The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games

At an elite finishing school, some girls play fighting games. Aya, a commoner, enrolls in Kuromi Girls Academy and discovers the school's queen bee, Shirayuri, playing a fighting game.

Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games is based on the manga series by Eri Ejima. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

Note: The reviews below are based on an early screener provided by Crunchyroll. The anime series will premiere on July 7 at 7:30am EDT.

If anime has taught me anything, it's that prestigious all-girls academies are enchanting and terrifying in equal measure, like fairy-tale battlegrounds strewn with the metaphorical remains of all the girls who couldn't handle the crushing social pressures and vicious battles of girl-on-girl psychological torment. Those who emerge from this gauntlet of fire and steel, however, will find themselves possessing the kind of talent and self-confidence that the mere mortals of everyday society could never dream of. There's also a 75% probability that incredibly fraught homoerotic melodrama will work its way into the proceedings at some point.

On the spectrum that falls between the Ohtori and Otonokizaka Academies, the school of Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games, Kuromi Academy, falls somewhere in the middle. Thankfully, this means that Aya, Mio, and the others don't have to navigate a surreal nightmarescape of quasi-literal battles to the death. Still, it also means they don't live in a musical paradise of eternal sunshine and friendship. Aya isn't surrounded by a horde of scheming bullies and villainesses, but she is the fish-out-of-water prole who doesn't quite fit in amongst the well-meaning but terminally bougie girls that make up the school's student body. She's very likable and endearing right from the get-go, though, at least so far as we in the audience are concerned, so we are forced to ask, “How ever will this young lady manage to find her place in such strange and trying circumstances?”

I mean, you all read the title of the show, too. She's obviously going to play some fighting games with other cute girls at her school. Now, the real question is whether or not this concept can sustain an entire season of television when it is so clearly just another riff on the old “Anime Girls Doing a Hobby” routine. The answer, of course, is “Yes, it absolutely can, provided the characters play well off of each other, and the show can do something interesting with its visuals and storytelling.” I am happy to report that Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games performs admirably on both of these fronts.

The sharp, clean visuals and polished animation stand out from the premiere's very first scene, and they basically never waver. If nothing else, this will be a gorgeous anime to look at this summer, which can go a very long way. You can tell that Studio diomedéa has some extra budget to play around with, too, since they have made the uncommon choice to use actual footage from titles like Street Fighter IV and VI for the gaming sequences. It looks a little strange, I will admit, mostly because I'm so used to shows that just rely on footage of older sprite-based games or custom-animated material that blend more naturally with the 2-D environments of their respective programs. Still, it's honestly really cool to see the White Lily whooping some ass as Ryu in all of his modern, HD glory. It gives the show some real verisimilitude, which helps sell the bond that these fighting games will forge amongst our heroines.

Overall, Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games put forth a very strong premiere that helped fill the Rock is a Lady's Modesty-shaped hole in my heart. I'm very much looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

I often have an issue with the romanticized anime version of a “young lady,” possibly because I once ticked a lot of those boxes myself, including attending a women's university that might be termed “prestigious.” That made me leery of this series, because I can assure you that I did (and do) in fact play fighting games, albeit badly. (Unless I'm playing Sophitia in Soul Caliber. I kick ass as Sophitia.) So I was delighted to learn that this first episode is setting up protagonist Aya to be completely wrong about socialized ideas about young ladies, because, when you come right down to it, the designation is simply a confluence of age and gender. If you fit those categories, then anything you do is something that young ladies do, full stop.

I realize that this is willfully ignoring a bunch of social norms, but that's the point – and something that this episode hints that Aya is going to have to do. From her explanation to the White Lily of Kuromi Academy, it seems less like she began to feel that her hobby wasn't ladylike enough and more that she was afraid that she was becoming too obsessed with it. That she would immediately swap it out for another obsession – in this case, being a “lady” – makes a lot of sense, because the issue was never what the actual hobby was, but rather how lost she got in it. The question then becomes how she can healthily maintain both hobbies, and that's something her new secret gaming buddy is well positioned to help with.

