The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Trillion Game

Carefree Haru and the serious Gaku are two men who plot to earn a trillion dollars in order to afford anything they might ever want in the world. Haru is an eloquent, persuasive, and confident speaker, which allows him to be in anyone's good graces. Gaku is an awkward but highly skilled programmer. The two were schoolmates in middle school and reunited when Gaku's application to a bank company was rejected.

Trillion Game is based on the manga series by Riichirō Inagaki and Ryōichi Ikegami. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Trillion Game's first two episodes are competently animated, and the Madhouse team has done their work to translate Crying Freeman manga creator Ryōichi Ikegami's art to the screen. Its distinctive look immediately sets it apart from the other premieres. The opening and closing themes are infectious, and the use of manga art in the ending sequence is attractive. Unfortunately, I bounced off every other aspect of the production.

Trillion Game stars one of the most unlikable leads I've encountered in a hot minute, and I found his face enticingly punchable. The short version is Haru is full of shit. That's his entire gimmick. He mostly knows he's full of shit, but he has the unearned confidence to sell it to people with more money with the hopes that they'll part with some of it so he can become absurdly wealthy and achieve his noble goals, like sleeping with TV news anchors and conglomerate heiresses. He's flanked by "Gaku," a guy whose only skill is being a self-taught hacker on obsolete equipment.

I can't tell if Trillion Game's central conceit is the point or if it shows an overall weakness in the source story. It seems like Dr. Stone creator Riichirō Inagaki wanted to write a story about two guys building a tech empire from scratch, not unlike Bill Gates and Paul Allen or Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The only problem with that premise is you need characters smart enough to conceive of this sort of tech and, by association, a storyteller to imagine it. As of episode two, neither character has anything resembling that sort of idea, but that won't stop Haru from asking for tens of millions of yen investments anyway.

Maybe this is some kind of commentary on the tech bros and start-up culture of Silicon Valley, but I wouldn't hold my breath. If I have to see Haru attempt to seduce Kirika with his smarmy-ass face again, it'll be too soon.

Trillion Game is the kind of anime that 95% of anime fans will dismiss out of hand for its unconventional art style that hews closely to the art style of the manga, drawn by legendary gekiga artist Ryoichiro Ikegami; or for the story, which exclusively stars adults and has no speculative elements. Of the remaining percentage, an undetermined number will become devotees of it, swearing up and down that it's the best anime you're not watching, and everyone else is missing out on Haru's ridiculously over-the-top capitalist antics. The remainder will be people like me, who did their best to give it a fair shake but did not like what they saw.

This is the part where I declare with my full chest that my politics heavily informed how I reacted to Trillion Game because, guess what, all art is political. I can tell you the precise intersection of the Amazon spheres shown in the opening monologue, nicknamed “Bezos' balls” by locals. I can also tell you that the area surrounding them is littered with victims of Amazon's rape of the local economy, robbed of their homes by the skyrocketing cost of housing and the shocking wealth inequality that marks the city that both I and some of the wealthiest men in the world call home. Greed is not good, and I'm simply not going to enjoy a story celebrating two men's quest to become the wealthiest people in the world. There's no such thing as an ethical billionaire, let alone a trillionaire, no matter how good buddies they are with their business partners.

Capiche?

But I swear my dislike isn't entirely ideological! I also detest Haru and would like to knock out each and every single one of his individually-drawn horse teeth. Unlike Kirika, the girlbossing sole major female character, I was not charmed by his smarmy cockiness or skill at bluffing. His audacity was interesting at times, sure, but I've encountered far too many finance bros in the world to find him compelling. Although exaggerated, it draws too much from an economic truth: if you swagger enough, you don't need a business idea or a product to sell. It remains to be seen if the story will actually lionize him – and that's forever the debate, if stories like Wall Street and Glengarry Glen Ross are critical of their characters' actions or if they make unethical finance business look appealing and romanticize them to the audience – but I don't really want to spend any more time looking at those chompers than I've already had to.

I'm on the verge of turning this into a rant about how finance guys have destroyed creative industries and “disruptions” like rideshares and online food delivery invariably have a negative effect, so I'll stop here.