Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Turns an Exploitative Sport into a Predatory Game with a Relentlessly Positive Facade

By Grace Benfell | July 17, 2025 | 3:00pm

Video Games Features uma musume

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Turns an Exploitative Sport into a Predatory Game with a Relentlessly Positive Facade

The success of Uma Musume: Pretty Derby is at once totally quantifiable and absolutely baffling. As the economy settles into constant disruption and gig work overtakes all other forms of employment, gacha is ascendant. New Genshin Impact-likes emerge every month. Vtubers are not just some foreign curiosity, but a multi-billion dollar industry unto itself, with independent scenes to match. Yet another anime girl collectathon is hardly a shock to the system, even if it trades in sports anime, slice-of-life tropes, and classic social simulation games like Princess Maker. Pretty Derby is weird, though. It takes a sport with some underground associations (thanks both to its ties with sports gambling and its often brutal conditions for both horse and rider) and turns it into a glittering, feel-good idol concert. Everyone wins; everyone is immortal. Yet Pretty Derby holds that alongside the disposability and objectification that come with gacha. The contrast makes it an unnerving and revealing experience.

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby has taken the US by storm, even getting serious attention from mainstream streamers like Northernlion. The influx of US fans has prompted folks who have been playing the game for years to evangelize their favorite horse girls (called “uma musume” in the game). The premise is pure absurd sports anime. The horse girls all attend the same school, where they receive specialized coaching from trainers. You play as one of these trainers and help guide your horse to victory through your strategizing (and luck and money). The game’s exhilarating races are free from any player input at all. Instead, it is your planning and prep which will result in victory.

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Quite a few sub-systems affect race outcomes; Pretty Derby overwhelms with features and things to do. Seasonal events add new horse girls to the gacha roster. Daily challenges offer rewards for logging in and completing specific tasks every single day. But you’ll spend most of your time in the career mode, which operates much like Princess Maker or Long Live the Queen. Each uma musume has a set of stats—like speed, wit, and guts—that help them win races. Each day, you’ll select a training regime boosting specific stats. But you can’t just train forever. If your uma musume doesn’t rest, she can get injured. If you don’t accompany her on fun outings, her mood may plummet. All these factors affect her ability to perform in races. But the horse girls are not even the only gacha element. At the start of each career, you’ll select a deck of cards, representing other uma musume in your chosen girl’s orbit. Day by day, you’ll get story events involving those other characters which will boost your uma musame’s stats and grant them access to skills which activate during races. These cards have a separate gacha pool and upgrade system from the horse girls.

All this is to say, Pretty Derby is as predatory as any other gacha on the market. Like those other games, that predation works through layers of currencies and subsystems. Pretty Derby‘s simulation is not realistic, but it is dense and complex. There is some degree of shrewdness required for winning. Playing to your uma musume’s strengths, both in training and choosing which skills to upgrade, can dramatically affect outcomes. The fact remains that unless you are willing to grind out career mode after career mode for months at a time, you gotta spend money to win (or even just to get your favorite horse girl). Pretty Derby offers plenty of “content” for free players and a steady drip of rewards. But each one of those systems is tilted towards spending money. The flood of early prizes is not meant to prevent you from buying things, but to settle you in until the game can jab its hooks in your mind.

Unlike other gachas, Pretty Derby‘s gambling gains a weird resonance because of the sport it simulates. At least in American culture, horse races are associated with gambling addiction. The track is a place where poor and desperate people grow more poor and more desperate. The sport has also been brutal to the jockeys who participate in it. Laura Hillenbrand’s book Seabiscuit, about the legendary American race horse, describes jockeys starving themselves, even ingesting tape worms, to maintain light weights. It is no less harsh on the animals (for one poetic example, listen to the intro to the Killers song “Runaway Horses,” which describes a horse’s injury and the deadly aftermath). Like most sports, the horse race is easy to turn into drama, because of its connections to the most extreme demands on the body and its place in the culture as a frantic run for wealth and power.

This resonance gets even weirder because each of Pretty Derby‘s anime girls is based on a real race horse. In the game’s lore, the girls are reincarnations of these legendary steeds, who maintain their speed and stamina in this more humanoid form. There are no male uma musume, though many of the real horses Pretty Derby borrows were stallions. The cutesy designs, and the high-school like setting of Japan Tracen Academy, combine with the game’s themes of mentorship and guidance in the most loaded ways possible.

However, Pretty Derby is hardly the only gacha game to take inspiration from real-life for its collectable characters. Fate/Grand Order features historical figures from throughout all of human history. But the circumstances of Pretty Derby‘s cast make it a touch weirder. Grand Order‘s characters are mostly powerful figures whose inclusion in a silly game does nothing to shape their legacy. Pretty Derby‘s cast, in contrast, is made up of one of the most vulnerable living populations on this earth: Animals from which humans can extract profit. Race horses are bred to run; they don’t have a choice in the matter. Pretty Derby posits that these horses are not free even in death. Instead, they are doomed to relive their careers over and over until they achieve a total victory. This even includes horses that are best known for losing, like Haru Urara.

The game’s systems underline that grim subtext. If you fail any of your uma musume’s goals, career mode ends instantly and you retire that horse. You can use your retired horses, and their upgraded stats, in team races against other players and daily races against computer-controlled opponents. Furthermore, there are innumerable, more generic horse girls who fill out the rosters at lower levels who cannot get pulled from the gacha pool. These are horse girls that are destined to lose and be forgotten. The uma musume which populate Pretty Derby are at once immortal and disposable, eternal losers and forever winners, chosen over and over again.

Through all this, Pretty Derby‘s tone is relentlessly positive. The uma musume are inspired and excited. Setbacks lead to future victories. The game emphasizes the importance of rest and recreation in both its writing and its systems. The sport is noble and demanding, but it must be engaged with good health in mind (how else could an uma musume be in peak condition?) Regardless, the game’s rhetoric speaks for itself. Race forever and your favorite girls will never grow old. Just, please, don’t look behind the curtain.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.