So, you want to make Urara win Arima Kinen, huh…
First, a bit of context.
Every girl has a set of proficiencies from the outset, they’re the letters you see when choosing who to train and they come in three categories. Let’s explain those.
Venue (バ場)
The type of soil in the course, it comes in Turf/Grass (芝) and Dirt (ダート).
These merely indicate which races the girl can participate in and don’t need certain statlines to shine properly like the other proficiencies.
Distance (距離)
The length of the race, which can go from 1200m to 3600m. They’re divided into Short (短距離), Miles (マイル), Middle (中距離), and Long (長距離).
Unlike Venue, different races have different stat requirements to consider. To grossly oversimplify: The longer the race the more Stamina you need, and the shorter the race the more Power you need (Power affects how fast a girl reaches top speed).
Racing Strategy (脚質)
This is the strategy the girl will use while running, changing how they approach the “pack” (personal name for the point of the race where all other horses pile up to keep pace) it comes in four types:
Escape (逃げ): The girl will take the lead in the pack and make sure to keep it until the end. Usually the easiest strategy to use during training, it requires a lot of speed.
Frontline (先行): The girl will remain at the front of the pack and increase the lead as the goal approaches. Requires a balance of Speed and Power to make sure you don’t get blocked before the Last Spurt (the last stretch of the race).
Cut-in (差し): The girl will remain in or behind the pack saving energy for the Last Spurt. It requires more power than speed.
Chase (追込): The girl will chase the pack and save all its energy for the last stretch in one last burst of speed.
As you can appreciate, this is an example on how the mechanics are layered for the player bit by bit. For example, if you train Daiwa Scarlet, you know that by having Turf proficiency you have more races to choose from, all her inherent skills favor Frontline but you can switch to Escape during training, focusing on speed. You can then also shift the focus to more Stamina as her objectives move into middle and long distance.
But it’s not as easy as just having the stat line for a strategy or a race. Each proficiency has a rank indicated by a letter.
It goes from G at the lowest to A at the highest, and can go up to S during training.
Now, Uma Musume is a bit of a black box where all the specific effects (beyond what can be discerned through trial and error) are kept hidden from the player outside of contextual explanations. So while the specific numbers aren’t officially known, let’s use this website’s argument as reference since the specific numbers are secondary to the argument.
Basically, Rank S means a whole 10% bonus (1000 becomes 1100), A is your baseline, B means you’re operating at 90% capacity (1000 becomes 900), all the way down to 10% of your stats (1000 becomes 100) in Rank G.
This other website theorizes that each proficiency is tied to a specific stat. Running Strategy is tied to Intelligence, Venue Type to Power, and Distance to Speed. This would line up with what a different user on a different website saw where they were able to train with Escape at G with relatively minor issue (since it wasn’t affecting Speed or Power).
This would also make sense on a “real world” sense. Running in Dirt requires more strength so the Venue Proficiency would be how well the girl can control her strength while running in specific courses, running in a distance you’re not used to means you don’t know how to control your pace, and running with a different strategy than usual means you don’t know how to handle the earlier portion of the race until the very end.
Got all that? Now let’s review what we gotta deal with and what we gotta do.
First, let’s take a look at Urara’s proficiencies.
Now let’s look at Arima Kinen.
Urara’s running strategy isn’t that big an issue so by default she faces the race with G/G/A, but basically, even if you had the Speed and Power cap of Grand Masters at 1500 each, Urara would be running as if she had Speed and Power of 150, which, as you might notice it’s barely above her baseline stats at 5 stars.
So first: We need to improve her proficiencies, which isn’t that hard… on paper.
When you finish training a girl she will get “Inheritance factors” at random. And when you choose that girl when training the next one you’ll get her factors and those of the two girls you used to train her.
You will always have one blue (stats) factor, and a pink (proficiency) factor, with a green (signature skill) factor if the girl is at least 3 stars. You will also get a bunch of white factors depending on which scenario you trained, which races you ran, and a bunch of other elements.
Each factor has stars from one to three. More stars means bigger gains but also better chances of inheriting the factor again during March of the second and third years. What this means is that if 3 star speed gives you +21 speed upon starting training, then you have a better chance to get an extra +21 when the Inheritance event happens.
The one we need to focus on is on the pink ones, the proficiency ones.
At the start of the training the girl’s proficiency rank will rise depending on the amount of stars that there are towards that proficiency. In our Urara hypothetical, if she has four girls in her “family tree” with Long Distance but they’re all at 1 star, then she will only raise from G to E (two ranks up).
If you somehow got a family tree where everyone has 3 star Long Distance factors, initial rank up is capped at 4 ranks, so she would go from G to C. She would most likely inherit it again and reach A or even S in long distance but that’s one of two factors that she needs to fix.
So our best bet would be to make Urara’s “Parents” each have one of the factors, and make sure her “grandparents” share the same ones. So 3 of one and 3 of the other, ideally with at least 7 stars total on each.
OH YEAH FACTORS ARE RANDOM BY THE WAY. While the amount of stars has a certain level of weighed chance as to how many stars they’ll get, which stat or proficiency will become a factor is completely random. At least the game added the option to reroll the results once per results screen for 30 training points (the game’s stamina system) which alleviated things A BIT.
What this means is that even though a girl with overcapped Speed (above 1200 basically) has a higher chance to have a 3 star Speed factor upon finishing training, there’s no guarantee that the blue factor she’ll have is speed, you might have a girl with 1500 speed and she still ends up with a 1 star Guts factor.
Thankfully for proficiencies the game will never pick a factor for say… something in G.
