Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games: Series Review

Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games plays with expectations of gender roles and adolescence in a way that crosses cultural and age boundaries.

The series was released on a weekly format on Crunchyroll, and the first five episodes are a slow burn, introducing the characters and the vibe before pivoting into the story. 

Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games follows student Aya Mitsuki (Fairouz Ai), who enrolls in Kuromi Girls Academy with the dreams of being a proper, upstanding young lady. Despite being an avid gamer since her youth, Aya at first believes she must sacrifice this pursuit to excel in school. Her fears are proven wrong when she sees the most popular girl in school, Mio Yorue (Rika Nagae), playing Street Fighter, and being quite skilled at it. The two girls bond and even attempt to start a gaming team despite the insistence of the school that this pursuit is not considered “ladylike”. This leads to both of them entering a real tournament and learning about each other’s competitive strategies along the way. 

What makes Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games unique is how it details the idea of unusual hobbies. The gaming culture in Japan is still male-dominated and any girls in the scene are treated as “unicorns”, anomalies who are singled out for happening to be of a different gender. What this show suggests, however, is anyone can be a gamer.  Aya does not have to sacrifice her unique hobby to fit in, because she finds people with the same hobby in this new school environment. The show even uses actual gameplay footage from Street Fighter to add to the authenticity. Even the most proper and well-behaved student Mio is allowed to show her competitive side in a healthy manner by playing the game with friends. This show’s strength is showing how friendships are usually formed over a common interest, such as video games. 

The relationship between Aya and Mio in particular is well handled. They come from different backgrounds, but still have a shared love of Street Fighter. Their separate fighting styles and favorite characters are even highlighted, showing the writers understand how fighting games and their players function. As more girls are introduced into their club, the focus is taken away from them somewhat, but the closeness of these two characters in particular is believable and sympathetic. They grow over time and despite being rivals in the tournament, they develop an appreciation and learn each other’s strategies so they can both be better competitors. 

The show can feel a bit slow moving at times, fitting the pace of many more low-key anime. Several key moments either feel rushed or glossed over as focus is taken away from the main characters. Subplots are a bit more spaced out, and several other players are given less screentime. What is welcome though are the intimate moments between the two leads. While close enough to be interpreted as romantic, it is left open enough to be filled in a variety of ways, and sometimes a super close friendship is satisfactory enough, so draw the conclusions you want from it. 

Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games is an acquired taste, but worth watching for those who want a different twist on the high school anime genre. The interpersonal relationships and faithfulness to fighting games and gaming culture are worth commending and will make fans of Street Fighter pleased. 

All 12 episodes of Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games are now available to watch on Crunchyroll.