Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games – Episode 1

Content Warning: some flashing lights

What’s it about? Aya Mitsuki is starting her life over as a scholarship student at the prestigious Kuromi Girls Academy, eager to leave her early years obsessing over fighting games in the dust and throw herself into becoming a proper young lady. But the school’s beloved White Lily, Mio Yorue, immediately clocks her as a gamer and is determined to strike up a rivalry. Which is a problem, because gaming on campus is grounds for expulsion!

I’ve been waiting for this anime adaptation for…. oh, five years now? The manga is a fantastic hobby series with tournament arcs and what I would proportionally call a side of yuri. The mangaka, Eri Ejima, talks about wanting to write a story about the camaraderie of old gaming cafes and envisioning it as a space where girls could be be welcomed. It’s really wonderful, and I’m pleased to report that this adaptation starts out on a strong foot.

It might also seem a touch familiar to anime fans in broad strokes. Last year’s Rock is a Lady’s Modesty also starts with a commoner entering an all-girls academy to become a high-class lady, only to discover that the most elegant girl in school shares the “unladylike” passion our heroine is trying to leave behind; the two have an epic showdown after the heroine is rumbled thanks to the calluses on her hands, and a passionate entanglement begins.

I bring the point up mainly to briefly and pre-emptively defend Fighting Games’ honor. Rock is a Lady’s Modesty is an excellent series that is visually, tonally, and thematically different from Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games, but it’s pretty hard to deny how similar their starting chapters are. But while it might not have been the first to get an anime, Fighting Games’ manga predates RockMod’s by about two years. I will now step down from my soapbox and get back to the episode before us.

Fighting Games’ roster reunites director Shota Ihata and writer Wataru Watari after their work together on Girlish Number, an underrated gem in the “letting girls be relatably terrible” subgenre. I got to speak with Watari a few years back, and his body of work definitely feels in line with what makes this series shine. Art director Scott MacDonald seems to favor a more grounded-looking background style in order to make the characters’ expressions shine more, and the contrast is appealing, but there were a few moments where I was left hoping for a tiny bit more visual verve.

The most notable change is the anime netting permission to use actual footage from Street Fighter VI. It works as a contrast in the same way the goofy faces work at standing out from the peaceable backgrounds, and I don’t doubt that it unlocks an additional level of resonance and recognition for fans of the genre. But I do somewhat miss the legally distinct version in the manga—like with Marin’s cosplay in My Dress-Up Darling, I find it immensely charming when a mangaka presents a pastiche of something refracted through their own affection. You can tell a lot by what they choose to emphasize or how, and I love the amount of flavor it adds to a text. It’s also slightly easier to follow the explanation of the moves as a non-gamer when the artist can emphasize a particular part of the screen rather than having to take the game footage in as a whole, but the overall effect still works. This is a minor quibble that anime-only viewers likely won’t even notice. Inserting real game footage has been done with great success already in titles like Hi Score Girl, after all.

What matters, though, is the real world confrontation between Mio and Aya, and the show absolutely nails it. There’s drama, dynamism, crackling tension during all that intimate hand-grabbing—and the understated approach to some of the other jokes pans out absolutely beautifully when Aya pours out her backstory only for Mio to completely 100% no-sell her. I died. I lived again. It was all I had hoped for. There are themes going on here about acceptable femininity, the gendering of hobbies, and creating inclusive spaces (which is especially germane to the fighting game community), but all it needed to do to bring me back for a second episode was to bring my amazing trash girl Mio. They have done this. And so, the world is good.