But let’s pretend you somehow Did It. You have at least 7 stars into Long Distance and another at least 7 in Turf.
Congratulations! Your Urara will now face Arima Kinen with a D/D/A spread, meaning a theoretical Haru Urara with capped 1500 power and speed will face it with… a power and speed of 900 each. And that’s assuming you can even cap the stat to that point at all.
1000 speed is the minimum recommended for Arima Kinen by the way.
So what do you do now that you have the perfect skill spread and whatnot?
You pray.
As mentioned, beyond the initial rank ups, every March in year 2 and year 3 there’s an “Inheritance” Event, where the girl walks near the statue of the Three Goddesses and after a vision of chasing the other girls you chose as “parents” she gets a chance at getting more factors applied. This is how a girl can end up with S proficiency in a stat, by inheriting a proficiency factor in gameplay while already at A (or inheriting two of the same while at B and so on).
In theory if you have the devil’s luck you can end up with Urara at B/B/A by just inheriting factors twice. It’s actually not unheard of for someone to make Urara win Arima Kinen TWICE in both years.
However, let me stress this.
You’re lucky if you get ONE factor inherited, much less TWO, and that scenario I just proposed means you inherit FOUR (two ranks of each) in one go.
Realistically, you can hope for one of each per year and try to make do with B Ranks.
Also, may I remind you, this isn’t a regular game where you can reload a save. If Urara doesn’t get the factors that’s what you’re stuck with for the whole run aside from quitting and trying again.
And while you’re distracted with all of that, you might forget that you’re still training Haru Urara and the ranks into the other proficiencies don’t make her training any easier, she still has a really narrow selection of races to train with.
Not only that but as pointed out earlier, Short Distance and Long Distance require completely different skills and stats, so you need to be ready for Arima Kinen while making sure you still complete all her objectives and get the skills that will assist you.
In fact, let’s assume that you did all of the above. Let’s assume things went not TOO perfectly but to the bare minimum possible. Urara is heading into Arima Kinen on her second year with a spread of B/B/A, with decent stats, and some skills to back her up.
You better pray to all the gods she wins, because Arima Kinen is a story race where the objective just says “participate”, meaning that if you lose that’s it, no retries.
And after all of that, why would you put yourself through all of that?
Because you can! That’s the beautiful thing.
I need to explain a bit of context for this.
Haru Urara has been in the game since launch. In fact, she’s one of the characters you’re GUARANTEED to have in your roster before you even unlock the Gacha. This is important because she’s basically the freebie for Dirt races, something the others can’t cover as easily.
What this means is that she’s a character every player has access and early exposure to, and I’d argue she’s the second or third easiest character for newbies to train right after Sakura Bakushin O and (assuming a decent selection of support cards) Daiwa Scarlet. Her objectives are very freeform until the last year and by that point any bruteforced stat line is more than enough.
So you play her story, and you see that tragic moment where Urara, the girl that has been nothing but a bright bundle of joy and smiles during the whole campaign is crying for losing Arima Kinen.
Then you play a bit more, you learn more of the game’s mechanics, you learn how you can offset Scarlet’s Long Distance proficiency into A or even S rank, you might even try to get Vodka to win her own long race (though she starts at C instead of G). And then you remember that moment with Urara and wonder if you can make things right, if you can make the impossible happen.
And as illustrated, you can! In fact, if you have the proficiencies, I’d argue training Urara for that is even easier these days. Not only is more of the game figured out but the powerlevel has risen in general. There’s even more understanding on what goes into a higher compatibility rate (a hidden stat only illustrated with symbols that indicates more likelihood of inheritance).
You might even go to the trophy room and notice that you can win any trophy with any girl. Urara can’t just win Arima Kinen, she can win the Satsuki Sho, the Tenno Sho, the Nihon Derby. You don’t earn anything special for it but you CAN, you can have a trophy room where every trophy has Urara’s face just because you like her that much.
The game has many other challenges like these. Recently Twin Turbo can race Toukai Teio in Satsuki Sho in a race where the difficulty isn’t even the proficiencies but the fact that Teio has high stats and a bunch of skills (more skills than some endgame races even), something that also happens with Nice Nature’s training campaign. Some grant you some extra stats, many of them grant you extra dialog, but all of them are in the realm of things that only require a bit of adjustment, some more training, or going into the race with more skills purchased.
I didn’t explain in detail all the systems just because (that’s only half a lie), but to illustrate the fact that if you want to see the alternate result of this mandatory objective, if you want the satisfaction of having one Haru Urara that completed Arima Kinen at least once, you have to engage with every system the game has to its fullest BEFORE you even start her training.
To put it into perspective, Smart Falcon has one objective in her campaign where she has to race the Satsuki Sho, a turf race despite specializing in dirt kinda like Urara… but Falko starts Turf at rank E so it’s not that hard to reach rank B or higher with her. Not only that but she already has Rank A on the Middle Distance proficiency that Satsuki Sho needs.
As a game designer myself, the “Haru Urara beat Arima Kinen challenge” has always been super interesting. It’s an objective with an optional result, marked by an emotionally charged moment that the player won’t forget and that hints at what you can do with the systems if you try hard enough. It says a lot that to this day, even if more resources are available on how to tackle the challenge, it doesn’t make the preparation any easier. It requires patience and luck in a way that no amount of rising powerlevel has been able to offset.
There’s many ways you can do a “final boss” for a game. You can make a cathartic power trip, you can give the player a big beefy thing they need to put down, or you might give them something that puts to test everything they know about the game, among other options.
And it’s immensely amusing to me that the cheerful girl that loses when playing shiritori by herself fits the label of “Final Boss” like that.
