YMMV / Pocket Card Jockey

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Horse Off-Course can be like this. While you can skip most of his dialogue by pressing the X button, you can't skip whenever he introduces a new mechanic for the first time. You also aren’t told how to skip him until well into the tutorial, at which point he’s certainly interrupted the gameplay more than a few times to teach you something either the loading screen told you first or you figured out yourself. He also tends to show up at the results screen with advice when you win anything other than first place. However, due to a good chunk of the game being based on luck, tends to make the advice more useless than helpful, especially if its something like "everyone else was just better", "I have no idea what happened" or telling you how to avoid Runaway when it only really happened due to a bad hand. Fortunately, Ride On not only allows you to instantly shut him up by tapping him directly, but also introduced a setting in Options to just not have him show up at all at the results, with the advice he gives instead relegated to the loading screen tips with other, more helpful information.
• Awesome Music:
  • Holy crap, "Challenge to the Vertex". It sounds less like the final boss theme to a horse-racing game and more like the final boss theme to an epic adventure RPG, and it's glorious.
  • Funky Monkey Style is rocking and slick and wouldn't sound out of place in something like Sega Rally or F-Zero.
• Cult Classic: Despite being a rather obscure Nintendo 3DS eShop title that saw minimal advertising, the game has a small, passionate fanbase that attest that it is an incredibly fun and addicting game, frequently touting it as not only one of the best games on the system, but also one of the best titles ever developed by Game Freak. The director even commented on this when interviewed about the Apple Arcade Updated Re-release, noting that while the studio was aware of the game's cult following, they were still taken aback by the amount of Japanese social media excitement caused by the announcement.
• Funny Moments:
  • When they're finally convinced that they're talking to an angel, one of the first things your character does is assure them that they totally worshipped whatever deity the angel is representing.
  • The angel casually talking about damning you to Hell if you can't hold up your end of the deal in Ride On!. Or, rather, danging you to Heck. In response to this, the player tries to convince the angel that their true dream in life is actually to make store-bought mac-and-cheese. When you eventually do win the Derby, he reveals that he was just joking about sending you to Heck, and chastises you for having a bad sense of humor.
    ???: I thought your dream was to win the derby?
    You: That's more like my... fantasy?
  • When you start the tutorial and Horse Off-Course introduces himself in Ride On!, your options are "Nice to meet you" and "I'VE MISSED YOU SO MUCH!"
  • In Ride On!, when Mr. Maekawa asks if you were always this good at horse racing after you win your first race, your character triumphantly shouts "I AM REBORN!" Mr. Maekawa wisely decides to ignore that and continue talking. Your character is still high off their first success though.
    You: ALL WILL TREMBLE BEFORE ME!
  • After declaring you his rival, Jagger approaches Mr. Maekawa to glean information on how you are managing such a good string of victories. While the older man is confused by the questioning, he's even more confused by the fact Jagger is holding the entire conversation with his back turned and keeps beseeching him to just face him already.
    Mr. Maekawa: Please just turn around. It's absolutely not having the dramatic effect you think it is.
  • Jimmy's entire Happy Carrot addiction storyline.
  • Whenever you win particularly big international races, the angel shows up to congratulate you. It's all smiles until you find out that he also bet on each of these races... and they bet against you, assuming you wouldn't be good enough to win or that you'd have an off-day. Your character stops being surprised after this happens for a third time.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Devil's Hand (Strong) is incredibly overpowered. It essentially manipulates the deck in such a way that you'll hardly ever draw a dud card. You can pretty much guarantee Perfect Clears with this Skill.
  • Front Charger is easily the most busted of the Characteristics. Unlike the other Charger abilities, it’s incredibly easy to position your horse in front of a rival and thus gain obscene amounts of energy, to the point where staying in a Level 3 Comfort Zone actually becomes a potential hindrance due to Super Unity knocking opponents away from that ever-important sweet spot behind you. By regularly positioning yourself correctly, reaching 100 Enthusiasm becomes laughably easy, with the chance of achieving 120 if everything else aligns just right.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Pompadour horses are bad-tempered to start and get angry very quickly if cards are left uncleared, meaning you have to have near-perfect runs if you don't want them to go runaway. They're the hardest special horses to deal with in the game because of this.
