromulent 1980s anime plot. You add the bit about self-recording, the virus, the show-in-a-show take, the zombie tropes, and in the end it’s a swamp of animation production issues bookended with unusual music choices. Also some interesting voice cast here. Trainwreck? Brilliantly bad? More like, just oddish.
There’s this anime about idols and magic school, which is tied to a KLab game franchise in the making (out soon?) called Lapis Re:lights. They had a fully-costumed seiyuu live thing last year (or several?). The idol units in the story all play a short live performance for us throughout the anime series, which gets a Youtube cut without the in-episode dialogue. It’s worth checking out if that’s your thing. Honestly, this is a bit too “love live” for me, but overall it’s worth mentioning. In some ways it’s the same formula as Love Live but more tailored to the prototypical otaku notion. Also, this song has a few sextillions in it.
Is this it? I think this is mostly it. I tried a few episodes here and there, like the fishing anime. The characters don’t do much for me but there’s a level of meta here where just like the protagonist, you end up liking the outdoor activity (or the depiction thereof) despite the annoying people? I don’t know. It’s more than what I can say about Peter Grill, although that show is interesting to think about, and kind of icky to think about, so it doesn’t occupy much thinking time. Umamusume shorts are cute and sweet. What else? I’m probably forgetting something as usual.