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 participating repeatedly in four different mini-games that make up the Grand Prix – Hurtling Hurdles, Blazing Baskets, Dodgeball Demolition, and Gourmet Gauntlet. Each of these activities has up to four horse girls competing, each one belonging to a specific team. You’ll mainly tackle these activities through a story mode that lets you choose four different teams to follow as you play through their experience of training for and competing in the Grand Prix.
I was most excited to try Hurtling Hurdles, since it most closely resembles the racing that the series is known for. Instead, though, it’s more of an on-rails obstacle course that requires you to manage your stamina, grab points, and use skills or items to rack up the most points and win. It’s fun, but also severely suffers from only having one playable stage and no variations on it.
Blazing Baskets, meanwhile, is a basketball competition that might just be my favorite of the bunch. All 4 competitors need to run and tackle into each other to grab the active ball, bring it to one end of the court, and line up a shot to score points – but as the match progresses, new ball types, environmental obstacles, and moving hoops pop up that keep things spontaneous. The speed and intensity in this event was great and often hilarious. Dodgeball Demolition is similarly entertaining, if a bit slower. It’s a free-for-all dodgeball battle, but you can time the throw button just right to catch incoming balls, adding some technical prowess to the event that isn’t present in the other ones. This is also easily the most entertaining of the events to play 1 on 1.
Finally, Gourmet Gauntlet easily feels like the most miniature of mini-games of the bunch. One umamusume runs around grabbing plates of food to serve to a second umamusume, who automatically scarfs said food down. There’s very little strategy to this one, and not nearly enough ways to entangle with or directly affect your opponents for there to be any sense of strategy or competition to it.
Another big shift for this game is the art style – Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash renders everything in a bright pixel-art aesthetic that’s a huge change from the traditional style of the original game and the anime. What makes it work, besides all the lovely detail that goes into these pixel animations, is that the audio for the game is so accurate to the franchise. Every voice actor returns, and familiar music and sound effects can be heard through every moment – it really helps fill in the gaps and make these pixelated versions of my favourite umamusume feel just as lively as their original versions.
A minor note, but Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash isn’t without technical faults on PC. The game lacks resolution options higher than 1080p, and on Steam Deck, videos shown in the chapter select screen and before each event fail to load and only show an awkward missing-asset color bar screen instead.
There’s so much love packed into this game that dedicated fans will specifically appreciate – the story chapters for each time deliver on cute moments and interactions that feel straight out of the anime, and your customizable clubhouse lets you chat with and interact with all 25 quirky equine athletes in the game. Plus, you can even unlock a secret on-rails Vampire Survivors-style shooter that has way more depth to it than I would have expected. Honestly, if Golshi’s Grand Adventure 2 was a standalone $3 Steam release, it would be the talk of the indie-game scene for months. The sum of all the parts of Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash is definitely not without fault, but for the fans this game is aimed at, I think those faults are easily overlooked in favour of all the good parts.
