Any of you ever heard of that guy “Osamu Tezuka”? He’s kind of a big deal in some circles.
“The God of manga” is one hell of a title to thrown on somebody’s lap. I’m not a Tezuka fanboy nor a hater, but I’m here to acknowledge that the title of “God of” is overpowering and dominating. While Tezuka’s merits cannot be denied in any good faith argument, that title makes it all too easy to eclipse his many contemporaries that contributed as much to Manga.
Not to mention that the title elevates the holder to an unfair standard. While Tezuka was a passionate and creative person, at the end of the day he was a flawed human. There’s tales of how he would miss deadlines and others would need to work more only for him to take the credit regardless, there’s tales of how he kept a demeaning eye on his competitors and apprentices-turned-competitors, the completely unsustainable undercutting model that anime operates on to this day can be traced back to Tezuka who put more emphasis on being able to produce his ideas and get the funding for them.
And I’m sure many a Tezuka fanboy that hold him in the highest of reverence would love to jump and defend his honor as if these faults undo his accomplishments somehow.
Tezuka wasn’t a God, he was a man. And isn’t the tale of a flawed person being able to rise to that sort of position more inspiring? At least to me it is.
But such is the power of that word, “God”. So overpowering that it made me grow concerned about my love for Uma Musume.
You see, as much as I love the game, I have a really fractured trust with Cygames’ way of doing things. Once upon a time I displayed the same passion I do for Uma Musume for another one of their games, Granblue Fantasy. And I didn’t so much “drift away” from GBF (like I did with Final Fantasy 14 where I don’t play as much but it still brings me joy) as much as my good will and patience were put to so much test with so little reward that it’s harder for me to care about the game outside of Sunk Cost Fallacy every month.
And a big element of this can be traced back to the What Makes The Sky Blue trilogy of events. Now, the events were good as derivative of El Shaddai Rise Of The Metatron as they were, so good in fact that from there on they been trying to copy WMTSB’s format and flow to an extent that has evolved from weird, to concerning, to infuriating, to insulting.
So when they announced that the new scenario would feature Uma Musume’s Three Goddesses, the Three Goddesses that greet the player three times per training, the Three Goddesses whose statues you can exchange for extra Star Fragments, the Three Goddesses based around the three stallions that all thoroughbred horses can trace their ancestry back to,THOSE Three Goddesses… I immediately had a million flashbacks to WMTSB promising to FINALLY move forward with GBF’s metaplot and the downfall that that resulted into. I was concerned that Cygames was gonna speedrun destroying the narrative foundation of ANOTHER project.
As the intro probably hints, I was thankfully wrong. But let’s step back a little.
Grand Masters opens explaining that the Satono Group (of which Satono Diamond and newly added Satono Crown are part of) has developed a VR training machine. This is that sort of advanced SciFi VR sort of thing that’s super immersive. Without the Tron elements of dying IRL, but being able to get stuck in it as evidenced by the one time Gold Ship got stuck in an MMO and became the game’s Demon King (its Umaoh if you will).
As part of the training program, three AI horsegirls have been added to the environment. Darley Arabian, Godolphin Barb, and Byerley Turk. These three advanced AI horsegirls have been modeled after, and given the reported memories of The Three Goddesses.
If you’ll allow me to skip ahead for a second, and to illustrate the amazing restraint shown by CyGames with this scenario, I will spoil the fact that no, they’re not “mysteriously advanced” they weren’t “the real goddesses all along” or anything like that. Which is extra commendable because Uma Musume has the kind of really flexible reality where that would be easy to pass. But as we’ll see later, the fact that they ARE just AI is extremely important.
Through the campaign, the three AI guide you and the other trainers (Kiryuuin from URA Finals and Riko-chan from Aoharu Cup and their girls are back! But there’ll be a different post about them). And through the story they tell their own tales, tales that mirror the real counterpart in some shape.
Godolphin Barb was a moody horsegirl which only needed a caring and dedicated trainer to shine. Reflecting how the original Godolphin was a horse that wasn’t appreciated and even used as a carthorse until it reached the hands of Francis Godolphin, 2nd Earl of Godolphin who loved the horse until it peacefully died one Christmas. There’s even a cool deep cut in the campaign where a flashback reveals that Godolphin was called “Sham-chan” by her trainer. “Sham” was the birth name given to Godolphin in the novel King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry.
Note to self: research Marguerite Henry’s work down the line.
