Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games

Mitsuki Aya arrives at the elite Kuromi Girls' Academy determined to transform herself into the perfect young lady, taking as her model the school's paragon of grace, Yorue Mio. That image shatters when she stumbles upon Mio in a hidden corner of the campus, fiercely mashing buttons during a heated match on a portable console. Far from the demure flower everyone admires, Mio is a devoted fighting game player with a deep knowledge of frame data, combo routes, and tournament etiquette. Rather than recoil, Aya is drawn into Mio's secret world, and the two begin a friendship built on late-night practice sessions and trips to local arcades.

The manga traces their double lives: by day, they attend etiquette classes and maintain their reputations as model students; by night, they study match footage, enter online ranked battles, and eventually compete in real-world tournaments. Eri Ejima's artwork captures the contrast with precision, rendering the academy's ornate architecture in clean lines while the fighting game sequences burst with dynamic motion and expressive character sprites. The series also functions as a gentle primer on fighting game culture, with in-text notes explaining terms like "wake-up DP" and "option select" for readers unfamiliar with the genre.

Serialization began in Media Factory's Monthly Comic Flapper on January 4, 2020, and as of late 2024 ten tankōbon volumes have been published in Japan. Seven Seas Entertainment handles the English release, with eight volumes available in print and digital formats by mid-2025. The series has proven popular enough to generate two screen adaptations: an eight-episode live-action web drama that streamed on Lemino from May to July 2023, and a forthcoming anime television series produced by Diomedéa, directed by Shōta Ihata, with scripts by Wataru Watari. The anime is scheduled to premiere on July 7, 2026, and Crunchyroll will stream it worldwide outside Japan and China. [edit]