Wait, is it actually coming to the west?
not yet, but notably Cygames has a partner in NA/EU in Crunchyroll for Princess Connect Re:Dive and they do their own goddamn English translation for Granblue so they probably have a good feel for what perceived demand is
the only issues I can see is that I have no idea how the CR Games/Funimation Games/Aniplex/Sony Music game publishing thing is going to eventually shake out to - yes Sony owns all these entities - if they’re crazy enough to publish a phone game about anime horse girls, and international naming rights to the horses
okay, well, there’s also the issue of people lewding the horse girls (do not lewd the horse girls) and Cygames had to post in English ahead of the Shadowverse/Uma collab (technically the first available horse game content published in the West; they had the Granblue collab translated but technically that game isn’t on phone stores in the West) that, hey, do not lewd the horse girls. they also had to post a 6 month reminder to the game’s news board so, no, it’s just lawless freedom perverts who are horny for horses
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look, I’m not saying it’s hard to find horse girl porn
just, what the fuck is wrong with you, you pervert, do not lewd the horses
I’m here to tell you you cannot control the perverts
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iirc the main issue is that the japan racing association and the owners of the actual horses are litigious towards those who cough lewd the horse girls
The unspoken rule about the JRA horses is that they are mob money and the joke is if you make some lewd horse art then you’ll get paid a visit
Your kneecaps will be involved
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this version of tokyo vice would have been so much better.
tokyo vice x luck, i guess
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Masaaki Bandoh of GTA fame* kind of looks like this young lad here
so the JRA thing totally checks out!
* yes, i am aware that most people don't even know what he does or who he is :tarothink:
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hey, speaking of, did you know they announced a season 3 of your favorite horse girl-based cartoon show
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IT’S FINALLY TIME
PALMER IS UPON THE WORLD
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hello
hi
it is the dawn of a new era in horse girl phone app horse racing
the beloved B league for the monthly cups, which has seen either sick, demented meta perverts or insane horse scientists battle it out for horsupremacy, has been retired as of last month
it its place: the limit is been raised from B and lower (8,199 rank points) to A+ and lower (14,499 rank points)
now, I bet you’re wondering (you’re actually not wondering if you’re part of the demographic posting on the selectbutt but entertain me here for a minute), what actually does 6,300 points mean
at 8,199 points, decisions have to be settled on and sacrifices must be made. invest in stats? tilt towards skills? should I bother going for the horse’s unique skill level ups? did I screw up and now I have to track the last few turns in the arcane art of horse math?
at 14,499 points? fuck man, two stats maxed out, 3 to 5 gold skills, real big brain dumb skill builds, stupid ideas
the chains are off
hell, some horses are more viable now; Christmas Oguri’s special is “if you heal three times in a race, you get big speed”, and, suddenly, doing 3 heals and some other skills and enough stats to make sure she’s actually smart enough to heal 3 times in a race instead of leaving it to luck or losing out on power or stamina is no longer a Spohie’s choice (yeah I said it)
of course, none of this matters as I am a bad trainer and will burn out and lose regardless. but now I can do it with flair
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I keep reading this as Uwe Boll san’s Pretty Derby
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did you see this
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hello
hi
today our friends in Korea have been introduced to the joys of horse daughters
I wish them the best of luck in trait farming and pulling the Super Creek SSR card
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hi
hello
a lot has happened in the months since I have last posted, so this one gets to be a long, stupid post
firstly, I’m excited to share that the game is celebrating its 1st1.5th Anniversary
we made it friends, 18 months of horse girls somehow being one of Japan’s biggest nerd things
the game is somehow still going through growing pains as the developers fight off the insane playerbase and their ability to break any and all systems presented to them (I’ve seen what the whales can do) and also just generally lining things up.
such as moving the cup dates from the back end of the month to the middle of the month. this seemed like a nothing change and messed a lot with the first cup that got rescheduled because if you’re some kind of damn idiot who trains new horses for every cup because that’s how you get your kicks, you went from having a month of downtime to suddenly having a cup 15 days out after one just ended. the good thing about this is that they’ve aligned the monthly events, which you build participation in by playing the game, with the cups such that every month is now monthly event>cup>misc events and everything flows into each other and there’s no more gaps in “content”. I for one think it’s been a positive change; I have a reason to do the event other than just doing the event and FOMO on the monthly SSR card and, hey, cups are hilarious and fun
also, somewhere in trying their best to make sure the game isn’t a flaming wreck on the side of the road, Cygames has made two additions:
- they raised stat caps. okay, this one is kind of insane. from launch until, I don’t know, August of this year of our Lord 2022, the stat cap was 1200 in each category. however, as the top horse scientists and their wealthy benefactors started to experiment and new scenarios were added, soon, horses were easily reaching 1200 in 3-4 stats (I mean, if you had spent hundreds or thousands in the game or just happen to have gotten meta cards every single pull and the RNG blessed you with good traits on your horses) (oh god is there ever a meta around cards and horses but that’s not important right now).
