By all rights, Trillion Game should be a blast. Creators Riichiro Inagaki and Ryoichi Ikegami have more than a dozen hit series to their names—including Eyeshield 21, Dr. Stone, Sanctuary, and Crying Freeman—and a flair for writing shamelessly entertaining stories that burst at the seams with crazed villains, over-the-top plot twists, and jaw-dropping action scenes. Trillion Game, however, is strenuously bad, saddled with profoundly unlikeable leads and a premise so dumb I’m almost embarrassed to type it: two young men set out to be the first Japanese entrepreneurs to make a trillion dollars. (That’s US dollars, just in case you’re wondering.)

Part of the problem is the lead character: Haru is less a person than a teenage male fantasy, a ruthless entrepreneur who weaponizes his charm and good looks to get what he wants. He lies, bluffs, and cheats, manifesting new talents—say, bantering in Mandarin or scaling skyscrapers—whenever the plot demands, prompting other characters to gush about his charisma and business acumen. His only redeeming quality is his unwavering loyalty to friend and business partner Gaku, a helmet-haired nerd with computer skills. Even that relationship is fraught, however, as Haru repeatedly puts Gaku into situations that test the limits of his abilities.

The other issue plaguing Trillion Game is its sincerity. We’re supposed to admire Haru’s audacious, go-for-broke style, even when his behavior seems more sociopathic than strategic; no matter what he does, Haru always gets the better of his opponents, even when they’re more logical, experienced, or perceptive than he is. That dynamic is most evident in his interactions with Kirika Kokuryū, a.k.a. “Kirihime,” a twenty-six-year-old wunderkind who helps her father run the all-powerful Dragon Bank. Any time she appears to have the upper hand in her dealings with Haru and Gaku, the authors undercut her authority by dreaming up ways to humiliate her while suggesting the she’s deeply aroused by Haru’s scheming.

Art-wise, Trillion Game looks a lot like Ryoichi Ikegami’s early work with Kazou Koike. Ikegami populates the story with attractive leads while rendering the supporting players as caricatures, making it easy to know who we’re supposed to root for. The layouts are dynamic and detailed, capturing the density of Tokyo’s financial district with the same degree of verisimilitude as the spartan office that Haru and Gaku rent. In short, it’s fine.

Would this series have been better if it was a satire, perhaps? That’s hard to say; the authors seem so enamored of their lead that I have hard time imagining they would do anything that intentionally made him look ridiculous or invited us to question his ethics. As a result, the story feels like an unironic artifact of the 1980s, right down to the chapter titles. (The first chapter is called “The Greediest Men in the World.”) Given our current political moment, it’s hard for me to get swept up in Inagaki and Ikegami’s embrace of greed and deceit, especially when the lead characters approvingly cite broligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos as their inspiration. Not recommended.

TRILLION GAME, VOL. 1 • STORY BY RIICHIRO INAGAKI • ART BY RYOICHI IKEGAMI • TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN PAUL • TOUCH-UP & LETTERING BY JOANNA ESTEP • VIZ MEDIA • RATED M FOR MATURE (NUDITY, SEXUAL REFERENCES) • 208 pp.