The spring anime season is packed full of exciting shows, but Toei Animation's Run For Money: The Great Mission has gotten lost in the shuffle. Few Western anime fans have talked about the show or even know of its existence, and the few who have watched it have taken to social media to complain about the series. However, is it as bad as they say, or has the show mostly suffered from a lack of marketing?
Run For Money: The Great Mission is based on a real-world game show that has been running on Fuji TV since 2004. The game is simple -- players have to run around the streets of Japan completing missions while avoiding a team of hunters, with the players winning a cash prize if they manage to survive until the end.
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What Is Run For Money: The Great Mission?
This anime version puts a sci-fi twist on the Japanese game show's format, as it's set in a future where humanity has gone to live on the moon. Society is vastly unequal, with the rich living in the white area and the poor living in the slum-like gray area. It follows Sawyer Tomura, a poor delivery boy who works in the gray area. Sawyer's little brother Haru is gravely ill, and Sawyer needs to raise funds to get him the treatment he needs. To do this, Sawyer forces his way onto the Run For Money show. However, this version of the game show is slightly different, taking place in a virtual recreation of 2023 Shibuya. The hunters in this version are high-powered androids -- and if that isn't enough, this virtual world is packed with dangerous monsters who want to destroy the city and anyone who gets in their way.
Is the Run For Money Anime Actually Bad?
Run For Money has a lot of good things going for it. The animation is good, especially during the chase sequences, as they are loaded with interesting Parkour-like choreography, with the characters using every bit of the environment to their advantage. This leads to many memorable, high-tension moments as the characters pull off ludicrous stunts.
Sawyer is an interesting lead character. While his underdog status is a little generic and the first episode pushes it too hard, once he's in the game, he's got plenty of charisma and feels genuine enough that viewers can't help but root for him. The other characters are, unfortunately, a mixed bag. While some, like Luna and Maurice, are interesting and have good development over the first seven episodes, others are paper-thin and don't get enough screen time to make an impact or feel like fully-rounded characters. Their over-designed costumes also make them very hard to take seriously.
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However, the anime's main issue is that it doesn't capture what makes the original game show so much fun. Because that show isn't scripted, much of the enjoyment comes from picking a contestant to support and shouting at the screen when they do something silly, while also debating with friends about how one would have finished a mission or avoided capture themselves. While the chases are of course less athletic, given that the contestants are regular people, they have a fun "anything can happen" scrappiness that the anime's over-the-top, over-choreographed action scenes simply can't capture.
While Run For Money is technically sound, it often comes across as trying to do too much at once, being both an adaption of the game show and a shonen action series. It frequently feels like the show is working against itself, leading to a messy, fragmented experience, as the two sides of the plot don't mesh well and frequently undermine the other's impact.
Sadly, Run For Money is as disappointing as reviewers have made it out to be. While it's not offensively bad, the show clearly doesn't know what it wants to be. The lack of advertising certainly hasn't helped, as there are almost certainly some anime fans who would enjoy this show despite its flaws but would struggle to find it since it received so little promotion prior to its release. However, even with the best advertising in the world, the series would likely have never gotten above middling reviews.
