Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Season 3

Since childhood, horse girls Kitasan Black and Satono Diamond have admired and aspired to be like their fellow horse girl named Tokai Teiou. Chasing their dreams, they enroll in Tracen Academy, an institution dedicated to training horse girls and preparing them for legendary races. Soon after, Kitasan Black lands on Team Spica, the same team as Teiou. Beaming with motivation, she remains undefeated until she fails to win her first Grade 1 (G1) race—the most prestigious type of race in the league—but she is determined to unleash her true potential as a horse girl.

Meanwhile, Satono Diamond comes from a long line of horse girls who, despite sporting incredible running prowess, have never won a G1 race. It is up to her to finally break this curse and bring the Satono clan the glory it deserves.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Kitasan Black Main

Yano, Hinaki Japanese

Satono Diamond Main

Tachibana, Hina Japanese

Toukai Teiou Supporting

Machico Japanese

Rice Shower Supporting

Iwami, Manaka Japanese

Special Week Supporting

Waki, Azumi Japanese

Mejiro McQueen Supporting

Oonishi, Saori Japanese

Silence Suzuka Supporting

Kouno, Marika Japanese

Gold Ship Supporting

Ueda, Hitomi Japanese

Twin Turbo Supporting

Hanai, Miharu Japanese

Nice Nature Supporting

Maeda, Kaori Japanese

Masuo, Masashi Producer

Nishimura, Kento Producer

Oikawa, Kei Director, Storyboard

Morita, Yuuichi Sound Director

Reviews

Sep 3, 2024

ArturiaP3ndrag0n

Recommended

This Season has been an emotional rollercoaster, which took some time to digest. However, thinking objective I'd give it a solid 8/10
Before going further, I'd preface by saying if you have watched S2 and loved then you should watch S3 and form your own opinion. However, if you didn't like S2 then don't have high hopes here then.

While everything from entertainment value, artistic merit, the premise of the story, the emotional peak moments were all there. The Bias and Narrative Consistency is where S3 suffered.

Meaning:
2/2 Artistic and Entertaining: It handled the premise of a a star studded idolizer, a childhood friend turned rival and the ... twilight of ones career really well. The final race in particular hit hard after that emotional investment.

2/2 Recommended to everyone: I can't recall a good sports anime that handled the twilight years of an athlete properly. I wont say more since spoilers but I think this has something for everyone to appreciate.

2/2 Emotional Moments: There were multiple extremely emotional moments, with the final climax leaving me kinda dead inside. It was one heluva emotional rollercoaster and I can see myself remembering this for a long time after this show ended.

the 2 points here are one from Narrative Consistency, which compared to S2 wasnt as good and the other for my bias on Power Systems.

1/2 Narrative Consistency: I define it as the ability to ask "What are we doing", "Why are we here", "When is this happening", "Where are we headed" and "How did we get here?" at any point in the story. Having a clear answer at any point means full points, but here admittedly, ever 3-4 eps feels like an arc of its own that doesn't properly flow well together compared to Season 2 which flowed extremely well from start to finish. So while S3 gets the job done, I feel it isn't as clean or smooth as S2.

1/2 Bias Category for meeting 2 of 3 biases. My preference is:
1 = Historical Inspiration, Uma musume adapts stories of Horses that happen in real life into a dramatized anime form which I absolutely love.
2 = Idealogue, It has sufficiently deep exploration of themes such as pursuing your idol as a dream, dealing with childhood friends turned rivals and of course most importantly the Twilight years of an Athlete's career.
3 = Magic/Power System, Meaning the abilities and powers involved in resolving the narrative and plot points. I use Sandersons 3 Laws of Magic for Power Systems here.

Law 1: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

For S1, I wasnt convinced. Special Week and Suzuka are talented but I dont understand exactly how and where they are talented. I appreciate shallow steps on hills and slip streams but I feel they were only used once or twice max. S2 however solved that. Tokai Teio has flexible ankles and a beastly acceleration on short spurts that makes her a menace. Meijiro McQueen has plenty of power and stamina that allows her to compete over a longer distance and is more consistent. This is best leveraged in their corresponding training arcs with Teio being given endurance training and mcqueen taking strength training. S3 However, I am not sure I am entirely convinced. Kitasan has an incredibly busted body physique. a nod to the real life Kitasan known as a Tough guy. This often didnt translate much onto the race, but they did use it for training arcs.. which was more 'Intense Training' rather than specialized training.
Infact a point about foul play. In S1 we see a horsegirl try to knee jab Special Week, but she dodged it. We saw how Satomo Diamond is a bit frail and was pushed around in the race in S3, but we don't see any of that with Kitasan explicitly. If we had seen how Kitasan with her strong physique could easily withstand pressure, and her strat to be middle of the pack aligned as such it would make better sense here in contrast.

Law 2: The Limitations of your Powers are more interesting than the Capabilities.
Law 3: Explain what you already have before you expand it.
These 2 were properly met as we frequently contend with Limitations of each characters and how they approach them, and all training arcs start with stating what we already have before moving onto expanding it.

