by Luce, Okazu Staff Writer

Well, I guess I need to get around to reviewing more of Young Ladies… Wait, I reviewed Volume 2 review back in 2022!? And now there are 7?! With an anime coming up soon!? Looks like I need a training montage! Over the next few reviews, I’ll try and bring us back up to speed with double bouts, back to back. Ding ding!

In Volume 1 and Volume 2, we met Aya and Mio, or ‘Shirayuri-sama’, who love fighting games but attend a school where games are banned. Having found a group  with Yuu and Tamaki, they even have a little fighting games club going. What next, but a tournament?

Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games, Volume 3 has the girls realising that if they flunk their exams, the make up tests will be on the weekend of EX-Japan, the tournament they’re desperate to go to. Should be fine… But they’ve been spending all their time gaming, and Mio has a visceral reaction to studying – getting her up to speed in time is going to take some doing. At the tournament, the girls get into their first day of matches.

In Volume 4, they have another run in with the smart-mouthed kid who nearly tries to use physical violence, only stopped at the last second by Tamaki’s sister, who’s also in the tournament! Yet their sibling relationship isn’t exactly roses, when Hana is so damn terrifying. Finally, we follow Aya and Mio’s matches against two pro-gamers, Gekido and Café au Lait. Can they move on to the second day?

This manga takes a sports manga approach to e-sports, and within the tournament, you can see the plethora of people who live and breathe fighting games. It’s nice to see people making connections because of the things they love – everyone at EX-Japan loves fighting games, and I can’t even imagine the atmosphere. This manga does a pretty good job of conveying some of that, the energy and hubbub of not only a convention but a tournament too. Unlike a lot of sports manga though, we see lots of little matches. With individuals only needing to sign up to get in, we see everyone from pro-gamers to pretty new players, and plenty of styles of play.

I must applaud the mangaka, Eri Ejima, for the amount of thought and love of the genre put into both the manga and the fake fighting game for it, Iron Sempai 4. The shortening is great. π4. So simple! All the different characters, their moves and hit boxes… I honestly feel like this could be a real game, considering how much they talk about the hit boxes and weaknesses of each move. I’m not familiar with any fighting games, so maybe this is based heavily on another game (there are nods to Tekken, at least), but it acts very much like a sports manga in that way, too, where the sport, or the e-sport in this case, very much is the plot. The strategies, the players. It isn’t fantasy, just people playing a game really, really well. (Although what is fantasy is smacking your head that hard with a game controller and being mentally fine afterwards.) As per the trailer, the upcoming anime will instead have Street Fighter and the gaming animations look as though they will run in the game engine. I’m sure they’ll make it work, but I actually really liked the character designs of π4. That said, it’s a pretty big thing for a franchise like that to come on board for a Yuri anime, so I’m hoping this will translate to some good animation, both in the fighting games and out.

Most brilliantly is that while the game is taken seriously, the characters are not. Mio will spout something ridiculous like ‘while studying for this school, I only vomited once a week’. Aya is often too lesbian to function. It handles the ridiculousness really well. There are little asides between the matches (and around them) that are comedic. But once the tournament restarts, it’s mostly matches – three official, and one not – between Tamaki and her sister. Here we see the root of Tamaki’s issues with fighting games that she’s been trying to work through, and why she is playing them. And dear lord her sister is intense. It does seem to be a complicated relationship, so I’m glad we’re getting some background on it, but the resolution of all the matches will have to wait for Volume 5.

Ratings:

Art: 9 (so many good facial expressions!)
Story: 7
Service: 0
Yuri: 6 (Aya is pretty gay and there are some yuri-esque moments, but nothing concrete. I’m not sure if there will be, but I live in hope)

Overall: 8

If you didn’t enjoy the first two volumes, this is more of the same. If you did, this is more of the same. Sit tight, though, since the next two volumes are still in the tournament. Can any one of our heroines win? Or even make it to the second day?