When I first started playing Umamusume, I honestly didn't have much of an expectation for it. I mostly downloaded it because I was curious. I wanted to see what the game was actually like, how it played, and why people seemed to be so attached to these characters.
And my first impression of the actual gameplay was... not very good.
I really didn't like the training system at first. There were so many roguelike elements involved where every run felt like starting over again, and so many things could go wrong because of RNG. You could spend all that time carefully training an Uma, only for a few bad turns, failed training sessions, bad condition rolls, or an unfortunate race to completely derail the run.
Coming from games where progression is usually much more permanent and straightforward, I just couldn't get into it.
Eventually, it reached a point where I genuinely hated the gameplay. I didn't understand what people saw in it, and rather than forcing myself to play something I wasn't enjoying, I simply stopped playing altogether.
I thought that was probably going to be the end of my time with Umamusume.
But several months later, for whatever reason, I decided to come back and give the game another chance.
This time, something changed.
It wasn't really the game itself that changed. It was the way I approached it.
Instead of playing just for the sake of progressing or trying to understand everything immediately, I gave myself a personal goal: "I wanted to train my Mejiro McQueen to be the absolute best she could possibly be as if she is a daughter of my own."
It sounds like such a simple thing, but having that one goal completely changed how I looked at the game.
Suddenly, all of those mechanics that used to annoy me actually had a purpose.
I started paying attention to stats. I started learning what different skills actually did, how inheritance worked, which support cards were useful, what kind of stamina McQueen needed for longer races, when I should take a risk on training and when I should play it safe.
Things that previously felt like annoying obstacles gradually became things I actually wanted to understand.
A failed training run wasn't necessarily just wasted time anymore. Sometimes I would look at what went wrong and think about what I could do differently on the next attempt.
And whenever I managed to train a McQueen that was noticeably better than my previous one, there was this genuine feeling of progression. Not necessarily because the game told me that I had accomplished something, but because I knew how much better I had gotten at understanding the game.
That was when Umamusume finally clicked for me.
I realized that the roguelike structure I originally hated was also part of what made training an Uma feel personal. No two training runs were exactly the same. Sometimes everything went perfectly, sometimes everything went horribly wrong, and sometimes an Uma I wasn't expecting much from suddenly had an incredible run.
And somehow, those failures made the successful runs feel so much better.
McQueen basically became the character that gave me a reason to keep playing.
At first, I cared about making her stronger.
Then, because I wanted to make her stronger, I started caring about the game's mechanics.
Because I started caring about the mechanics, I started paying more attention to the characters.
And once I started paying attention to the characters, I fell straight into the rabbit hole.
I started reading more of the stories. I started learning about the different Umamusume and their personalities, relationships, rivalries, quirks, and backgrounds.
Characters who were originally just "that other horse girl I saw in a race" gradually became characters I actually recognized and cared about.
And then there were the memes.
Suddenly I understood all the jokes I had previously seen completely out of context. The community's obsession with certain characters, the running jokes about their personalities, the ridiculous training moments, the suffering caused by RNG, and all the memes that only make sense once you've actually played the game.
Eventually, I started watching the anime as well.
And that opened up an entirely different side of Umamusume for me.
Characters that I already liked from the game suddenly had stories that made me appreciate them even more. Some characters I barely cared about before watching the anime became some of the ones I loved the most afterward.
And once you start learning that so many of the characters, races, victories, defeats, injuries, rivalries, and even some of the jokes are inspired by actual racehorses and real events, you start looking at the entire franchise differently.
There is something strangely beautiful about it.
What I initially saw as a silly game about anime horse girls turned out to have far more heart behind it than I ever expected.
Looking back, I think that's what makes my experience with Umamusume so funny to me.
I didn't fall in love with this game immediately.
Quite the opposite.
I tried it.
I disliked it.
I hated the gameplay.
I quit.
Then I came back months later and somehow ended up loving the very game I thought wasn't for me.
And I think the biggest reason was that I eventually stopped asking myself:
"What am I supposed to be doing in this game?"
and started asking:
"What do I want to accomplish?"
My answer was McQueen.
I wanted to make my McQueen stronger.
That gave me something personal to work toward, and from that one little goal, everything else naturally followed.
Now I wasn't just playing because the game gave me another objective to complete. I was playing because I wanted to see how much further I could push her.
And somewhere along the way, it stopped being only about McQueen too.
I started wanting to train other Umamusume. I wanted to experience their stories. I wanted to see them win races that they struggled with. I wanted to experiment with different builds and strategies. I started recognizing their personalities and getting attached to them for completely different reasons.
The game that I originally dropped because I couldn't stand its gameplay somehow became a game where even the failures became part of the experience.
Of course, I still get annoyed when RNG decides that my training run needs to die a horrible death.
I still have moments where I stare at the screen wondering how everything could possibly go wrong in such a short amount of time.
But now I can laugh about it, complain about it, and then inevitably press the button to start another training run anyway.
Because maybe this time it'll work.
Maybe this will finally be the McQueen run.
And I think that's when you know the game has gotten you.
Umamusume taught me something that I wasn't really expecting from it: sometimes a game doesn't need to immediately click with you. Sometimes you just need to find your own reason to play it.
For me, that reason was Mejiro McQueen.
She was the goal that made me give the gameplay another chance, and that second chance eventually led me toward appreciating everything else the gameplay, the characters, their stories, the anime, the community, the memes, and even the real-world history that inspired so much of it.
And somehow, that "one more run" turned into genuinely loving Umamusume for what it is.
I'm glad I gave it that second chance.
