{Note: I'm a dumbass and thought I'd posted this yesterday. I hadn't. Enjoy another double feature today.}


Carefree Haru and 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's double-length premiere is competently animated, and the Madhouse team has done their work to translate legendary artist Ryoichiro 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 actual manga panels in the ending sequence is a fun choice.

Unfortunately, I bounced off of every other aspect of the production.

Trillion Game is the kind of anime that 95% of anime fans will dismiss out of hand for its unconventional artstyle, or for the story, which exclusively stars adults and has no speculative or fantastical elements. Of the remaining percentage, an undetermined number will become devotees of it, swearing up and down that it's the year's best underdog anime no one's 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 shot but just did not like what they saw.

The one biggest and most glaring hurdle is that Trillion Game stars one of the most unlikeable leads I've encountered in a hot minute. The short version is Haru is full of shit. That's his entire gimmick. He mostly knows he's full of shit, he entirely knows he has no real ideas to work with or practical skills of his own to speak of, but he has the unearned confidence to sell a facade of brilliance to people in the hopes that they'll part with some of their money so he can become absurdly wealthy and achieve his goals. So basically he's a Japanese Elon Musk. He's joined by Gaku, a slightly more tolerable guy whose only real skill is being a self-taught hacker. On obsolete equipment.

I can't tell if Trillion Game's central concept is the point or if it shows an overall weakness in the source story. It seems like Ikegami just 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. That's a decent premise on its own, but you need characters smart enough to conceive of the tech involved and able to realize the dream. As it stands now, neither character really fits the bill, but that won't stop Haru from asking for tens of millions of yen in investments and trying to get conglomerate heiresses to sleep with him anyway. And frankly, I'm simply not going to enjoy a story celebrating these guys' quest to become the most obscenely wealthy douchebags in the world.

I just can't express enough how much I detest Haru. Unlike Kirika, the one major female character, I was not charmed by his cockiness or skill at bluffing. Although exaggerated, his audacity draws too much from an economic truth: If you swagger enough, you don't need a business idea or a product to sell in order to become inexplicably successful. It remains to be seen if the story will actually become critical of Haru's actions or if it fully intends to try and make his unethical practices look appealing and romanticize them, but I don't really want to spend any more time looking at that smug grin full of those individually drawn horse teeth than I've already had to.

Maybe this is some kind of commentary on the tech bros and start-up culture of Silicon Valley, but I wouldn't get my hopes up, nor would I like to see Haru attempt to seduce Kirika with that smarmy-ass face of his again.