Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games Anime Captured FGC's Attention

In 2020, Eri Ejima released the first chapter of her new manga about two girls growing closer over shared love of fighting games, it has been an instant hit with the FGC. 

Even though it doesn't focus on pro play or something terribly advanced, it served as an exceptionally rare representation of fighting games in media. Not only that, but it was clearly done with love, and written by someone who has a lot of personal experience with the genre.

This year it finally received an anime adaptation, and the subject matter of the first episode is resonating especially hard with the FGC. If you ever ran a set with someone in person, or played with your friends, you'll likely find something familiar here.

To start off you got Aya playing Cammy and absolutely dumpstering Shirayuri's Ryu by simply playing clean and exploiting her opponent's desire to press buttons.

But then we see Shirayuri making adjustments and conditioning Aya with the fireball spam. It's neat to see a bit of nuance here, as this is basically "second layer" type of yomi. You spam projectiles, but you do so with the expectation that your opponent knows a good response, which you will then exploit by switching things out and baiting out a wrong response.

The set ends with each of them taking one game, and kicking off a deeper connection between the two. It's a girls love manga after all.

Even if you're not into anime or not a shoujo connoisseur, there's some real authenticity on display here. It would've been trivial for the Diomedéa to draw stills of some fake fighting game or to avoid showing the screen altogether.

The original manga obviously made allusions, but these chapters came out before Street Fighter 6 even released. They basically went an extra mile to replace vague similarities with a specific fighting game, and rewrote bits of the manga around that. 

Obviously the gameplay footage is just a small part of the episode, but there is so much going on in those moments. Just think about it, they are telling the story by showing you the gameplay. We always talk about how storylines make tournaments more interesting, and here we have the same principle properly applied to fiction.

Needless to say, if you're a fighting game fan, you gotta give this a try.