Umamusume Pretty Derby is coming back with yet another anime project, this time with horse girls from the 99s generation of Japanese horse racing.
Media mix franchise Umamusume is still one of the biggest IPs in Japan a bit more than one year after the game version was finally released. Cygames, known for Princess Connect and Granblue Fantasy, released the Umamusume Pretty Derby game on February 24, 2021. That was four years after the project got first announced in 2017 and long after the first TV anime adaptation. However, the wait was worth it as the horse girl racing game boasts incredible production quality at all levels, and it quickly managed to climb up to the summit of mobile games, and stay in a high place.
Uma Musume's success in the Japanese mobile game industry can most notably be explained by how it filled a niche that was pretty much abandoned since the PSP era: the raising simulator, as pretty much only Konami is still into it with the Powerful Pro Baseball series, with the newest eBASEBALL Powerful Pro Baseball 2022 out since April 21 in Japan on PS4 and Switch. While horse racing has an image in Japan of mainly being popular among Old Men With Disposable Income, absolutely everyone in Japan loves cute girls, and everyone likes raising their Favorite's stats and seeing Numbers Go Up.
New Umamusume Anime Project Revealed with First Main Characters Key Visual
Cygames announced this new anime on May 4, 2022, and confirmed this will be a new animation project "different from the TV series", so this is not Umamusume Season 3. Additional details like a release date will be announced later on.
Moreover, this new anime will focus on three particular horse girls: Narita Top Road, T.M. Opera O, and Admire Vega. The real horses they borrow their names from were active as part of the late 90s early 2000s generation. The anime's story will follow these three as they aim for the top of the Classics and clash with each other.
These three are already available in the game version. Cygames has also recently announced a global version for Umamusume, so the franchise is bound to expand beyond Japan. Check out the reveal trailer for the new anime below, and let me know your thoughts in the comments!