Let’s talk Support Cards.
Support Cards are your “equipment” in this game, a combination of stat boosters and specific short stories. They’re often represented by an individual girl whose bond you raise in training and when it’s at max (or on the orange part of the bar), if the type of the card and training align (eg: Speed card on speed training) you’ll get a massive boost to the results.
Aside from one for each training type, there’s also “Friend” cards. These don’t provide the same “Friendship Training” bonus when their bar is full, but their passives are more all-encompasing and their events can be selected on demand through the Going Out option… though in sequence. So while, for example, Tazuna’s second event gives you a free guaranteed heal for any negative conditions whenever you need, it also makes you stay at 2/5 events for it.
But then they added an extra type: “Group” types. These cards represent sets of characters together instead of just one individual. They’re like a hybrid of regular and Friend cards. You can get Friendship training on any training at any point, but you need to proc a specific event with it and the effect will wear off at random after a couple of turns. You also have access to on-demand events and can even pick which one you want to see, but to see the last one you need to see them all first.
Group cards have a couple of extra rules. You can’t use some of them in certain scenarios (for example: Aoharu Cup where your cards are your initial teammates), and you can’t equip any card with a girl represented by the card (for example: “Those Who Gather At The Throne” locks you out of using Teio, Rudolf, and Tsuyoshi).
The first card of this type was “Team Sirius”. A card that represents the Main Story’s main team, fittingly, a freebie you can get after finishing the second-to-last chapter of the story.
Fitting those rules, you cannot equip cards with Special Week, Silence Suzuka, Mejiro McQueen, Rice Shower, Narita Brian, Winning Ticket, or Gold Shi-…
Or Gold Sh-…
…is that an error?
No, the card specifies everyone but Gold Ship so why…?
And then, it hits you.
Gold Ship was there from the first chapter of the Main Story, she was there for the trials and tribulations of every character in every chapter, she even ran with them in all of their practice races, and every celebration, which is why she’s in the card, the card is one of the CGs of the story…
But nowhere, at any point is it stated that Gold Ship is a member of Team Sirius.
She just hung out with them a lot, but she wasn’t ever an official member. But also nobody ever questioned why she was just there.
And not only is this a hilarious gag delivered through both context and mechanic, but it’s extra funny when you consider the character of Gold Ship.
The most Chaotic Neutral character in the cast whose exploits involve in no particular order: Cooking in the middle of a race track, selling Yakisoba during races, wanting to give her trainer a haircut for her birthday, kidnapping people by putting them in a sack, and sabotaging your training campaign with her so that at random she locks all but one type of training for no reason. The same character whose victory poses involve either a dropkick or hitting you in the face with the butt of a water gun.
The fact that at the center of all of this is this girl, that she fools you for a second wondering why the game made an exception for her specifically is just…
It’s the best gag in the game so far if nothing else for the arduous setup and subtle payoff.