Header comes from this Animeanime page on Cygames announcing Line stickers.
It’s wild that Uma Musume has, thus far, not had any collab characters.
Okay, to be more specific: Uma Musume has showed up on other properties, and even in-game there’s collabs with KFC and Number (a sports magazine). Hell, the Grand Masters scenario is technically a collab with horseracing arcades.
In fact, one of the first things that happened right after the game came out was Mayano Top Gun promoting Top gun Maverick and to this day it doesn’t feel like a real thing.
But there’s not been, for example, an Uma Musume, a girl that’s designed as a collab with another property in mind. Which wass something that people immediately started wondering about, especially considering how fond Cygames is of doing that sort of thing to the point Fortnite still doesn’t hold a candle to the stuff you see in Granblue Fantasy.
After all THEY HAD THE JAPANESE SHARKNADO DUB ACTORS FOR WHAT’S STILL THE BEST EVENT THAT GAME HAS EVER PUSHED OUT.
It’s also not like it’s unheard of for characters to be made whole cloth for it, in fact, back in 2020 (though through a collab that started all the way back in 2017) Kemono Friends 3 added no less than three Throughbreds as characters, and that was specifically for a thing with the JRA.
I’ve started a draft on JRA collabs since I don’t wanna get too sidetracked. So we’ll touch on that topic another day.
You get the point. Uma Musume has had promotional stuff in it, it also has been used in promotional stuff for other things. They’ve appeared as crossover characters elsewhere but there’s not been a thing where they make a character specifically promoting something else or based on something.
Sure, the three goddesses come from a collab with an arcade, but they’re based on historical horses like all the others. It’s not like they made a Fuunsaiki girl, or a Kokuoh girl, or Freddy’s Horse into a girl, or a Red Hare girl.
Sidenote, for all of you speculating what a Red Hare girl would be like you forget that the girls in-game are as much the jockeys and staff as they are the horses. Opera O is Ryuji Wada, Symboli Rudolf is Yukio Okabe; and Red Hare wouldn’t just be Lu Bu, it would be an amalgamation/progression of Lu Bu to Cao Cao to Guan Yu to Sun Quan to Ma Zhong.
BACK TO THE MAIN POINT, that status remained for… almost 10 years if you count the original announcement, until around two months ago. But first let’s talk about what they’re crossing over with.
The Royal Family was a novel written in 2019 by Kazumasa Hayami (with a paperback reissue released in 2022).
It spans 20 years from 1997 to 2017. It starts with Eiji Kurisu, a tax accountant who, feeling empty after the death of his father, is hired by Kozo Sanno to be his secretary. Sanno is an autocratic and slightly vulgar man but he has one dream: To win the Arima Kinen as a JRA racehorse owner. The problem is that Sanno doesn’t have an eye for what makes a good racehorse, or pedigrees or… any of those details, really so his dream remains out of grasp.
Cut to 2004 where Kanako Nozaki, an old acquintance of Eiji’s that’s now working for her family’s farm introduces him to a colt that might be the answer to Sanno’s prayers: A horse called Royal Hope who Eiji tries to name Royal Thunder, but Kozo (who the horse is very attached to) overrides the decision giving him the new name.
Fitting a story about succession and legacy, when the story jumps ahead to 2015 we get a title drop as a new horse, Royal Hope’s descendant, is born and gets the name of Royal Family.
By the way, quick sidenote, Kazumasa Hayami is also the author of Kanashiki Debu Neko-chan, if any of you have see that around. I think it got an anime a while back.
Another sidenote: Within the novel’s fiction the last horse to win Arima Kinen before Royal Hope’s year is called Imagine Dragon.
Imagine Dragon is a Triple Crown winner.
Also there’s another Royal Hope descendant in Royal Family’s time called Big Hope because be took down Hope and those was granted the title of-
In October of 2025 The Royal Family began being adapted as a TV Drama by TBS. To my surprise it’s also apparently being subbed by Netflix as Passing The Reins.
You know what else started being broadcasted on TBS in October 2025?
Cinderella Gray’s second season.
And hopefully all the opening paragraphs illustrate why I was SHOCKED when on September 28th they reveal this:
Royal Hope, as an original Uma Musume design. With all the care and bells and whistles you’d expect from an official design.
And would you believe it happened TWICE?
Exactly one month later on October 28th they drop this.
Royal Family as an Uma Musume. Notice how her colors play off Royal Hope’s, and the funniest part is that as far as I’m aware the Drama hadn’t even gotten to the part with Royal Family by then, I’m pretty sure by the time of the announcement it was on like Episode 3 or 4. This was basically an early bonus for those that read the novel.
Now, what does this mean for Uma Musume? Are they gonna be added into the game?
Nah, don’t think so.
If you came here expecting me to tell you I can see them adding these characters into the game I’m sorry to disappoint you but nah.
The truth is that the reason such characters haven’t existed so far is because the events in Uma Musume’s story are so interlinked and playing off from the real world that anything external to that is gonna throw EVERYTHING out of whack.
In fact, all of Uma Musume’s “original” characters are always parallels to existing horses. For example, Obey Your Master might be taking some fun liberties in characterization, but she is ultimately meant to be a stand in for Pay The Butler. Even supporting cast like Bellno Light is supposed to be vaguely based on a real horse (standing theory for her being one called Twin Bee).
Like, let’s take for example the timeline in the TV drama (where the timeline is pushed to starting in 2011). Royal Hope would be racing in the 2015 Triple Crown races, where he ended up 16th in Satsuki Sho, and 2nd in the Nihon Derby. This would step on Satono Rasen for the second one… though interestingly the 2015 Satsuki Sho only had 15 entries which means IN THEORY Royal Hope doesn’t step on anyone’s feet.
And I always talk about how the game really shines when the horse dies early and such and the writers can go off the rails, but that’s still in relation to projecting a what if for careers that ended early.
Likewise it’s not uncommon for racing careers to have different endings that the real counterpart but that’s usually because of when the original story was released. So while Curren being a two-time winner of the Sprinter S ignores the existence of Lord Kanaloa, that’s because Lord Kanaloa is nowhere to be found as of this writing and as such Curren’s story has to exist in that reality, but then when Lord Kanaloa eventually releases her story is going to have that time the real one took an accolade chance away from Curren Chan.
Even the hypotheticals are grounded in existing reality, so to add a horse that is pure fiction is to invite the need for a whole fictional story with it and at that point you can just make an alternate reality game (no not that kind) that’s gonna probably have overlap with existing careers anyways.
So why make a big deal about the crossover designs? Because they ARE still a big deal. I want them to do more of that even if they never show up in game, I want to see the level of care and attention to detail I come to expect from the designs being applied to other things.
First on my wishlist is actually Fuunsaiki because if you can believe it, out of all the season the JRA has made Gundam collabs out of THEY DON’T HAVE THE ONE WITH THE LITERAL GUNDAM HORSE.
THEY DON’T EVEN HAVE ONE WITH GUNDAM UNICORN.
THEY MADE AN EVA-01 HORSE BUT MINIATURIZING THE LITERAL HORSE GUNDAM IS TOO MUCH LET’S JUST HAVE THE EXIA RIDE A REAL ASS HORSE.
But that’s a whole tangent for later.