so they raised the stat caps because fuck you spend money
now, the old hard caps of 1200 are effectively soft caps and, depending on the scenario you play and the parents you pick for your horse, can get real silly (Make A New Track, in an effort to actually make people build stamina, has a stamina cap of 1900). but also they made stats over the soft cap 1/8th 1/2 as effective, which kind of blunts the effectiveness of them unless you are going big, big on stats. also my napkin math says like, 18 points over cap is worth a whole goddamn skill so there’s that too.
- they added a fourth scenario. in Grand Live, they remembered that their anime horse school girls who race horse races are also idols who ostensibly perform idol concerts for their fans. in a ploy to encourage degenerate horse scientists to not send their horses into the race grinder endlessly as was the meta for Make A New Track (if you back-to-backed too much, your horse would start losing motivation and stats but it didn’t matter because you were generating a ton of skill points and stats and currency for the shop, which just gave you more stats and maybe cupcakes and energy), Grand Live is focused on Actually Training as was the intended(?) gameplay of the original URA Training scenario the game launched with.
the gimmick here? well, when you train after a certain, very early point in the scenario, you gain one of 5 currencies: Dance, Passion (I think it’s passion), Voice, Visual and Melody. you then use these to buy buffs in the shop and when you buy enough buffs, you’re offered songs to learn for your idol unit’s upcoming live show, which also give you nutty buffs. not just straight up Big Stat Number buffs but also additional stats on training.
once you get the tempo of gaining idol points and the flow of training, you start getting big gains from pressing the goddamn training buttons. also of note, Grand Live uses the unique character story routes, so in addition to having to fulfill their conditions, it also means the few characters who can unlock secret skills via unique story events are essentially massively bufffed (maybe) compared to running the in New Track
also they finally fucking added Girls’ Legend U as a song even though it’s the fucking song most of the menu music is based on and the only chance to hear it in full is when the game is downloading the first time you play it, which doesn’t mean anything to you, but I fucking love Girls’ Legend U (note: a version of it plays during horse gacha, which just lends further credence that the game has broken me)
(hell, they finally released the Winning Live of the game’s OST a few months back and now I can finally hear all the race music I never hear anymore on demand. except they didn’t include the cup music, which is the best race music in the game and I still have to rely on grotty game rips of them)
so, for a second time this year: this is it. the end of horse racing.
(actually the real end of horse racing is they finally added a skill to the game that works on multiple length types, basically daring anyone who actually spends on making meta horses to open up their wallets, but that’s probably a massive future problem for 6-12 months down the line)
oh! also, they remembered that dirt tracks are a thing. since launch, dirt tracks and horses have been mostly neglected, but as of the 1.5th anniversary, they got serious about dirt, adding 5-6 G1 dirt races, a whole swath of dirt-only skills and they’re starting to bump on the roster of dirt-capable horses (note: this will be relevant later)
oh, other than that, what is there?
cups. cups. how the hell have we been doing in cups.
RNG has not blessed us too much.
in May, the new era of open league began. no longer were we limited to the rank limit of B. instead, the cap was raised to A+ and we were allowed to make degenerate builds (I mean, relative to the actual endgame horses). stats got bigger, sets of skills got more important and teambuilding got dumber.
me? I spent two straight months gnashing my teeth watching my horses climb to Group A (for winners!) finals and then getting 2nd, watching the horse that took 2nd hit the 15-18% chance of getting a late start (oh lord do you know when your horse gets a late start, the game announces it for you loud and clear)
in July, my very good birthday present Mejiro Palmer, the very horse that I stan above all horses, dipped out of first for a split second in the final race and completely fucked over that cup
in August, they ran another sprint cup. now, even with B-rank horses, a sprint length race was barely over a minute and with the raise in rank, races were just over in blink of an eye. predictably, in a format where the race is over if you look away for a second, stamina wasn’t too important, leading to absolutely headass ideas for stat and skill builds. because I’m an idiot, I took this cup Very Seriously
da team:
Sakura Bakushino
tactic: I don’t know, clog up the front?
joke: Too dumb to live, too fast to die
okay the idea behind this horse makes sense later but essentially I took a horse that runs the chase tactic (this is mid-font of the four available) and bred her for outrun in an attempt to block out other outrun horses and create blockage in the front to enable another horse.
but why? whomst would I try to enable by trying to making a mess of the front of the pack?
