Life in Japan can truly feel like an anime sometimes. Case in point: during this past weekend’s EVO Japan, a junior high school girl showed up and absolutely destroyed her opponents.
The Master of Money Idol Exchanger
Also known as the Japanese Evolution Championship Series, EVO Japan is the Japanese offshoot of America’s EVO, an esports competition that focuses exclusively on fighting games. The lineup of games included the usual suspects — Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 — plus more niche fighting titles, such as Under Night In-Berth II [Sys:Celes] and Guilty Gear -Strive-. However, the schoolgirl in question was playing a different game, a 1997 competitive puzzle title called Money Idol Exchanger.
While no actual footage seems to have been captured, a Japanese X (formerly Twitter) user shared a post stating that the biggest surprise at this year’s EVO Japan was the aforementioned schoolgirl arriving with her parents and quickly winning the championship using her superb level control skills. In the game, players are faced with a screen of falling Japanese coins. They must combine these coins to form coins of higher value until two ¥500 coins combine and disappear. The post included video game footage of one of her matches where she had almost double the points of her opponent.
Support From the Online Community
The irony that the girl was most likely not even born at the time the game was released was not lost on the internet community. Since Money Idol Exchanger is a non-fighting game, it technically isn’t a part of the official EVO roster of games, but that didn’t stop the post on X from going viral. At the time of writing, it has garnered more than 1.6 million views.
Many of the post replies express awe for her skills, with one user saying, “She must be good at shogi or go,” two traditional Japanese board games. Another user joked that the game wasn’t popular overseas because only people from Japan and India can do carryover calculations in their heads.
