Quick Answer
Yes, if you want fighting manga with a practical, multi-angle setup and real narrative escalation. It starts scrappy and small before growing into something with genuine stakes.
Quick Verdict
“Three women with three very different skill sets turn a scrappy money-making scheme into the center of a much bigger conspiracy.”
Best for: Readers who want fighting manga built around a practical, multi-character scheme rather than a single tournament gimmick.
Not for: Readers who want a tightly focused single plot thread rather than business, crime, and conspiracy elements running in parallel.
| Quick facts | |
|---|---|
| Format | Manga (seinen), 3 volumes |
| Run | 2023–present · ongoing |
| Community score | AniList 7.7 |
| Where to read | Comikey — official |
ST✰R: Strike it Rich is a manga by Yabako Sandrovich (story) and MAAM (art), serializing on Shogakukan's Ura Sunday and MangaONE platforms since May 2023. Tenma Nozomi, a washed-up fighter who can't get into legitimate MMA or established underground circuits, starts her own all-female underground fighting organization with her friends Iori Ichika, a corrupt cop demoted to the juvenile division, and Mitani Hana, the struggling head of a shrinking yakuza family. What starts as a scrappy way to make money and keep delinquents off the streets quickly pulls them into the orbit of a cult that's trained nine women to fight for the right to usher in a new world order.
The three-woman founding team gives the premise a structural advantage a lot of fighting manga skip past: Nozomi brings the actual fighting knowledge, Ichika brings police connections and the ability to bend the law, and Hana brings organized-crime infrastructure and money. Instead of one character improbably managing every angle of an underground operation, the manga distributes that logistical weight across three specific skill sets, which makes the whole enterprise feel more plausible than the genre usually bothers to.
The escalation from small-stakes fights to a full cult conspiracy also keeps the story from settling into a repetitive tournament loop. Once the nine cult-trained fighters and the larger "new world order" plot enter the picture, the stakes stop being purely financial and start being genuinely dangerous, which gives the later chapters more to chew on than the opening hustle alone would sustain.
And because the fighting is centered entirely on women, the manga builds out a cast and set of rivalries the genre rarely gets around to developing -- it's not just a novelty, it shapes who ends up in the ring and why.
Juggling underground business logistics, police corruption, yakuza politics, and a cult conspiracy all at once is ambitious, and it shows -- keeping every thread clear and properly weighted as the story expands is a real structural challenge, and not every subplot gets equal attention.
Because it's a digital-first, biweekly series rather than a weekly flagship title, some plot developments arrive in smaller increments, which can make momentum feel slower in places than a series built around a faster release schedule.
ST✰R: Strike it Rich takes a fighting-manga premise and grounds it in a genuinely practical setup before letting it grow into something with real conspiracy-thriller stakes. It's juggling a lot, and not every thread lands with equal weight, but the core trio and the escalating scope make it worth following.
Strengths
Weaknesses
shares an interest in escalating underground fighting stakes and larger-than-life opponents
Kengan Ashura
similar underground-fighting-business structure with an ensemble of backers and fighters
Akame ga Kill!
shares the mix of action and a larger conspiracy plot underneath the fighting
| Platform | Format | Pricing | Region notes | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Comikey | Digital chapters | Free + Paid | Region availability varies | Open |
No, it's ongoing, serializing biweekly on Shogakukan's Ura Sunday and MangaONE platforms.
Comikey has the official English release.
It starts that way, but it escalates into a larger conspiracy involving a cult, so expect more thriller elements than a typical tournament-fighting story.