Umamusume Pretty Derby has taken over the gaming world. Part of its charm, beyond being a highly addictive training simulator similar to Football Manager (no, I'm not joking), is that each "horse girl" has a unique personality, with one standing out above the rest: Gold Ship.
What's even more endearing is the fact that the vast majority of racers are actually inspired by real-life horses, making Gold Ship an even greater legend that has become the community's favorite despite not being one of the best racers in the game. In fact, she's one of the worst racers in the game to pick up for beginners, as she's extremely challenging to train during Career mode.
To understand why, we need to look at the real-life counterpart. Competing from 2011 to 2015, winning 13 out of 28 races, Gold Ship is widely known for being a Thoroughbred horse that had the potential to become one of the greatest to ever do it, but simply decided that lifestyle wasn't for him.
Gold Ship isn't a particularly aggressive horse, but rather a very chaotic one, with Cygames bringing that personality to life with his anime/gacha counterpart. Perhaps his most infamous moment was the "12.1 billion yen incident" known as such for the amount of money betters lost due to a Gold Ship antic.
On 28 June 2015, Gold Ship was one of the favorites to take home the Takarazuka Kinen race for a third time in a row. Naturally, betters played it "safe," not knowing Gold Ship would decide to stand up as the gates opened, losing plenty of ground in the process. The incident would be referenced in a special episode of the Umamusume anime.
Norohiro Yokoyama, the poor jockey tasked with trying to control Gold Ship, simply said the following after the race: "I'm not sure what had happened in his mind because he can't tell us...he is just Gold Ship."
The game's version plasters this untamable nature in a very unique way: Gold Ship is simply too hard to keep in check. During the game's Career Mode, you'll boost your horse's stats by training and competing in races. Unless Gold Ship decides that becoming a more efficient racer isn't worth the time.
At several points, you'll be running into Gold Ship outright refusing to train, with you being unable to select any of the categories to help the character raise its stats. If you're lucky, Gold Ship will let you train her in exactly the thing she wants. Sometimes she'll make you skip turns (you have a number of turns before each race during Career Mode), making it impossible to raise her stats. She'll go as far as being slapped with a Slacker debuff, the kiss of death for every Umamusume Career Mode.
There's also untapped potential, as Gold Ship can become a very powerful racer if you make the most out of her, provided you luck out during training and have a good set of support cards on hand. Still, you'll have to be a proper min-maxer to make it work, something that a lot of people aren't able to put up with.
Even if you make the most out of her, Gold Ship still thrives in chaos and makes her training a living nightmare. She's a stubborn, egotistical, short-tempered competitor who will drop kick you after she wins a race. Even if you come in first place, can you truly consider yourself a winner?
The real-life Gold Ship now lives his best life as a retired horse, enjoying his newfound popularity. Meanwhile, Umamusume's version will keep terrorizing new trainers for the foreseable future.
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