Oh dear, where to begin…
Wait, wait… I think I know how to tackle this one, actually.
Okay, so… FIRST. Instead of explaining how the game works from the ground up for context, instead, let me jump into how the flow of the gameplay works.
The best way to break down the flow of a regular campaign would be with three words: Management, Choice, and Timing.
Management
To explain management let’s use Mejiro McQueen’s training as an example. McQueen’s first objective is to have at least 3000 fans by the end of the first year, and after the initial Make Debut race (the universal first objective after 12 turns upon starting training), McQueen will be sitting, at best, at around 1200 fans. Assuming we use McQueen’s default proficiencies where no ranks have been invested in Miles or Short Distance running, the player has the following choices:
- Run any of the two Pre-OP (Pre-Open) middle distance races (1000 fans as baseline) in early november for an easy victory and then hope either the late november Pre-OP vivtory or a potential G3 defeat that same month completes the objective.
- Only run the G3 race in late November (3300 fans baseline) giving you a margin of error if you lose to cap the needed fans with an attempt on the early december G1 race.
- Only run the early December G1 race. This G1 race has a baseline fan count of 7000 and G1 races give more bonuses for completion than the rest of the races.
The popular strategy is to aim for a singular G1 victory for this objective, because it not only completes the objective and gives generous bonuses by itself, but condensing all the solutions to the least amount of races possible maximizes the training time, which facilitates completing said objective…
But victory is not guaranteed. This example is used because it’s INFAMOUS with early players who are still learning the game and can’t get the right stats for McQueen (especially when the game was still young and less resources were available both in and out of the game) making the sight Rank E McQueen’s a comically common one.
And while you’re training your potentially failed McQueen, even if we were to assume a version of the game without any of the random elements that make it addicitive, you still have to maximize training time by balancing motivation, resting time, and potentially risky training if your energy is too low.
That’s Management, basically, managing the time you spend between training and objectives.
Make A New Track famously inverts this training flow, making it so the player has to maximize racing time instead. You’d think you can just race all you want but girls can only run two consecutive races. From the third one onwards there’s an increased risk of any number of conditions hitting them after the race.
Choice
I said that this was all thinking a scenario without any random elements, but those are what make the game fun.
The game isn’t as simple as just picking whichever stat you want until 72 turns pass, each turn randomizes any number of elements depending on the scenario so that you have to consider when picking which training to go for. The most basic one is the Bond Gauge and Hints.
A girl’s bond gauge rises when you train while she’s in that type of training, and if the bar is full then if the girl’s support card type is the same as the training she’s in (eg: Speed card on Sped training) you get a massive boost in training. Hints give you, fittingly, a skill hint but they also give you bond gauge with that girl. So even at the most simple level you might need to choose sometimes between one bonus to two girls, or two bonuses to one girl.
Scenarios add elements of choice where Bond Gauge isn’t the only thing to consider.
Aoharu Cup for example adds the Aoharu Gauge which is basically a second Bond Gauge that you can only increased if the girl has procced that turn, and the scenario gives you more girls that aren’t support cards but have Aoharu Gauges of their own.
Grand Live meanwhile makes it so every turn the points added by each training type that go into your currency pool is randomized. Creating scenarios where more girls (and especially maxed support cards) can give more points, but you might only need points in a training with an empty roster.
Timing
Despite how random things can be, the player does have a semblance of control over many elements, and making sure that things align properly (or have a chance to) is an important part of the game. Timing refers to both the act of using resources at the right time and taking the chance at the proper time.
On its most basic level, Timing can be as simple as making sure that you head into Summer Training (where all your training levels are maxed for 4 turns) with full energy to make sure you can train to the end.
As more mechanics are added there’s elements like foregoing an Aoharu explosion until it’s in a stat you wanna train, saving Aoharu Extreme Explosions for Summer Training, saving an Energy Recovery lesson in Grand Live for the right time…
Make A New Track’s gameplay is all about timing, given that the players can purchase items that let them manipulate the random elements of the game. From rerolling who’s where in what training, to nullifying risk on demand, to healing energy without using a turn.
With this context out of the way…
Grand Masters
So in Grand Masters, you get Shards of Knowledge. Each shard comes in 6 variants (one for each stat + skill points) and three colors (one for each Goddess).
Whenever you get a shard that gives you a bonus. Every 2 shards you will get a big knowledge crystal whose color and type depend on the shards (eg: one blue speed and one yellow skill can result in blue speed, blue skill, yellow speed, or yellow skill), and then every 2 big knowledge crystals you’ll get a bigger knowledge crystal whose result depends on the other two. And finally these two will combine into a Goddess Crystal.
The Goddess Crystal will depend on the colors of the shards and crystals before it to determine color and its color will make it associated with a specific Goddess and give a different one-turn utility. It’s important to note that you can’t get more shards until you use the crystal, and that after using the crystal you’ll lose all shards (so the training bonuses start from the beginning), but the Goddess will level up (to a maximum of 5) giving you other permanent bonuses to the training.
In this example we can see: Red Skill and Blue Int result in Red Skill, Blue Int and Yellow Guts result in Blue Int, and then the Red Skill and Blue Int from earlier combine into Red Int. This is automatic, so getting 2 shards results in 1 crystal automatically (3 bonuses), getting 4 results in 3 crystals (7 bonuses), getting 6 results in 4 crystals (10 bonuses), and getting 8 results in 6 crystals (14 bonuses) plus the Goddess Crystal. It means that even though the shards might not look like much, they ramp up really quickly and at their peak they must be used if you want any more.
