Banner from today’s topic’s 2025 Aprlil Fool’s.
April Fools! Let’s talk about another game that ultimately let’s me talk about Uma Musume indirectly.
More specifically, I’ve talked in this blog plenty of times about how when Uma Musume was announced in 2016 and even when it had the anime in 2018 it was trying to enter into a market that… to call it saturated would be an understatement.
And as it just so happens, last year I got into a game that lets me explain the problems early Uma Musume inherited from its subgenre.
But first, let’s talk about the game in question.
Station Memories (ステイションメモリーズ) usually shortened to just EkiMemo (駅メモ) is a mobile game that started all the way back in 2014.
The premise is this: In the future people have started to use their own vehicles more, which has resulted in railways and stations starting to be forgotten. This is where the DENCOs come in, small doll-sized (I’m assuming they mean the more common 1/6 size) humanoids whose mission it is to preserve and restore the memory of train stations and railways. They’re opposed by the IKS who employs their own DENCOs but these take away memories instead.
The player is a Master (we’ll get back to this) which is basically a civilian acting as a field agent with the DENCOs in the job of collecting and preserving the memories.
Aside from the really interesting premise of preserving public transportation against a prevalence of cars, the main thing about this game is that it’s a gijinka IP where the thing being depicted is specific train stations.
In case you haven’t ever seen the term for some reason, Gijinka (擬人化) is literally just the Japanese word for Anthropomorphization… but it’s three syllables vs SEVEN so excuse me while I’m a weeb about for the rest of this post.
Like most every Gijinka IP everywhere you get a choice of three girls at the start: Tameguri Melo (representing Shiteguuri Station in Nagano), Shinsaka Luna (representing Shin Osaka Station), and Koihama Miroku (representing Koishihama Station in Iwate).
I actually discovered the game because I live near Shin Osaka and they had a promotion with Luna plastered all over the place for a while last year.
Back to the girls, they been added consistently roughly every other month, even since I started playing. As of this writing the latest one is number 149 (technically 150 because there’s a 0 DENCO) called Nippori Harukaze who is based on Nippori Station in Arakawa.
And on top of these, there’s a whole sub category of “Extra” DENCOs who are based around countries instead. My favorite (because I’m a predictable Bitch with Predictable tastes) is Francisca Tequila (you’ll never fucking guess which country she comes from).
She’s not the only one hailing from Mexico though, there’s also Dulce Tacubaya and Margarita Xochimilco.
It doesn’t stop there either. There’s Luisa Belo Horizonte from Brazil, Elena Ollantaytambon from Peru, Melina Retiro from Argentina, and Rita Madrid from… no idea, not a clue.
I will never ever ever EVER complain about someone saying a character is south american and making her a brown-skinned bombshell, but mad props to the staff for not falling into that hole every single time and actually mixing up the designs a lot.
I also appreciate that it’s not a singular shade of brown, but let’s not get too derailed (HAH!).
There’s also collabs. In the time I’ve been playing there’s been Monogatari, Idolmaster, and Miku collabs, and I’ve seen Konosuba characters here and there.
Back to the game, how does it play?
It’s super simple. You have a squad of DENCOs and a “Main” one that “attacks”.
You press a button, the app checks where you are and which station is closest to you. If there’s no girls there you “link” to it, and if there’s a girl already linked you trade blows and if you defeat her you’re linked to the station instead.
The longer you remain linked the more EXP you get and the more points for events you get. Part of the strategy is that if you’re linked to three stations and your girl is attacked in all three, she has the same HP bar across all three.
There’s items you can use to link to stuff far away from you, but in a very fitting design way, it’s the ultimate “I’m riding the train and I have nothing else to do” game. Every time your train stops press the button and check that station specifically.
It’s light fun, it’s charming, it’s a miracle it’s still online 11 years in being such a specific niche game (though not entirely considering the steep prices for the gacha and how hardcore train fans are).
It also reminded me of the trappings of this subgenre that Uma Musume had to shed away in order to actually explode like it did.
To understand what I mean, I need to explain this ideosyncracy that I have: The difference between “Character” and “Original Character” or “OC”.
Simply put, a “Character” exists in a finite context where they change through its course, while an OC exists as an amalgamation of concepts and aesthetics in a void. An OC does change as the author refines their concept, but that’s a different sort of change.
