Television Drama adaptation by Madhouse
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

Haru and Gaku are two school friends who start a business, with the goal of making a trillion dollars. What their business does is not important: making money is easy when you have Haru’s charm and Gaku’s brain.

Jel’s verdict: There’s No Such Thing as a Good Billionaire

I seem to be running into a lot of protagonists I don’t like this season, with Trillion Game delivering a two-for-one deal on character types I hate. Haru is supposed to be cool and charismatic but in reality he’s reckless, talentless, and entirely dependent on others. I guess it makes sense he would become a billionaire, but damn do I hate this guy and that’s not how you’re supposed to feel about him. On the other hand Gaku takes the lame, spineless nerd stereotype to new levels. At one point he goes into a job interview and he’s so nervous that he manages to fall out of his chair multiple times, making me realize I hate this guy too. The show is very dependent on buying into these characters and their friendship, so needless to say I was not enjoying it.

Everything I’ve seen of Trillion Game prior to this made me think they would be getting into some fun, wacky business schemes and we didn’t get any of that either, at least not in the first two episodes. Haru just steam rolls his way through his attempts to get money, asking for cash simply because he is asking for it. This leads to their meeting with the one important female character, Kirika, who just gives Haru 100 million yen because it’s fun. Kirika herself is also a terrible character, who feels like the type of smart, sexy boss lady you’d get in an 80s movie or something. Sure, she’s smart enough to catch Haru’s tricks, but more importantly she is HOT – check out this shower scene! And she’s so confident, she makes the boys come in to her dressing room when she’s ONLY wearing a TOWEL! Isn’t that SEXY???

Honestly, if this was set in the 80s and they leaned into that style of camp, I probably would have liked Trillion Game a lot more. Instead we got an annoying, poorly written waste of nearly an hour of my life. Maybe it gets more fun now the premise has been established and we can get into more specific business hijinks, but I didn’t see anything in these two episodes to indicate the writing has the chops to handle that. I hear the original live action Netflix version was pretty popular, maybe this translated better there, I don’t know. All I do know is that I didn’t like this anime and I don’t recommend it.