And you WANT to use the Goddess Crystals. Godolphin makes it so you get assured hints from every girl in a training (before you’d only get a single hint if there was more than one girl) plus raising their Bond. Darley raises your energy and motivation plus adds a bonus to your training. And then Byerley makes it so that in that turn every girl gives you the Friendship Bonus, no matter their affinity, no matter their bond level; you have four girls in the blue and none of them have affinity in that training? Congrats! You now have a 4-way friendship training in the early game.
And how do you get these shards?
With every action.
Every. Single. Action.
Some of them even give you two in one go.
Training? You get a shard. Racing? You get a shard. Going out? Shard. Resting? LUCKY YOU THAT TURN RESTING GAVE TWO SHARDS.
Let me stress this. In the past resting was a necessity, something you did because you had to. The new scenario makes resting two turns in a row, even if you’re already at max energy, a perfectly viable strategy to do.
Of course, it’s all random. On every turn you can see what action will give you what shard and they’re randomized every turn. So one turn Speed might give you Red Skill and the other it might give you Blue Stamina. And as mentioned earlier, the big crystal’s color and type depends on which shards it’s made out of, so while having full control of it is impossible, should the player want to mitigate the randomness they might need to still take chances and do things like going out two turns in a row or running a G3 race in a turn.
And the reason you want these shards is that their bonuses apply to a stat if a training approaches it. So for example, a bonus of +5 to Speed means that if you do Speed training you’ll get +5 speed, if you do Guts training, you’ll get +5 speed, and if you do Int training you’ll still get +5 speed. So long as a training raises speed, you will get a flat +5 on top of whatever increment the training does.
But let’s take the earlier 3 points and see how the scenario changes them.
Management
Depending on your luck it will make things easier or harder, but it solves an inherent limitation of earlier scenarios.
In the past resting and going out were basically dead turns that you tried to avoid. Hoping to use Int training to rest or that an event will raise your motivation, but now those can be used as a strategic move. In other scenarios a common tactic was to go out and hope for Karaoke (which nets you +2 motivation instead of +1), and another one was to do one training and then go out so that if you don’t get Karaoke, you still get a small heal to energy. Now you can approach the first turns however you want because there’s a chance that either of those will have a x2 slapped onto itself and now you’ve taken advantage of it without really wasting anything.
Choice
It actually iterates directly off of Grand Live. In Grand Live you already had to make a choice of training to do plus what that training offered that turn. Here it’s the exact same, but the bonus granted that turn has two layers (type and color) instead of one. However in Grand Live you had the flexibility where even a “bad” choice was basically currency stored for later, whereas here not only does the choice matter immediately, but because of the way crystals are made one “bad” choice can actually ramp up FAST.
It’s also important to note that, should you choose to race, you will be granted the shard(s) even if you don’t get first place.
“Bad” is very nominal though. Thankfully the scenario is made in such a way where rather than an all or nothing Win or Lose, you get Win or Win More.
But this actually leads me to the biggest impact.
Timing
You’d think you’d want as many x2 moments as possible.
You’d think.
The interesting thing is how the game makes the players consider this no matter your level.
If you’re the kind to look for specific bonuses/goddesses because you have a plan, then you need to consider taking x1 choices instead of x2 in more than one ocassion. This is because objectives MIGHT give x2 shards that you don’t have control of since you don’t know which or how many until the turn rolls around (they will always give x1 at least), and if you enter that x2 scenario with one shard on a slot already, that means you’re completing one crystal and having half of the other instead of guaranteeing one crystal of one type and color (x2 cases give x2 of the same type). It’s also a waste to get up to the 7 slot instead of the 6th because you’re wasting one potential x2.
Not only that, but unless the goddess you got by racing time is Darley Arabian (shards are granted after the choice was made that turn) then you’re wasting one turn or one Goddess Crystal, since Darley Arabian is the only one that will give you race bonuses if you use it in the turn a race takes place in.
But the cool thing (from the design side) is that, even if you don’t care about any of this. At the most basic color level, you’re still taught to care about it. This is because every Goddess caps at Lvl5 (ie: Using 5 crystals of the same Goddess), not to mention that in the last race of the scenario you can get a blessing by a Goddess if you have her at at least Lvl4. So even a player that doesn’t care about min-maxing shards or exploiting the specific utility of a Goddess Crystal at specific times can understand that “I’ve used the yellow one too many times, I should try to get more Blues and Reds”.
Because, again, the design philosophy is one of Winning or Winning More. You’re not denied the boons if you play recklessly, but playing consciously will get you More and/or Controlled Gains.
There’s also something really cool about the way things are implemented. As a reminder, this whole collab is technically a non-time-limited collab with the arcade game Star Horse 4. The Shards page is obviously modeled after a genealogy tree, the kind that anyone that has looked up Horse Racing stuff will know very well. And the fact that the mehcanic evokes this feeling of wanting to keep a tight grip on what goes into the tree hoping that one choice by necessity doesn’t quickly escalate into something you might regret and this slight expectation of what the fusing of two crystals will result into does feel like the sort of thing you might feel in a horse breeding simulator.
Even that visual of how the crystals are building towards the Goddess Crystal but when it’s done it looks more like a tree that starts at the Goddess and branches down from there feels like a cool deliberate choice to homage the more commonplace horse breeding/racing games.
…ah shit I haven’t explained the scenario races, have I?
Thankfully, those kinda tie to something that was added to the game as a whole, so I’ll tackle that on its own.