  • Closer horses spend most of the race towards the back of the pack, meaning you'll be spending pretty much the entirety of the homestretch playing catch-up while bumping into half the competition, even while using every single whip and boost card available to you (which also means your horse will be developing at a snail's pace since it won't be able to take advantage of the experience boosts you'd normally get by not using said cards). In the vast majority of circumstances, a closer horse stands virtually no chance of winning if even a single non-closer competitor outranks it, even if you otherwise play absolutely flawlessly and end up with 100 Enthusiasm, since said rival will be nigh impossible to catch in the homestretch. Unless you've somehow bred a closer with high base stats, you can kiss any hope of winning a G1 race goodbye.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The Super Unity theme, which signals that, for the next leg of the race, you're going to be absolutely obliterating everything else on the track as a result of your hard-earned Lv. 3 Perfect Solitaire.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Runaway. It causes the horse to only rush forward, quickly drains stamina, and can only be cured by getting a perfect hand. Even if you do manage to win a perfect hand, your horse will probably be so far ahead it won't be able to get any Energy from the Comfort zone and it would be detrimental to try to run back. To make matters worse, the game is largely a Luck-Based Mission, so it's especially upsetting when you have an unwinnable hand with a lot of cards left in a big race. It's even worse if you're riding a bad-tempered horse, in which it's very easy to have go Runaway with a small hand of unused cards, or a single dung card that only appears in in Mature Mode. There are some upsides to this, however. If this happens on your final turn or before that, then you wind up far enough ahead of everyone, but it's not a guaranteed win unless you have some stamina cards and energy to spare and your opponents aren't strong enough to catch up.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: More like Remake Difficulty Spike, but Ride On! ends up being much more difficult than the original for quite a few reasons:
  • The mechanic of Happy Horses only being available on certain days was originally confined to Mature Mode. With both Growth Mode and Mature Mode being merged together in the remake so that the former seamlessly transitions into the latter, this mechanic is now present throughout the entire game, meaning it's quite possible to have a long stretch of the shop being unavailable and leaving you high and dry for Year 3 G1 races in which you could really use some help from items to maximize your horse's growth potential. Though somewhat mitigated with the daily item rewards you get from playing the game.
  • Originally in Start Solitaire, your final draw determined your starting Unity, while your completion speed determined your starting Comfort Zone. In Ride On!, this has been inverted, meaning that starting off in a high Comfort Zone now largely comes down to luck, especially with the shortened time limit greatly reducing your ability to target the card you want.
  • The Stamina mechanic has been completely overhauled. In the original, it was used solely to determine how many times you could use the "Go!" button to boost your speed down the homestretch, meaning that the worst that could happen from running out of stamina was that the "Go!" button would be unavailable - in many races, as long as your Enthusiasm was high enough, it would still be quite possible to win even without it. In Ride On!, the "Go!" button has been reworked into whip cards, with how many you start each race with being a new stat specific to each horse. Now running out of stamina has a far more damning consequence: it drastically slows down your horse, making it a virtual death sentence if it happens... and with how much easier it is to lose stamina in the remake than the original, it will happen unless either your horse has a ridiculously high stamina stat, you buy a Stamina Carrot from Happy Horses, or your solitaire playing is absolutely impeccable.
  • Puzzles have been removed from the game, meaning you can no longer enjoy the useful benefits of completing them.
  • The QR code feature has also been removed, so you can't use powerful horses from other players.
  • Breeding now has a poker mechanic added in: pairing two horses gives you a card from each one, with the remaining three being randomly drawn from their ancestry, and the resulting poker hand largely determines the quality of the foal you get. While particularly strong horses give you Jokers which can greatly improve your odds of getting a good hand, it's still quite possible even then to get screwed by a bad draw from the other three cards and end up with a low-quality foal from two otherwise top-notch parents, introducing yet another needless element of luck into a game already riddled with luck-based mechanics.
  • The special horse breeds are now locked behind specific goals, which are also the games Achievements, instead of just winning with certain horses.
• That One Level: The International Cup can be even harder than the intended final level due to the opponents having near-superhuman luck even if your stats are high and you get good solitaire runs.

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