Think the difference between The Dude in The Big Lebowski and Peewee Herman. The Dude has a recognizable character but also has that character have a development dependant on which part of the movie you are watching, meanwhile Peewee doesn’t really have any development even in his movie and TV show but the way it’s portrayed has evolved as it’s polished.
Or for a more personal example: Jill from VA-11 Hall-A is a character because even if you can summarize her personality pretty easily, the Jill from the start of the game and the Jill from the end of the game are markedly different but the same person. Meanwhile, Haru (one of my dolls) has always been an ephemeral beauty sort of girl; sure, I eventually pinpointed more and more what her style was and refined her character to be “she thinks she’s babied but everyone just treats her like royalty” but she pretty much remains static.
And this is relevant because Gijinka IPs focus so hard on having OCs that they write themselves into a corner when it comes to adapting things into a different work or needing any plot at all.
Every one of these IPs basically consists of a roster of girls with designs filled to the brim with DETAILS and TRIVIA, the general framework of a personality and how they might react to other characters, maybe a rival faction to incite gameplay, and a player character given a title that often tends to default to Master.
When the time to adapt the work comes there’s always a tonal and pacing challenge because that structure is not really conducive to having a “voice” so to speak. sure all of these tend to have events and such, but the events are short self-contained vignettes where an ending doesn’t need to be too crazy because it’s just reward for grinding.
It’s true for Ekimemo, it’s true for Kancolle (hell there’s no two adaptations of Kancolle that are even remotely close in lore or even tone)… and it was true for Uma Musume.
Our old friend Starting Gate comes to mind with how barebones the characterization is, I’ve also mentioned how early Uma Musume wanted to push the idea that the girls do what they do for the trainer rather than the other way around, even season 1 of the anime has plenty of moments that just feel like undecipherable fanservice for the heck of it like having Super Creek “cheat” in an eating context as a nod to the one time Super Creek was disqualified from a race for obstruction… or for that matter that one scene where Super Creek just says to Oguri to show the others what their generation is made of.
Characters appearing for the sake of appearance, random non sequitors being thrown just because, pivotal career moments reduced to trivia sections of pages about each episode.
Baffling in current Uma Musume context but perfectly in line with the whole Gijinka genre as a whole.
TM Opera O actually comes to mind for this.
In Starting Gate you only see her briefly when Special Week enters the school, almost like a “oh hey do you recognize that name?” sort of thing which also happens in Season 1 where she’s just… lumped into Rigil. In both she’s just a theater kid, that’s it. She’s grandiose and wants to give a good show, basically the level of characterization you see in other Gijinka things.
After that point though?
*breathes in*
TM Opera O isn’t really a narcissist, rather she’s in love with the image she sees in the mirror, she fights to be what she feels she can be if she tries hard enough. If you see Road to the Top you actually see her depth in how hard she works, how good humored she is, and how gracious of a loser she is while Toppro takes her defeats to heart. Come Door To A New Era she has fully grown into the role she was chasing in RTTT, becoming the overlord daring the others to take her down and give everyone a good show.
Meanwhile the game also focuses on just how much she obfuscates with her act, where you start to realize that she’s one of the most perceptive girls in the cast and her front is there to keep the mood light, as seen with how she’s Dotou’s hype woman but also knows EXACTLY how to get under Admire Vega’s skin because if she doesn’t Ayabe is going to retreat into herself so better to annoy than to leave alone.
*COUGH*
Basically, Uma Musume only started truly coming into its own when it stopped making OCs and started making Characters. Even through events there’s a very loose but consistent character continuity where developments in one carry in spirit into the others. A nice example is how Mihono Bourbon (who’s been in at least three events by now) starts in a Halloween even isolating herself because she can’t do anything right but cut to two events where she’s featured later and she’s now having a meal with other clumsy girls.
And I don’t mean an ounce of disrepect to EkiMemo when I say this (because again, I do think it’s a neat game), but seeing the contrast between what Uma Musume has managed to and the standard that EkiMemo was and is a part of was so sharp it made me appreciate how far things have come. And more importantly, articulate something I’ve been saying a lot around here.
Let’s just hope neither EkiMemo nor Uma Musume fall to Persona 5 Collab Curse.