Mayano Top Gun
tactic: I had a bad idea while drinking too much
joke: TURN AND BURN
the horse I love to hate is back (though sadly her movie-accurate jacket has been censored)
one of Mayano’s unique attributes compared to most of the horses in the game is that she can be molded to fit into any race type with enough coercing and luck. setting her up to get an A or higher in sprints is trivial; getting her both this and rare skill Non-Stop Girl while maintaining a sane stat build is a little trickier.
allow me to take an aside to describe Non-Stop Girl. in the wake of the shift to higher rank limits, a whole swath of skills opened up for trainers to use. chief among these are acceleration skills. possibly far more potent than just regular speed boosts, acceleration skills allow horses to giddy the fuck up and do absolutely dumbass shit. Non-Stop Girl is unique as one of two neutral acceleration skills in the game and whose activation condition is, roughly, “hey the horses in front of me/the front of the pack are clogged up”, which means it can very easily not go off, but when it does, ho shit.
allow this video of Gold Ship getting her zoom on to demonstrate:
horses in the rear gain ground. horses in the front get space.
why the hell is this explanation necessary?
Mayano’s unique skill and Non-Stop Girl roughly have the same activation conditions, to the point where Non-Stop Girl is her level 5 unlock
upon realizing this, I trained an entire horse around the idea that one day, she would pop both at the same time and destroy the field because I am an idiot
Taiki Shuttle
tactic: BANG
joke: BANG
Shuttle is also back! I have gotten a better grasp on what her skill does via the power of paying attention. if she is in third or fourth in the beginning of the the last third of the race (and very specifically third or fourth and very specifically during the opening of the last third of the race as shown on the race line on the UI), then she gets a massive acceleration boost and she just absolutely decimates the front of the pack. however, I was content with this and also gave her the rare chase tactic acceleration skill for the last corner and also El Condor Pasa’s unique, for the last straightaway. what this means is when she don’t win, she loses, but when she wins, she wins
of note: jesus christ nearly everyone had a pocket Shuttle ready to go this is the most goddamn annoying horse to go up against because she can just ruin everything and also her namesake possibly had just died so it was the Taiki Shuttle Memorial Cup
okay, so this team worked okay for a run but I felt like having two horses up front was doing too much clogging work and kneecapping Shuttle’s ability to whip out her six shooter and gun everyone down
King Halo
tactic: moral support
joke: ojousama laugh
(note: I ran regular King Halo, one of the launch 1-stars, and not Ouendan King Halo, an event horse who’s also dressed like a female version of a Japanese male cheerleader, birthed from a monthly event where she convinced everyone that cheerleading was cool, whom I accidentally pulled to lord over someone that I had their daughter)
look, when the race is a minute long, there’s not a lot of room for the rear positions to make themselves known, because either outrun horses… outrun the pack or chase horses take command and take over in the last corner. King Halo is a mid-rear horse meant for sprints and maybe milers if you don’t do much breeding and she sits in a weird spot in that she’s competitive, but she’s not winning
not that she can’t win:
anyway, third horse on the team, isn’t in the way, funny laugh, does it in heels
how did the cup go: holy shit are you kidding me, it was an RNG-driven trainwreck, how the hell did you think it went
well, that’s not entirely true, because like any good solvable problem, results can be achieved, either by on purpose or by accident
so we got to the finals of Group A, largely on the kindness of Shuttle actually functioning and I guess Mayano did some things and King Halo was there
most of the race is horses up front, fighting for position. the two Shuttles in the race, my own and another, fight for being the less worse one toward the back and then there’s a couple of horses in the back doing nothing. Mayano decides to compete for first, as is her job when, 40 seconds in, we hit the last corner, when she declares:
TURN AND BURN
the number one movie at the box office has come home as the Maverick boost is real and also her deadweight teammates get to taste victory too
next time I feel like typing: oh god they did another goddamn dirt cup
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have no idea what’s going on here, and start to feel like a proper boomer for not even understanding the basics what’s going on here, but that’s OK!
it’s like finding one of these anime fanshrines in 1999 and not having any idea what the character(s) are from, what the story/plot arc is all about, just marvelling at the almost cryptic info that has no Relation to Anything That Matters In Real Life.
