There are many ways you can get better at fighting games, but there does come a point where it’s time to test how good you actually are. So why not head a tournament and compete against completely different players? The four girls — Aya, Mio, Tamaki (who affectionately gets called Tamatya starting in volume 3) and Yuu do just that! After first helping Mio get good grades in her exams and temporarily stopping her sniveling, the girls take part in EX-Japan, where way too many people gather in one big arena and face off in a number of fighting games. These four of course will be facing off against fellow π4 (Iron Senpai 4) players.
But let’s just say if I gave you the following options on who (or what) any of the girls would be facing in the tournament, which would you pick:
A) Two delinquent-looking pro gamers in the same gaming house who hate each other’s guts (?!?)
B) A girl who hates getting chummy and flies off the handle like a raging red panda (???)
C) Sister to one of the four who apparently hates her own younger sister’s guts and manifests a cobra to those around her (!!!)
D) All of the above
Yeah, considering this is all happening over two volumes, we know the four girls we’ve been following already have some screws loose since they’re attempting to game despite their school rules outlawing this, and the funny or serious face-game can’t only be restricted to them either, so I guess you all know what the answer to this question is.
In returning to Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games, I have an admission: it’s been too long. Ok, discounting that I did stall in reading this, volume 3 didn’t come out until September (digitally) when volume 2 came out December 7, 2021!…So yes I had to try and remember a couple of things about these characters. Then of course we get the four in a totally different element: a tournament. It’s not even close to gaming in their dorms, no matter how those went. It’s not the worst thing in the world to have a gaming tournament arc, but I did start thinking the intrigue of them trying to game when prim-and-proper ladies supposedly can’t would’ve been nice to return to.
But no, we just get thrown into the four girls facing off against other π4 players, and all of them are definitely weirdoes. While we do have a long match involving two pro gamers who look and act like your typical delinquents, the focus on Arisa, a small girl with untold amounts of anger and gaming skills, and Tamaki’s older sister Hana, dominate these two volumes. All of this should be kind of entertaining, but not quite. You can only go so far with drawing everyone obscenely wildly and explosively, and Hana and especially Arisa just feel kind of tossed in there without much thought. You can understand meeting a set of new faces at a tournament, but so far it seems early to have them take up so much page time.
I am somewhat curious about their backstory — at least for Arisa it definitely involves a relationship with a girl going wrong — but there’s still way more to know about Mio and Aya, and now they’re all embroiled in tense matches with experienced pro gamers. Like they’re essentially the noobs compared to them! There’s no way they can actually win right? Yet I don’t know if I really care what happens to them at this stage…well, Yuu and Arisa end up facing off and I guess I’m curious if Yuu can at least humble Arisa a bit.
The art still remains pretty memorable and well drawn, we still have Mio crying as naturally as it is to breathe, and the fighting game terminology’s even more amped up, somehow. Since it’s a tournament you even have commentary — both in-text and as notes — in both volumes so you’ll know what some of these gaming terms mean. Heck, there was so much content packed in both volumes that it’s probably recommended you take a break after reading a volume. You don’t need to have frames and players being baited into mistakes dominate your dreams.
All of this said, I am kind of hoping this tournament arc doesn’t go too long. But there’s still much to be resolved before the four go back to school, and it’s gonna be another long wait for the next volume (assuming it even stays at that date) of Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games to find out what’s going to happen…!