Umamusume: Beginner tips for URA Finale

The core gameplay loop of Umamusume revolves around its career mode and URA Finale is the first major scenario available. This is where you’ll learn the ropes, taste bitter defeat, and elevate your trainees to divine glory — but with some of the more intricate game mechanics being left in the dark by the tutorials, it’s difficult to wrap your head around what to do.

These Umamusume beginner tips will get you up to speed and ensure that you can properly support the dreams of your trainees.

Pick the right Veteran Umamusume and Support Cards

Starting the game, the selection of Veteran Umamusume and Support Cards at your disposal will be small, but it’s important to understand their functions. 

You can pick two Veteran Umamusume at the start of your run, which pass down some of their stats, aptitudes, and skills to the new Trainee Umamusume. Be sure to pick Veterans that grant helpful bonuses to the Trainee, such as stats and skills that support her running style.

Support Cards are a similar deal: You’ll want to pick cards that provide boons and skills specific to the kind of style you’re going for. Each card will provide narrative events, stat boosts, buffs to Mood and Energy, and the chance to receive discounts on skills.

Learn more about the best stats for each race style in Umamusume to make the best decisions.

Keep the Trainee’s Mood up

Mood is a very important attribute in career mode. If your Trainee has Good or Great Mood, they receive bonus stats from each training session they complete and perform better in races. Awful or Bad Mood, on the other hand, slows your Trainee’s growth and lowers race performance.

Although Mood can change through specific events, you can always use the Recreation function to boost it at the cost of a turn. We’d recommend you to bolster your Trainee’s Mood early in the playthrough, since the bonus gains derived from it will mount up over time — this is a fantastic way to ensure a good growth trajectory.

Build Friendships and level up training

While you’ll generally want to focus on raising the stats that are most suitable for your Trainee’s style and strategy, the Junior Year affords you the opportunity to focus on building Friendships.

When choosing which stat to train, you’ll notice that different characters’ avatars appear on the right side of the screen. These are the characters brought in by your Support Cards. They will randomly participate in different training sessions each turn and having your Trainee practice with them strengthens their Friendships. 

When you maximize the Friendship Level between characters and your Trainee, this will unlock Friendship Training — an especially powerful type of training with extra stat yields. To reach the maximum level quickly, it’s advisable to focus on the training sessions that have the most other characters present. Once you’ve got those Friendship Level maxed out, there’s enough time to focus on the stats that are important.

Likewise, you should know that training types can be level up. Whenever you complete four sessions of any training type, it’ll reach the next level and give you additional yields in every session. You’ll want to focus on leveling up the crucial training types for your Trainee first.

Manage Energy carefully

Energy is consumed whenever you train a stat — with the exception of Wit, which actually gives back a little Energy. Once your Trainee’s Energy falls below 50%, her training sessions can fail. This is disastrous, since it completely wastes a turn without stat yields and can lead to injuries as well as stat losses. 

It’s good practice to recover Energy by letting your Trainee Rest for a turn whenever the chance of failure exceeds 20%. Only Friendship Training is really worth the risk of incurring an injury.

You’ll also want to Rest your Trainee (along with getting her Mood up to Great) ahead of the Summer Camp in Classic Year and Senior Year. Summer Camp has especially powerful training sessions in store, so you don’t want to waste your precious time with Rest and Recreation.

Participate in races to earn Skill Points

Skills are very important to make your Trainee competitive in her key career races — but you can participate in many other races throughout the year. Although you shouldn’t overdo it, as running races costs turns and therefore needs to be weighed against training time, it’s always good to get a couple other competitions under your belt, since doing well in them will yield a couple extra stat gains and precious Skill Points.

These can be invested to learn skills. Which skills are available to you depends on the Trainee, Veteran Umamusume, and Support Cards you chose.

Races are also great to see how well your training is progressing, as a bad result will give you hints as to which areas you need to improve. Victories also earn you trophies and materials to unlock your Umamusume’s Potential.

Finally, races bring your Trainee Umamusume more fans, raising their Fan Tier. This is crucial, as having a certain number of fans at specific points of the year will grant you extra bonuses.

Keep all of the above in mind as you go into your first couple of career mode playthroughs and it’ll quickly become basic knowledge, after which you can dive deeper into areas like building a perfect Support Card deck.

Make sure to check out how to unlock outfits in Umamusume as well.