In short, geocities ghost surely approves of this thread, gives hoofes up!
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hello
hi
I’m ready to feel like typing again
with the flaming multicar pile-up of the 2022 Leo cup behind us, it was time to set our sights on the next challenge. September’s monthly cup would be a first for the cup series. in an effort to help make moneydraw attention to the many additional dirt events and skills added to the game, Cygames made the cup a particularly bizarre combination: dirt, bad track condition, mid-length
before they had added more races, there were a grand total of three (3) unique mid-length dirt G1 races on the campaign calendar. the dirt category for your steady PVP team always places races on a miler track and most of the races and events on dirt tracks were sprints or milers.
so that’s already fucked. but then the same issue that existed back in February from the first dirt cup still exists now: hey there’s not actually a bunch of horses instantly ready for dirt. since then, they have four more horses that are a bit more dirt ready: Inari One (oh my god there’s so many fox jokes around her), Yukino Bijin, Cobano Rickey and an idol version of Smart Falcon. of those four, three of them (that’s 75% for those of you scared of math) ran on rate-up banners on the lead up and during the cup itself
once again you have two options: fuck you pay Cygames or be lucky enough to have a deep or good inheritance pool and good luck during the run to forcibly breed horses that don’t belong into dirt champions
okay actually there’s a third option but we’ll get into that later
I am not blessed with a deep pool of strong dirt traits to pass along, so either I pass along good stats or build dirt. instead, I chose the boring route of building horses already good at dirt
Team Dirt
Agnes Digital
methodology: get her so hot and bothered that she blows up the entire field
joke: see previous post dedicated to Agnes Digital’s joke - short version: a gay horny horse girl fangirl horse girl
Agnes Digital is the wildcard of the team. she is armed with Number One dumb acceleration skill Non-Stop Girl and she’s just there to ruin everyone’s day. Non-Stop Girl combos with her own unique skill, where she gets a massive boost after passing two horses, and Symboldi Rudolph’s unique, which gives a boost after passing three horses. but, as Non-Stop Girl is a volatile skill, she only does the thing every so often
BUT WHEN SHE DOES, SHE DO
she’s less a sane competitor and more a powder keg waiting to explode with horny
Cobano Rickey
shut up let me reference Dr. Rin
methodology: I’m not actually doing work at work
joke: uh, as far as I can tell, Feng Shui
okay, Rickey was one of the three horses running on a banner in the lead up to the cup, making her valuable because she is naturally for the dirt (with the tradeoff being she is bad at grass). I initially went “yeah, I guess that horse is cool”, but then I took a closer look at her skill sheet and saw this:
Cobano Rickey
has a gold-level passive
that boosts her speed by a portion of her power
immediately my brain is just “we will shove as much power on her as possible and she will be perfect”
commence gambling
I don’t know, maybe 50-60 pulls later, Rickey has joined the team and I’m ready to-
okay so it turns out that her very good rare skill passive is her level 5 unlock and doing this requires race banners from the new races, including banners from a race that you can only do once a run and get 2 banners per a run and you need 60 of them. but, since it’s the 1.5th Anniversary, runs cost half energy, which means we can do 6 runs per a day for free and
we are going to level 5 this horse or die trying
several hours of horsing and maybe a dozen Rickey runs later, we have fully powered up Rickey. we put her in a cup run and
you know, I think she’s good at her intended tactic of chase, but I felt like a I needed a presence up front. one more run and we have an outrun Rickey, whose sole purpose is to combat the billions of Smart Falcons floating in the brackets by stopping them from getting in front by getting in front
she doesn’t need to win to do her job, but hey, sometimes she sticks it out and wins
okay we’re ready and-
shit, I need a third horse for the team, don’t I
Oguri Cap
methodology: there is only one sane way to build this horse
joke: it is literally canon in the comic where she is the main character that her mom says the grocery bill when Cap was living at home was larger than the tuition to Tracen Academy
much like I had an entire parenthetical in the previous post explaining that the King Halo I ran was Classic Flavor King Halo and not New Flavor! King Halo, here the Oguri Cap that I ran (and, indeed, the only Cap I have on my account) was Miracle of Christmas Oguri Cap and not regular Oguri Cap. this is a very, very important distinction because of how Xmas Cap’s unique skill functions:
if Oguri Cap heals three times in a race, she will receive a massive speed and acceleration boost during the second half of the race. if you heal three times before the halfway mark, it fires off once she crosses the threshold. if your third heal goes off during the second half of the race, the skill immediately fires off.
