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|  "Happy New Year 2026: MMC Horse edition" , posted Thu 1 Jan 11:17  
Happy New Year to all, and thanks to the Professor who gives the Cafe wayfarers a place to sojourn!
In the spirit of the Year of the Horse, please share your favorite video game horses. There's not as many as you might think! Kind of surprising given all the high fantasy, but horse sprites are more work and they're hard to animate realistically in 3D. I don't think Final Fantasy has a single horse! Anyway, in the old-school spirit of the Cafe, I'm going entirely on memory and not looking up any details:
Wander and the Colossus/Shadow of the Colossus: This is a great horse. It gives just enough resistance when turning to feel realistic and like a real living horse. Some people used to complain he was a pain to ride, and these people have probably never ridden a horse. It's possible this game is actually a horse simulator with a side-quest of selling your soul and having incidental encounters with extremely large statues. It feels TERRIBLE when you have to send your horse off a cliff to reach the last boss, and it's a great way to underline how corrosive the hero's quest has become.
Zelda Breath of the Wild: There are a lot of cool horses in here! I feel like it was weirdly easy to lose them some places, even with the whistle. I liked being able to give them cool outfits and loved that great stable. I recall getting some weird ghost armor, which maybe made the horse teleport around. Like the Warring States and Medieval periods, in a pretty dangerous world, it feels so comforting being on a horse, especially when getting near enemies/evil robot things that can run you down on foot. I remember people liked the horse in Ocarina of Time, though all I remember from watching at a friend's is that it had some nice Spanish-sounding music.
Romancing SaGa 3: I never played this one, in favor of MMC/Iggy's Bible RomaSaGa 2, but the screenshot of someone riding a horse (!!) through very attractive scenery in what was probably the opening sequence really stuck with me and looked so cool. But not cool enough that I was going to play SaGa over FF in my ignorant early days.
Derby Stallion: I never played these either but this was always THE go-to horse racing sim in my memory. Did this really never get released internationally?!
OMAKE - Soul Calibur: in some of the weak later entries, I'm pretty sure Nightmare briefly has a horse for certain moves. They could have ditched boring last bosses like Inferno or Night Terror and just put Nightmare on top of a horse that was hard to hit. This would have been a chance for Seung Mina (never Seong Mi-Na) to finally shine, since her weapon is a Zanbatou, a horse-cutting sword/anti-cavalry sword.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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