The White Lily is treated as the pinnacle of graceful femininity at school. Petite and pink-haired, she's graceful in everything she does in the public eye, so when Aya discovers her secret Street Fighter habit, she's terrified that she'll be unmasked and expelled, because according to school lore, that's what happens to girls who game at school. But she's got a lot of practice hiding her hobby while projecting perfect ladyhood, seeming to belie Aya's assertion that the two are incompatible. For my money, that's the most interesting aspect of this episode, and the one that the girls' ill-advised leap through a (closed) window suggests will form the backbone of the story. And I'm here for more scenes of Aya casually flicking glass shards out of her skull: it's a good distillation of her perceived juxtaposition of ladyhood and gaming.

With fluid animation and an excellent use of color, this appears to be a show to keep an eye on. I'm still a bit leery of the subject matter and how it will be handled, but this episode gives me the confidence to say that I think it's going to be an exception to the rule in the Rock is a Lady's Modesty vein.

The creator of this show seems to really love Street Fighter. Normally, in other shows where they couldn't get the rights to show off real games, the staff will always come up with a parody version to serve the same purpose. But the fact that so much of this episode just blatantly revolves around Street Fighter 6 was funny. This is the type of show that a very specific demographic will appreciate: people who like those aristocratic yuri romantic comedies and people who really like fighting games. I don't know how strong the overlap is between those two markets, but seeing the general reaction to this show could be surprising.

I really like how blatantly Young Ladies doesn't take itself seriously. It almost got me in the first couple of minutes by framing the intro like every other yuri/friendship story, about this mysterious aristocratic girl that all the other girls look up to, only for that to clash with how much of a gremlin she is when she engages in fighting games. However, as the episode progresses, it becomes more unhinged, which only makes it better. When the White Lily called out Aya for her cringeworthy monologue about her backstory with fighting games, I was on the floor laughing because it shows just how little these girls care about their own tropes. At the end of the day, they want to play fighting games with each other, and they're willing to cough up blood to do it.

If the show maintains this level of craziness, I'm sure I'll enjoy it very, very much. It does look like there are seeds for serious plot points, such as gaming being banned on campus so the girls could focus on their studies. Given that this gaming time is under threat by the end of the first episode, I think it will be addressed very early on. However, if Aya and Mio address the situation as they do their friendship, that could still be fun. It's almost like this show is taking the crazy, over-the-top competitive nature of online gamers and applying it to a typical slice of life. I don't think I've seen many shows like this, so I'm very curious to see how strong the comedy is throughout the rest of the show.

When you're playing a fighting game, you need to keep your opponent on their toes. The split second it takes for them to realize what you're doing can mean the difference between total victory and defeat by parry. Making unexpected choices may be a risk, but they can pay off in the end.

Maybe. I think. I'm a lady, so I don't play fighting games.

Anyway, doing something slightly different from what I expect is the special sauce that really made the first episode of Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games stand out. Every time I thought I knew what it would do, it made a slightly different choice. Never anything so out of pocket that I felt like they were trying too hard, just a bit weird and unconventional. Aya made up her mind to be a consummate young lady, and in pursuit of this goal, attends Kuromi Academy, the most Class-S Catholic boarding school you ever did see. She's more or less settled in, if still struggling a bit, and all her classmates are squealing about the newest transfer student, a delicate-looking girl who they've nicknamed Shirayuri: the White Lily.

It takes a bit for the episode to get going, and I was skeptical that it ever would. Class-S yuri does nothing for me. But then Aya and Shirayuri start actually interacting, and I realized: this series is weird. Much like its close sibling Rock is a Lady's Modesty, it's mashing up multiple genres and playing with the conventions while bringing its own flair. While I'm sure much of this comes from the source material, the adaptational writer-director team of Shōta Ihata and Wataru Watari also contribute their voices. Their creative chemistry is well-proven, having worked together on such series as Domestic Girlfriend and Girlish Number. This may explain the episode's utter confidence in pulling off the story's quirky sense of humor, delivering jokes with perfect timing that allows them to land while staying understated.

But… I don't know if I'm going to keep up with it. One of the big things about this adaptation is that, instead of using the in-series fighting game, the production is working with CAPCOM to feature Street Fighter 6. While this has its advantages, including not having to devote resources to creating bespoke fighting game footage, I'm simply not interested in watching other people play games. Hence, I have a hard time following when watching game footage. When Aya and Shirayuri are playing together, I could feel my attention span just shut off. The writing brought me back quickly, but this is shaping up to be an unbelievably crowded season, and I'll probably stick with the ones that hold me all the way through.