thus, we have to keep a few very important things in mind to reach our win condition:
-
holy shit we absolutely do not only build her with three heals. horses, even at high levels of brain, are dumb and will simply not use skills for a number of reasons, be it stupidity, feeling like they don’t need to, because they’re so goddamn motivated that they think they can just win or they’re so demotivated that life isn’t worth living. so we build her with a fourth heal with an easy activation condition in order to mitigate risk
-
we try to place the third heal as far into the race as possible to maximize push potential while also giving her time to jockey for the win
-
we have to balance our stats to allow for enough brain to have her actually use skills so she can achieve three heals
so, she is built with 円弧のマエストロ, the meta special, a gold heal that pops on corners, which is good as nearly the first third of the track is corner and easily sets it off; 栄養補給, a chase tactic heal that goes off during the middle portion of the race; スリーセブン, a heal that activates at the 777m mark (thus creating a point where her unique will fire off most of the time and a squarely placed at around the 2/3rds mark of the 2000m track); and ふり絞り, a heal that activates in the last section of the race if you activate multiple skills in a short amount of time, serving as the desperation backup heal.
when the horse machine breaks down? she is just a horse, albeit one who can still contest.
when the horse machine works?
WE FEAST
also, unlike Rickey and Digital, who have multiple, multiple runs dedicated to getting them just right, I randomly go in, do one run with Cap and go “yeah, that works I guess”
also much like last cup, holy shit nearly every fucking trainer has a pocket Oguri Cap, in either flavor
okay but how did the cup go?
shockingly well, actually. the team immediately go through both rounds 1 and 2 (in class A) in one run. we were sitting pretty and other runs were just done to get that sweet free gacha currency.
we did hit a few snags though:
-
horse Inari One, who is more or less Gold Ship, the thief of victories, but made for dirt. she is a Problem Horse
-
some perverts elected to, instead of rolling the dice on a full team, to deploy meta nuke horse Nice Nature. it goes even past this, with other trainers running Rudolph also in a nuke capacity and apparently the new meta is building your nuke horse with Swimsuit Gold Ship’s unique, which makes it so a gold skill you have always goes off regardless of activation condition
but hey, a few rough runs don’t matter too much, we’re sitting pretty
okay, group A finals. so, the first thing I notice is that my bracket is half as large as it was for the previous cup, which seems like some serious “Gacha Cup” vibes. and I don’t dispute this because, well, as I’ve said, either you got lucky on pulls or you got lucky on horse training.
as for the race, it’s basically a three-way mirror match. 3 Oguris (though mine is the only Christmas one), 3 Digitals, 2 Falcons and Rickey, who is effectively a Smart Falcon stand-in because I wasn’t good enough at gambling (remember, gambling is a skill). perhaps speaking to how RNG is on my side, one of the other Digitals is B-rank and all of the competing horses have a small amount of runs, despite have high win rates (a comparison: a cup where you do the full amount of runs is 81 races, counting the final race. I had an overall 60% win rate, Oguri had the highest of the team at about 30% of 70-some races along with a 70% podium rate (finishing 1st, 2nd or 3rd). one of the Digitals had a 70% win rate, but inspecting her stats shows she had run 10 races).
at the start, Rickey gets out of the gates late, but between her skills, her stats and her absurd passive, she can push up and contest in the front easily. everyone else pushes to their positions and we take the first turn. everyone is functioning well so far, up until we go into the long straightaway that makes up most of the middle of the race. Oguri was stupid and didn’t use the very good heal button on the corner, so she’s already down a heal on the crucial three count we need for her to activate.
anyway, midway through and Rickey summons a water dragon to defeat a dust storm and enrich the land (at this point in the journey, you should just nod, this is a relatively grounded unique skill animation), Oguri has managed to heal twice by the 777m mark and Digital is busying being useless in the back. we enter the last part of the race:
it’s a Horsemas miracle
or we actually built correctly and introduced enough safeguards
either way, WE FEAST
although I am disappointed that we didn’t yoink the 1-2 by a nose
I’m also becoming increasingly concerned that I’m actually getting good at making horse
anyway, who the hell knows when the next post will be because why would I post about losses
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