The year is 2007, and Koharu Hidaka, 28 years young, has just been freshly oriented into her new teaching job at her old high school in Mizunoguchi. Things are not as hopeful as she'd like. For starters, life has seemed to pass her by, and she has remained single and a virgin since the Love Triangle she was embroiled in during her junior and high school years back in the mid 90s. To top things off, she's just been assigned as the homeroom teacher of the rowdiest class in school, and will have to navigate their various issues, and an overbearing school faculty on top of her own dread and personal issues. The most persistent of all being her love of gaming being both a blessing and a curse. Hidaka-sensei, as it turns out finds the most common ground with her students through gaming. However, the culture of gaming, especially the stigma of arcades being a breeding ground for delinquency, clash with her role as their teacher.
Beginning serialization in December 2019, High Score Girl DASH is Rensuke Oshikiri's sequel series to High Score Girl.
This manga provides examples of:
- Badass Biker: Akira makes a cameo appearance in Credit 8, riding a motorcycle on Route 66 in Los Angeles.
- Bouquet Toss: The manga opens with this. Koharu lets it bounce off her head despite Onizuka deliberately aiming for her.
- Bullying a Dragon: Arisu makes the mistake of taunting Hidaka-Sensei during their first meeting in Mizunoguchi arcade, expecting a schoolteacher not to know her way around advanced fighting game setplay like Rikuo's Bubble Jail/ Poison Gas stunlock loop. Arisu's surprise is magnificent.
- Call-Back: In Volume 2 Shinji ends up frustrating Miwa into ragequitting, haymaker to the face and all, mirroring the first chapter of the original Hi Score Girl.
- Combat Pragmatist: The "play-to-win" philosophy gets explored here much like it did in the original Hi Score Girl.
- Arisu tries her hand at putting Hidaka-sensei through one of Rikuo's dreaded stunlock loops in a match of Night Warriors only to find out the hard way that Hidaka, a Night Warriors veteran herself knows her way in and out of onesided setplays, especially while playing as Huitzil. What a coincidence that both of them happen to be friends with Futako Nikotama.
- Shinji and Miwa have a Night Warriors set of ther own, and their match depicts what Arisu's Rikuo stunlock strategy would have looked like. It works so well against Miwa's Pyron that she explodes in a rage quit.
- Darker and Edgier: The darkest the original High Score Girl got with its subject matter involved either Akira trying to navigate through her lack of a choice in her role with the Oono Zaibatsu or Koharu being put through the wringer in her doomed end of the Love Triangle. DASH on the other hand throws midlife crisises, terminal illness, Domestic Abuse, and adolescent violence into the mix.
- Foil: Both Hidaka-sensei and Arisu are worlds apart in terms of social standing, even skill in fighting games. Both of them genuinely love the arcade. Hidaka however had resolved to set it aside for work. Arisu on the other hand, toxic gamer that she is, is struggling to find new blood to play with and keep the scene alive from her end.
- Shinji and Miwa both have some severe anger issues. Miwa has a shorter fuse and will pick a fight at the drop of a hat. Shinji prefers to bottle up his emotions until someone ''really'' pisses him off.
- Hypocritical Humor: Much of the comedy involves Hidaka-sensei being painfully aware that as a teacher, she has to shepherd her students away from a past time she brazenly took pride in during her own formative years.
- Progressively Prettier: A rather literal example while Doi begrudgingly decides to take Numata-sensei's daughter Kumie (who looks like Pai-Chan's character model from Virtua Fighter 1) out for a date. Every time she steals a kiss, she gets a graphical update, and manages to reach her 3rd form before poor Doi is checked out.
- Virgin-Shaming: The manga takes great joy in taking the piss out of various adult characters for still being greatly inexperienced in matters of love and sex.
- Whole Episode Flashback: After Hidaka-sensei's students finish the elimination tourney at Futako's Night Gaming spot, the story goes back to 1998 to explain what made Koharu become a teacher.
