I had three sleeper picks this season, and they all premiered on the same day. I’m certain that’s never happened before. Six of my my preview series debuted yesterday in fact, which is just insane. I pushed Trillion Game (third of those sleepers) back a day and in truth should have kicked at least one more too. I wouldn’t say this show was less of a sleeper than the others, so the choice was more or less random. But it having a two-episode premiere did make the decision easier.
The pedigree here is an interesting one. A Madhouse series with the arch-typical Madhouse ugly-pretty look to it. A manga that’s won the Shogakukan Award and been nominated for others, and an old-school hand in director Satou Yuuzou. The theme in anime this season is unquestionably to me “adults” – especially working adults. That’s both positive and refreshing, but of course each individual show still has to actually be good. The topic here is entrepreneurism – in the tech world, specifically.
I lived in the SF Bay Area during the height of the tech boom years, and even if you weren’t directly involved you couldn’t help but be aware of what was happening. I have a few friends who were trying to ride that wave – in biotech rather than IT, but the basic principle is the same. You’ve got to get a VC (venture capitalist) interested enough to seed you. A lot of startups were school buddies who started out in a garage or apartment (Apple’s two Steves – before my time – most famously). Typically, the formula for success was one guy (sorry, but it was mostly guys in those days) who was great at selling and managing people, and one who was great at doing the actual tech (be it software engineering, genetics, or whatever).
That’s the same formula Trillion Game is leaning on. Programming ace Manabu Gaku, terrible at selling himself and general people skills. Tennouji Haru, a world-class bullshitter with absolutely no sense of fear. Casual classmates at middle school their partnership is born when Haru saves Gaku from having his newly-bought laptop stolen by a bunch of thugs. In return, Gaku hacks the parking lot security cameras and deletes the video of Haru beating the toughs up so he won’t get expelled. As Rick Blaine said to Louis. this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
The basic template for Trillion Game is grounded in realism, then. From there it goes very fanciful indeed, but that’s to be expected – this is entertainment, after all. All that stuff with the messages on the windows and the fake weights is out there, but it works narratively. I like the Haru-Gaku contrasting partnership, and ojou-sama Kirika – daughter of the president of the company that hired Haru and rejected Gaku, Dragon Bank – makes a nice third point of the triangle. My favorite part of the two-part premiere was the boys going around trying to score some funding, culminating in the hilariously silly scene where Kirika and her trainer meet with them in her office gym.
Haru is smart about some things and dumb about others, and Gaku pretty much his inverse in that respect. They do make a good pair and not a few successful startups became huge running off that basic dynamic. We already know these two hit it big, so suspense is not the selling point here – it’s how they got there. I see some potential for Trillion Game to be pretty fun in that sense, a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy about a superficially mundane arena. It’s too soon to say how much lasting appeal this pairing and their story will have, and becoming the richest men in the world is hardly the noblest of goals. But that might be what makes it interesting enough to succeed.
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