Uma Musume‘s Horse Girls Blow Past Persona 5: The Phantom X in the Gacha Game Race

Persona 5: The Phantom X and Uma Musume: Pretty Derby show the highs and lows of gacha

By Willa Rowe | July 14, 2025 | 10:21am

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Uma Musume‘s Horse Girls Blow Past Persona 5: The Phantom X in the Gacha Game Race

In the nine years since Persona 5 released, the game has become a franchise within a franchise. With a re-release (2019’s Royal), manga and anime adaptations, as well as rhythm, musou, and tactics spinoffs, who even needs Persona 6? The latest offering is Persona 5: The Phantom X, a gacha title finally receiving its global release after launching in Asian territories last year. On the surface Phantom X has all the hallmarks of a good Persona game (or rather a good Persona 5 spinoff). There’s stylish UI to gawk at, complex heists in lavish dungeons, and a loveable cast. The greatest charm of Phantom X, however, is its willingness to break away from the Phantom Thieves, who have headlined the past three spinoff titles.

In place of Joker and Co. is Nagisa Kamisiro, another blank slate high school boy thrust into the world of the Velvet Room and Metaverse. Narratively he serves the same purpose as Joker, fulfilling the role of basic protagonist, but the fresh face is enough to instill some excitement in me. This extends to the ensemble Kamisiro collects over the course of Phantom X’s initial story arc, which concerns the cartoonishly (to the point of inducing endless eyerolls) evil Subway Slammer. The standout is Motoha Arai, a baseball obsessed classmate whose connection to our villain gives her plenty of time in the spotlight. It didn’t take long for me to feel the urge to spend more time with her (and others) in order to flesh out their stories.

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That’s when Phantom X hits a wall. Its predatory gacha mechanics rear their ugly head and make it hard to get to know its characters. Unlike Persona 5, Phantom X does away with time-sensitive missions and deadlines in favor of real-world restrictions. While the calendar system exists in name only and you can run around Palaces for as long as you want, that only rings true if you don’t run into the hard-gating baked into Phantom X’s gacha systems. For example, those seeking to adhere to a free-to-play experience will find it takes at least four days (real, not in-game) to reach the level requirements to complete the first palace. As is the case with all gacha titles, the goal is to encourage the spending of in-game and—more crucially—real world currencies to progress.

Persona 5: The Phantom X

Synergy Bonds, Phantom X’s version of Social Links, especially suffer from this business model. Rather than 10 levels, each Synergy Bond is bloated to 20, a decision that feels so clearly meant to extend an activity that is itself gated behind gameplay requirements. To engage with Synergy Bonds you need to reach certain social stats, which are most easily raised through—what else—using real world money. While the main story of Phantom X does justice to its cast, side activities meant to deepen your bonds feel shallow in service of making money rather than telling a story. It reveals a clear incompatibility between the Persona model and this game’s gacha systems, as an attempt to monetize the characters has only made them less compelling narratively. Grinding for the game’s many currencies has replaced depth. At least the UI is still nice to look at?

This isn’t to say gacha games can’t successfully tell stories that rely on a player’s bond with a character. After all, it’s working for the horse girls.

Even if you don’t know its name, you’ve probably seen Uma Musume: Pretty Derby by now. It’s another gacha title that finally saw a global release this June (on the same day as Persona 5: The Phantom X). The game concerns adorable anime horse girls (all based on real race horses) seeking fame and success on the track by attending Tracen Academy. Unlike Phantom X, however, Uma Musume displays an excellent synergy between mechanics and narrative centered around the relationship between player and horse girl.

This is best exemplified not by the main story of Uma Musume but by its career mode, which tasks you with training your chosen character and having them compete in progressively difficult races. The gameplay loop of career mode, ironically enough, feels linked to what players might expect out of a traditional Persona game. Career mode is broken into goals that occur on a deadline. The first goal is to run in a debut race, and you’re given 11 turns to prepare. In those turns you can train your horse girl to raise stats like Stamina, Speed, Power, etc., as well as rest to regain energy or go on recreational outings to boost her mood. All of these attributes (stats, energy level, mood) will affect her potential on race day. It is up to you to choose what activities will benefit your racer the most in your limited time. These goals get progressively harder, with more high profile races and stricter expectations (like needing to place first to progress). Alongside daily activities, short scenes will play out between your horse girl and her classmates (support cards also chosen at the start of career mode) that flesh out their relationships as well as give additional boosts to stats.

What makes all this so compelling is its use of the sports narrative. Even the horse girls with the most potential start out at the bottom and rely on your choices to improve. It’s a mechanical realization of the bond between horse and trainer (or really any athlete and trainer) that makes the player feel a more real sense of responsibility. It’s hard not to grow attached after days of seeing your chosen racer train and struggle towards success. All of this is still tied into Uma Musume’s overarching gacha ecosystem, which gates new racers and support cards behind “pulls” linked to carefully distributed in-game currency or real-world purchases.

Yet the set up of a sports story creates an almost ingrained pushback against the need for buying success (a positive flipside to the natural cohesion of a game about horse racing encouraging gambling). To paraphrase Riverdale, if you haven’t played Uma Musume then you haven’t known the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of horse girl racing. That’s because it’s all about the underdog story. In fact many players have gone out of their way to challenge themselves by choosing the (on paper) worst racers and shepherding them to stardom. Haru Urara is a prime example of this. In real life, Haru Urara ran in 113 races from 1998 to 2004. She never won a race in her entire career. In Umu Masume she is a star. Players are training the once famed loser into a victor as some sort of cosmic justice. Her popularity has grown so much that the owner of the real Haru Urara noted social media posts of the horse in retirement have skyrocketed in popularity. While there is a story mode to pursue (though I’d suggest watching the anime instead), the best stories in Uma Musume are the one’s players craft themselves.

The ability to win in spite of predatory gacha mechanics, through perseverance and the bond between trainer and horse girl, makes Uma Musume shine. It adds so much more depth to every character as a result of the career mode gameplay loop. This is the spark that is missing from Persona 5: The Phantom X. Phantom X twists one of the franchise’s biggest draws, its characters, into a shadow of itself that forgets what draws players to Persona in the first place.

Willa Rowe is a queer games critic based in New York City whose writing has been featured in Digital Trends, Kotaku, Inverse, and more. She also hosts the Girl Mode podcast. When she isn’t talking games she can be found on Bluesky rooting for the New York Mets.