Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games ‒ Episode 7

I, for one, think the idea that there’s just two guys—two passing ships in the night, really—who both just, coincidentally like dressing like they’re motorcycle punks straight from the 80s or 90s, and also they’re rivals in fighting games, is hilarious. They’re both just like this in their day-to-day lives, and under different circumstances, they would’ve been each other’s (literal) ride or dies. And I guess in a sense, they still are. But instead, fate has brought them together in such a way where they’re rivals on the battlefield of Street Fighter. These two are hilarious, and I’m excited to see more of them as the series continues.

Still, as much as I loved those two, most of the episode was spent meeting—well, characters who aren’t new, per se, but characters who haven’t really been fully introduced into the story until now. Namely, the small, argumentative girl, Arisa, that the squad recently ran into, and Tamaki’s dorm monitor older sister, Hana. Again: Not our first time meeting them, but our first time seeing more substantial interactions with them, that all but guarantee they’ll have a bigger place in the story moving forward. Almost certainly a match between them and one of the girls by the end of the season, because that’s how these things work.

Nothing brings a series like this more heat quite like even more rivals, so I am all for this. The thrill of competition, the burning passion of wanting to take down your rival (and in the case of Aya and Mio, wanting to also smooch afterward), and the overall desire to stop at nothing until you’ve reached your goal—it’s all super compelling, and absolutely coming through here. At this point, we got a small handful of rivalries building up, and I’m 100% here for it.

But of course, you can’t have a compelling rivalry without compelling characters, and this episode felt like it was trying to do more to put the spotlight on characters who haven’t seen as much of it. In particular, although I wouldn’t say she necessarily had a lot of lines or screentime, it’s hard not to think of Tamaki differently now that we know that the mysterious person she wants to catch up to is her sister—who, again, is also FGC and very much there. Then, there’s Arisa—who we’ve only barely met, but has nonetheless made quite a lasting impression. She’s more self-aware, not to mention knowledgeable, than she lets on, which already makes her a pretty interesting character in a series like this. That she was trying to throw hands with Mio IRL is just icing on the cake.

Mio’s background and familiarity with martial arts isn’t something we’ve really seen explored in any depth yet—it’s something that’s been mentioned previously, but never something that we’ve seen her really talk about. In fact, this seems to be the first time her friends have seen her bust out some moves. Whether her love of fighting games might be connected to this in some way, at this point it’s hard to tell. She obviously loves gaming for the sake of gaming, and we haven’t seen anything yet suggesting that she loves studying martial arts (as opposed to it being something she was forced to do, not unlike studying). Although regardless of her opinion on it, it doesn’t make her any less skilled either in-game or out.

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Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.

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