Hence with that.. while S1 satisfied 1 of 3 laws. S2 satisfied all 3. S3 satisfied i feel only 2 of them, as the explain-ability of the power systems didn't feel as relevant and it was more Loud Screaming during races instead.

Hence a 8/10. Better than S1 but flawed just enough to not be a masterpiece. The narrative shortfalls and the just enuf absence of the power system compared to S2 brought it down.

But eh, Despite that I still enjoyed and loved it immensely as the emotional rollercoaster was truly something insane.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Dec 29, 2023

MarlsMarsBars

Mixed Feelings

Umamusume is back and as per usual, the focus has shifted to two side characters turned season protagonists, this time on Kitasan Black and Satono Diamond. As much as I liked the first two seasons of this anime, it’s unfortunate for me to say that this season is weakest and that’s mainly due to how these two characters are handled. In previous seasons, the heart of the series would come from the dynamic between the two main characters, whether that be how they are as friends or as rivals. I’d say that there are around two instances each this season where both Kitasan Black and ... Satono Diamond do any of these things, and at first I thought that maybe this is done intentionally to flesh out the internal struggles for both characters, but that isn’t exactly the case here. Kitasan is the only one whose character arc is compelling, which isn’t a good thing when compared to past seasons where both protagonists as well as even the side characters are given a lot of depth that can at least make us care about the hardships they face. This season doesn’t have its equivalent Rice Shower arc, that being a subplot that shifts focus to a seemingly unimportant side character but ends up with a pretty sad plotline. Satono Diamond is given a very brief personal struggle that gets resolved almost immediately, that being her desire to race overseas. That subplot felt like a much watered down version of Silent Suzuka’s in Season 1 since they have very similar goals, however Suzuka’s actually had stakes involved, something not present here for Diamond or almost any other character besides Kitasan.

As for Kitasan’s storyline, hers just doesn’t hit as hard as other main characters from previous seasons. See, both Special Week’s and Tokai Teio’s arcs had a set starting motivation that naturally evolves into a more refined goal by the end of the season. Although Kitasan Black’s arc in this season might be similar like in other seasons, the issue here is that she never had a set goal in mind other than “be the best”. I guess that’s something, but we already had that in the last two seasons. Another aspect (or lack thereof) that I found disappointing is that in Season 2, both Kitasan and Diamond are set up as massive fans of both Tokai Teio and Mejiro McQueen respectively, and I was hoping that this season would build on top of that and have those two be major mentor figures for the main characters here, but we don’t get any of that. Yes, this season does have a few scenes where Teio gives Kitasan some pep talks, but those are not only sparse, but they don’t play on Teio’s own experiences from last season. I do think that the last few episodes of this season were good to send off Kitasan’s character, and I also think that this season as whole still hits all the emotional beats it was aiming for, but I feel like there were a lot of missed opportunities to build on top of what we got last season.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Dec 20, 2023

Brainerrorboom

Not Recommended

Preliminary (13/13 eps)

After an amazing experience in season 2, everyone have high hopes on season 3, hoping it will be another banger.
Turns out, this is a horrible season - worse than the ONA aired on April or even season 1.
What went wrong?

In a nutshell:

1. Using up a lot of new character's time for old characters
-Before: New season, new characters
- Now: New season, old characters gets lots of screentime

... 2. Boring racing scenes
- (Apart from ep 12) Close up shots of girls trampling grass and keep yelling and shouting for minutes straight
- No memorable matches

3. Too frequent racings
- less time for character development
- There is no climax in the show

4. Lack of emotions
- The production team expected that you can save lots of emotion by just ONE episode - and release it out like
a flood through a race
-> Climax? No.

5. Time wasting on useless scenes
ex. Sakura Bakushin-O : Her only purpose is to interact with Kitason a bunch of times - without being any motivative source for Kitason

6.Wasting characters
Ex. Duramente: A perfect character to fit in the anime
-Gets screentime but no character development

7.Talking instead of action
- Actions are the best way to develop a character - and they chose not to, but instead talking for 12 ep straight
8.Confusing character developments (the worst)
Kitasan Black:
-Real life: Nicknamed " Tough guy"
-Anime: "Glassheart" - Keeps breaking down and have to get motivated every episode
ex. Within TWO minutes:
-Want to compete overseas
- Denied by the trainer
-Got sad and went out
- Motivated from two random guys on the street
- Cheered up
- Changes idea and will compete in Japan
->Totally time wasting and no character development and no emotions saved
- Amazed by how the production can turn a horse which is strong and got the most G1 trophies among all into
a girl who is stupid ,fragile and weak
Satono Diamond:
- Expected to get main screentime (rivalry with Kitasan irl)
- Reality: NPC with ONLY ONE EP for character development - and that ep was totally not passionate enough
New side characters:
- Have screentime but... simply no character development

Overall: A complete disaster which is not recommended to newcomers and even old fans. Seriously this is the only uma musume anime I dropped due to its boringness of the first few episodes- and I came back to watch if it gets improvements. The answer is clear no.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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