Reviews

If you told me before the season started that one of my favorite anime would’ve been about cute horse girls doing races and performing idol performances... I probably would’ve believed you because that actually sounds dumb enough to be good. Uma Musume wasn’t JUST good, it was great. Even if you take away the whole horse girl side of things, you still have a great anime about character striving to be the best runners they can, how they deal with training, rivalry, and losing on their way to achieving their goals. It’s a great character piece where the Main Character doesn’t always win, doesn’t always pull through when she has to, and sometimes you don’t know who to root for. These races can get surprisingly intense. It’s not as simple as “whoever has plot armor wins the race.” Each race is full of interesting characters with their own unique designs and racing tactics. While not all of the main cast gets enough time to truly shine, the main two were wonderful to see. Special Week and Silence Suzuka were great to see help one another as friends and rivals. The other members of their team never get the spotlight themselves, but they do well in supportive roles. The screen time they do get is always fun to see. It’s also worth mentioning that every character in the anime is based off of a real life race horse. So if you’re really into horse races, you’ll definitely see some names that look familiar. In the anime, the winning horse girls in a competition get to do these big idol performances to celebrate their victory. However, outside the first and last episodes, we really never get to see them. I should probably be glad the races themselves were made more important than idol performances, it would’ve been nice to see more of. While this was all technically just promotion for the upcoming mobile game, it was great for a standalone anime. It’s filled to the brim with colorful, unique characters, had some intense races, great character dynamics, and is an anime that I will truly miss watching each week. It really did a great job of selling the premise of the game. I’ll definitely check that out and get frustrated when I don’t summon a SSR Special Week.