Whoa, hold your horses! Another update galloping in the same month? You gotta be foaling me! Saddle up for another gacha game update. Originally, this was just my mane excuse to add Umamusume, but I was horsing around in the backlog and found a whole stable of other gacha game tracks! Code: Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel - Ritual Festival/Event - Keycard Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel - Karakuri / Shiranui / Six Samurai - Climax Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel - Monarch / End of the World / World Legacy 2.0 / Vendread - Climax Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel - Duelist Cup September 2024 - Stage 2 - Climax Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel - Evil★Twin - Duel Field Theme Let's start with this Yu-Gi-Oh game composed by none other than Yasunori Nishiki of Octopath Traveler fame. Expect the same quality and intensity, because card games are SERIOUS BUSINESS. Then there's "Evil★Twin - Duel Field Theme", which I'm not even sure was composed by him, but it's still catchy. Code: MementoMori: AFKRPG - Poco A Poco MementoMori: AFKRPG - Everglow (English Ver.) MementoMori: AFKRPG - Flag MementoMori: AFKRPG - Anemone (Lament Collection English Ver.) MementoMori: AFKRPG - VI. THE SWORD (English Ver.) MementoMori is an idle game, so the gameplay is the management of characters and resources, which is a basic part of every gacha game. It has no story, only lore that's unlocked through each character, so it's like reading the Silmarillion if LOTR didn't exist. If you guessed that the only way to get the whole "story" is to pull for every variant of each character(124 so far), you are correct. It is fundamentally a collectathon game and getting a dopamine hit watching numbers go up. But let's get on with the music. The music is arguably the greatest asset this game has. Every character has a theme song, both in Japanese and English, spanning most genres, and they're all done incredibly well. People say Hypergryph is a music company because of the wide variety of music in Arknights. Well, I'm pretty sure Bank of Innovation developed MementoMori as a music collection with a bonus mini-game. I also think they're assholes for not crediting the English singers and VAs. Fun fact: "Flag" was composed and sung by Wakana who used to be in FictionJunction with Yuki Kajiura. Code: Alice Gear Aegis - Keishi Yonao - Vices Helix Surround (Master HG β) Alice Gear Aegis - sHARD GEAR Alice Gear Aegis - Assault of Hexed Faith Alice Gear Aegis - Insurmountable Fight Alice Gear Aegis CS: Concerto of Simulatrix - Valiant universe - Another Ver. - Alice Gear Aegis CS: Concerto of Simulatrix - Break through Now comes Alice Gear Aegis, which just recently celebrated its 7.5th anniversary. While the gacha game is Japan-only, you may have heard of the Switch version (or not, judging by how obscure it is). The music was composed by Zuntata, a group well-known for their music in games such as Darius, Bubble Bobble, and Ninja Warriors. Code: Brave Frontier - Brave Arc Brave Frontier - Suppression Brave Frontier - The Warrior's Cherished Desire Brave Frontier - Flash Brave Frontier 2 - Randall Brave Frontier 2 - Decision Authentic Brave Frontier 2 - Sand Serpent Hilda Brave Frontier is a somewhat popular game franchise that ended all services in 2022. It had a good 9 years before going to the big server in the sky. The music was composed by Hikoshi Hashimoto, a long-time career composer since the early days of Sega. There's a zombified bastardization of the game called Brave Frontier Legion that was just released. Code: Honkai: Star Rail - Flying Aureus Shot to Lupine Rue - A Duel of Connecting Blades Honkai: Star Rail - The Fall at Dawn’s Rise - Proi Proi I decided to catch up on Honkai: Star Rail. No, not the game, just the music. Code: Umamusume: Pretty Derby - U.A.F. Ready, GO!: Senior Year Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Ms. VICTORIA Umamusume: Pretty Derby - BLOW my GALE Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Roiling Craving Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Blooming at Dawn The hottest game right now is mambo Umamusume, the #1 gacha game in Japan. It's got the biggest elements of modern Japanese culture: anime, idols, and horse racing. Ingredients to make the perfect weeb bait. What, you didn't know horse racing was huge in Japan? In fact, 6 of the top 10 highest-earning racehorses of all time are Japanese! So here's the thing about this game. Every horse girl, called uma, is modeled after real racehorses, down to her appearance and personality. Every race track is modeled after real racetracks, down to its slopes and corners. You train these umas in a mostly luck-based rogue-lite career mode and hopefully get perfect stats and traits to pass down as a parent. Yes, there is breeding in the game, but they call it "inheritance". There are dozens of guide videos and hundreds of pages worth of documents and spreadsheets, and I don't have time to explain the intricate optimization details in this game. Just know that it's extremely time-consuming. You don't even have to whale. A whale with a full-time job will rarely beat a sweatlord with all the time in the world. You have to grind endlessly for the chance to train the perfect uma grandparents to train the perfect uma parents to train the perfect uma who can run slightly faster in a circle. So, in short, Umamusume is not just a game. It's a lifestyle. Or you can just play casually and enjoy losing, like Haru Urara. But forget about the game, let's talk about the music. This is where the idol part comes in. After every race, the umas hold a concert, which has surprisingly exceptional choreography and cinematography - from top-quality in-game concerts to top-quality IRL sold-out concerts in Japanese sports stadiums, all amazingly performed by the VAs. Even though the game has only been out for 4 years, it already has 700+ tracks in 30+ albums, all of which were recorded with a live orchestra! Even the BGM is stupidly good. That's some insane dedication to music, man. What's even crazier is that all the character VAs do their own singing, and each vocal track has multiple versions depending on who's singing. There are albums dedicated to these versions, which I ignored for my sanity. They were even making albums back in 2016, when Umamusume was simply a promotional video. In conclusion, the game has, hands down, some of the best music I've ever heard in any gacha game. In other news, I've got another patron! It seems every time I post an update, I catch another one! I also moved all the performers to a hidden section(for now) because it didn't make sense to have them in the composer section. A workaround to my self-imposed 5-track limit, specifically for live service games, is coming soon™. I've already implemented it for Honkai: Star Rail, since each of its updates is distinct and significant enough to be added in the IGDB. (In fact, I tried submitting Nikke's events to IGDB as well, but they were rejected.)
