She Beat Me at Street Fighter and I Never Recovered

In the early nineties my life was organized around a few fixed points: the public pool, Power Rangers, and the Super Nintendo. Specifically the Super Nintendo in multiplayer, because solo play was fine but nothing compared to the specific pleasure of sitting next to someone and destroying them at Street Fighter II. The games I sank the most total hours into were the lonely RPGs, the ones that ate entire weekends. But the ones that mattered, the ones with actual stakes, were always two-player and always competitive.

Hi Score Girl, the manga by Rensuke Oshikiri, understands this precisely. The story follows Haruo, a kid who lives in the arcade and leads the high score boards under the alias "Beastly Fingers Haruo"—until he meets Akira, wealthy and seemingly mute and completely expressionless, who walks up to a Street Fighter II cabinet and dismantles him without visible effort. This is not a minor setback for Haruo. This is a cosmological event.

The manga became an anime series, airing in Japan and eventually landing on streaming platforms. If you grew up in that era—the arcades, the import cartridges, the Neo Geo MVS machines that cost as much as a used car—it hits with a very specific kind of recognition. A shy girl named Koharu adds the romantic tension the premise requires, but the show is really about the arcade as sacred space and what it means to meet someone who beats you at the thing you were certain you were best at.

I know that feeling. It changes you.