The Winter 2021 Manga Guide

Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games

What's It About? 

Kuromi Girls' Academy is a refined, elegant school that expects the very best in deportment from its young ladies. Aya got into this peerless rich-girls' institution on a scholarship, and hopes to grow as lovely as her fellow student and idol Shirayui. But Shirayui hides a terrible secret: she's a trash-talking, combo-chaining, newbie-stomping, ruthless hardcore gamer! Could a mutual indulgence in no-holds-barred video game combat grow into a deeper rapport between these two girls? (from Seven Seas)

Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games is drawn and scripted by Eri Ejima and Seven Seas Entertainment has released its first volume both digitally and physically for $9.99 and $12.99 respectively.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

On a conceptual level, Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games is a slam-dunk for me. I love competitive fighting games, and for ages now have wanted to see a manga or anime about the subject. Thankfully, this story is going to be both, and this first manga volume shows that it's got excellent fundamentals to work with. Of course I went in wanting to love this thing, but I've cultivated enough of a critical mind that I knew I would take it to task if it didn't measure up. Fortunately, Young Ladies isn't content to coast on the central spectacle of cute schoolgirls buffering inputs and pulling off dash cancels. What Eri Ejima is presenting here very much has its own identity, and that identity is being completely friggin' insane.

The overall stylistic conceit at the heart of Young Ladies seems to be pushing the contrast between the image of 'proper' private-school girls and the outlandish nature of their unusual hobby and the wild ways in which they express it. So this manifests in Aya's pained looks or bleeding lip-bites as she tries to pass muster in this social crowd, and Shirayuri inelegantly pouring emotional tears anytime she gets too into her button-bashing beatdowns, or spewing blood from her mouth as she loses her mind trying to coax her just-discovered combative kindred spirit into a match. Even aside from the contraband hobby at the center of this story, these ridiculous mask-slips sell the thematic idea of these 'refined' girls cutting loose and getting to be wild kids with the games as an outlet. It culminates in the defining image of the manga: A double-page spread of the two girls crashing through a window carrying their arcade sticks.

Even as it's pointedly portraying all this as wildly as possible, the fundamentals of the 'competition series' aspect of Young Ladies indicate an author who knows what they're doing. The fighting game played in this series may be fictional (though I wouldn't complain about some enterprising programmers making it a reality) but it plays off of enough established tropes and rules that seasoned arcade veterans will recognize. And that in-universe nature lets Ejima explain concepts for newcomers in ways that fit with the structure of the story. Shirayuri's deployment of an 'empty' Shoryuken comes off as galling even to those who might need Aya's explanation afterwards, and the depictions and descriptions of the two girls' different player expressions in their styles are made interesting. The technical foundation, spiced up with the eclectic emotional elements, make for a volume that feels like it's over way too soon, and turns this into one that I'm (expectedly) excited to follow further down the line.