Byerley Turk describes herself (in the same indirect “I once knew a girl” way as Godolphin) as she tells how she had a hard time due to being small and unassuming despite packing a lot of strength still, and only getting stronger and having a record of 100 races and 70 victories thanks to its discipline. But it gives an extra element to that discipline, with one of her memories having her trainer say that the one thing that needs to be the strongest is her heart or else it’ll all be for nothing. The real Byerley Turk was actually a war horse owned by Captain Robert Byerley.
And while Darley Arabian doesn’t get the same sort of focus (fitting since she’s more of a free-spirited character that doesn’t sit down with anyone the same way), the few snippets of her past we see show her being really casual with her trainer, who calls her “Little Lamb” to her dismay. The original Darley Arabian was originally named “Ras el Fedowi” or “The Headstrong One” and lived a very carefree life with Thomas Darley, where it didn’t have to race but its abilities were undeniable.
And the point of the game showing all that is to illustrate that the “Goddesses”, whether in this AI form, or if they actually existed, were once just regular girls like any other. They had weaknesses, they had problems, and they were only able to rise to their mythical status thanks to the support of those around them.
Horses didn’t start existing from the Three Founder Stallions onwards, just like Horse Girls probably didn’t start from The Three Goddesses onwards, just like comic artists existed aplenty before Tezuka started drawing.
The game’s glossary says that the Three Goddesses “created horse girls” and while to be fair, Uma Musume has enough Plausibly Deniable Fantastical elements to itself where that could be literal, it could also be illustrated to mean that the legacy of Horse Girls as we know them started with them.
The true way that this theme of legacy is sold by the campaign, however, actually happens after the end.
In the best ending (the one you get for winning the Grand Masters race at the end), the three trainers go back to the VR simulator and find it more crowded with people trying it. Not only that but the Three Goddesses are working better and faster.
Remember what I said about the fact that they’re plain AI being important? This is why. Riko-chan notices this and wonders if their experiences on the time of all three with them had an effect on this, and if in the future a different Trainer and Horsegirl might owe their victory to the footprints they left behind and how they helped the AI grow.
There’s three angles I wanna take from this.
The first is best left for another post since it involves exploring the other characters in the campaign. But to sum it up, it’s the idea that even an expert can still learn more. It’s not hard to think about an expert that only becomes a teacher through practice of being a teacher. Just like how Riko-chan was an expert and still had to learn a lot, or how Kiryuuin, despite knowing Meek better, was still blindsided by her on ocassion.
The second one is the fact that we all stand in the shoulders of giants. Going back to Tezuka, even beyond his accomplishments, he was very much inspired by Walt Disney, and even beyond THAT he mentored Go Nagai and Shotaro Ishinomori, two other mangaka that have arguably shaped the manga industry in even more tangible ways, he also inspired Monkey Punch, Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira Toriyama, and Naoki Urasawa among many others. The same way you can trace a straight line from any girl in the Uma Musume cast to at leat one of the Three Goddesses, you can draw a line that starts at Shonen Jumps latest hit and goes back to Tezuka or Mitsuteru Yokoyama. Arguably the biggest importance of a legacy isn’t what you but what others will do to continue your work in some way.
And this leads me to the last point, and something I’ve withheld until now. This scenario is explicitly a collaboration with Sega’s arcade horse racing simulator Star Horse 4. Tying to every point, this feels to me like Uma Musume is not only honoring the LONG historied legacy of games it draws from, be it Keiba Simulators, Dating Simulators, RPGs, hell even Granblue Fantasy itself with things like its portrait oriented gameplay; but in a way also wondering what Uma Musume might be able to provide for future games.
Another game I really like, Dolphin Wave, has a certain Uma Musume DNA to itself. While the tone and gameplay are completely different, both focus on a very dense cast of characters as they explore life while participating in their own fictional sport (Jet Battles, a combination of Paintball combat with fictional lasers and Jet Skis), and even if the tone of Dolphin Wave edges more towards the 17+ range than Uma Musume’s more family-friendly affair, its outfits also have a care put into them where you can tell that the designer isn’t treating them as just a formality that’s meant to inspire the drive to rip them with your teeth and nothing else. And the only other mobile game where I could claim there was a sincere care for the fashion (that I’ve played, mind you) was Uma Musume. Not to mention that Dolphin Wave also lifts Blue Archive’s system of messaging the girls and gives it its own spin.
And while this scenario is just well-written in general, that’s a topic I think about a lot. What you leave behind, how you might inspire people in one way or another, often in ways you don’t expect or with actions you don’t think about.
The worse thing you can do to someone is eulogize them as a “Great Mind” or a “God”, after all, what’s more impressive? The Goddess that defeated everyone in a race? Or the mere mortal so good that people thought them a Goddess?