Not THE Nishino Flower post yet, no.
If you’ve played as many mobile games as me… then first of all, my most sincere condolences. But also, you might start notice a… quirk that you end up not thinking about but that is actually quite WEIRD when you try to put it into a narrative.
What I like to call “The GBF Captain Conundrum”.
If I go and log into my GBF account right now and go to the character tabs, I’ll see 350 characters just in the SSR filter. Many of them are seasonals and alts, so let’s round it up to a neat 300 for this argument.
That’s 300 characters supposedly on your “crew”, 300 characters that the player character has different levels of involvement with and in Chronic Chosen One fashion ends up being the Make Or Break element of all of them.
This has different levels of severity. I’d put GBF at the higher end of the “just gotta accept it” scale, especially when the story itself boldly decides to point out in MANY ocassions how fucked everyone’s lives would be if the player hadn’t arrived.
I think mobile game producers have realized the flaws of this particular fallacy because games on the more modern side of things have adapted to this differently.
For some examples: Bandori has zero involvement with the player who is framed as just an employee at a shop and has zero bearing on the girls’ lives. Dolphin Wave pulls a hybrid situation where the girls live their lives independent of the player, but the player is basically a coach many of them know or are involved with. In Alice Gear Aegis, despite the cast being massive by now the player is more of a commander figure than someone whose personal involvement makes or breaks the situation.
Making the player an important figure is fine, but when a story ends up having different mutually-exclusive scenarios you can’t help but wonder “well without the player they’re shit outta luck, right?”.
In Uma Musume this isn’t an issue. The player character is a supporting figure, but the girls’ stories revolve around other girls. Sure, the player being there does have an effect but you never have the impression that they couldn’t have figured things out themselves either. The trainer certainly helped make the process faster though.
However, even without this angle, this is a non issue, because every girl has their own trainer. So when you train or have Gold Ship in the home screen, you’re Gorushi’s saint of a trainer, when you train Digitan you’re her Fellow Uma Musume Maniac friend, when you train Rob Roy you’re not Gorushi’s trainer or Digitan’s trainer but Rob Roy’s chronicler trainer.
This has the fun effect from the outset where if you’re not training King Halo and she shows up in another one’s story, you know she’s in good hands.
This was there from the beginning in the game. But to bring up GBF again, that’s another game where the player can see an introductory story relating to the characters currently in banner about how they met the player. But the player is so non descript in most cases that they all have the exact same fated meeting.
So if you come into the game with this sort of context, it’s really easy to just assume that the player is just adapting to whoever the girl is. And I wonder if the staff noticed this, because from Nishino Flower’s implementation onwards things certainly changed.
Without getting into too much detail here, Nishino Flower’s trainer is very explicitly a rookie trainer that constantly seeks advice from other trainers. This ties narratively to Nishino Flower being a literal child (she explicitly skipped grades from Elementary School) and how both wonder independent of each other if maybe the other one would be better with someone more experienced than them.
This was the point where it all clicked in place for everyone, I remember. Where people realized that all along, each girl was meant to have their own individual trainer. And not only that but difference became more pronounced beyond “being agreeable to the girl”.
To bring some pre-Flower comparisons, you can just look at the difference between Mayano’s trainer (who is just a trainer that noticed how smart Mayano was and wanted her to be a “shining horse girl” like she wanted) with Rob Roy’s trainer (who has a similar fascination with heroes as Rob Roy and a similar penchant for being cheesy), or Digitan’s trainer (who’s trait is being the only one bold enough to aim to make her an All-Rounder) with Machan’s trainer (who keeps a blog with her and is prone to antics like dressing in a mascot costume).
Or to bring a more recent example, Daiichi Ruby’s trainer is a clumsy awkward mess that nonetheless is willing to ask for Ruby’s help while being “tested” by her. By the end of the story, even if it’s not a strong personality, you can see an individual that is distinctly different from other trainers before, only sharing the commonality of falling for their girl’s plea and wanting their dreams to come true.
And there is just something incredibly fascinating about a scenario where an assumption (every trainer is the same person) is challenged by an irreconcilable contradiction (Nishino Flower’s trainer’s personality is based around being a rookie), and instead of it feeling like some contradiction that breaks things, the only thing it breaks is all the assumptions, making you realize it was how things were all along.
