Promise Mascot Agency

Right off the rip of the reveal trailer, I was pretty curious about Promise Mascot Agency. Well, no, that’s putting it too lightly; I was intensely, morbidly fascinated by a game where you play as a shamed yakuza member tasked with running a rundown, forgotten mascot agency. That initial trailer seemed to reveal a mascot management system, as well as card-based battles to help your mascots in tough situations (like getting stuck in doorways or chased by dogs), and even some kind of open-world exploration aspect where you drive around in a truck that can also turn into an airplane and launch a chopped-off pinky mascot like a missile to break walls. How could someone not be curious about a game with that kind of manic energy in the announcement trailer alone? If nothing else, I just wanted to see how all these disparate elements would come together in a finished product. That the game was being made by the same developers as the highly lauded Paradise Killer didn’t hurt to pique my interest, either.

In reality, neither the gameplay nor the story of Promise Mascot Agency is actually as flippant as you might suspect based on the above description. At its most base level, the game is a combination of visual novel, management simulator, and open-world exploration game, all set in a world in which mascots are biological beings rather than humans dressed up in costumes. Largely, you’re travelling around in the open world looking for collectibles or side mission objectives to complete on your way to the next mandatory story point while sending out members of your mascot agency out on jobs and sometimes helping them get through said jobs by playing a simplified card battle minigame. 

What started off as a game I thought would be exuding pure fever dream energy actually ended up being a shockingly down-to-earth one focused around numbers going up and collecting cards and truck upgrades in an open world. This is also all underlined by a story that, despite one of the main characters being the aforementioned chopped-off pinky mascot (named Pinky, of course), is largely a pretty down-to-earth story about redemption, found family, and a group of misfits coming together to enact justice in a cursed Japanese town that hasn’t seen anything remotely resembling the concept in decades. There just also happens to be a bunch of magical mascots running around the world with their own self-worth issues, such as a tofu mascot that can’t stop crying or a half-cat, half-mochi roll that’s tired of the fakeness of city life and tourists.

To be clear, this wasn’t a problem for me, and in fact is actually something I downright loved about Promise Mascot Agency; the mix of the serious crime and political drama with the larger-than-life and (mostly) silly mascot portion of the game is something I actually found benefitted the story the game was trying to tell. But I suspect not everyone will feel that way, and it is something to be cognisant of. When I said this game was partially a visual novel, I really meant it—you’re going to be doing a lot of reading here, more than just about anything else besides potentially driving, depending on how much of a completionist you are. There’s a baseline level of thought and care you’re expected to have for the characters and story presented here, but luckily, the story being told here is of enough quality that it shouldn’t be a problem if you’re open to story-orientated games at all.

Before we move completely off of the story, it’s worth noting that Promise Mascot Agency is not shy about wearing its inspirations on its sleeve. And by that I mean that the main character, Michi, is a legendary member of the yakuza with an unwavering sense of loyalty and is voiced by Takaya Kuroda, the voice actor of Kazuma Kiryu from the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series. I note this not solely because I’m a huge Yakuza mark that felt directly targeted by this particular casting (Kiryu is one of the best video game protagonists of all time, full stop), but also because that should give you a perfect point of reference for the kinds of storytelling and tonal shifts that Promise Mascot Agency is working inside of. It was also just a lot of fun hearing the voice of Kiryu angrily yelling “Pinky!” around 50 times throughout the course of the adventure.

When it comes to the actual gameplay, there isn’t actually that much to go over here. The management aspect, which tasks you with figuring out which jobs to send each of your mascot employees out on based on their stats, as well as levelling up various facilities around town and within your own agency, is probably exactly what you’re expecting, albeit simplified enough that you’ll never be spending too much time spent in unrelenting menus. 

As the game progresses and you unlock more jobs to be able to send your mascots out on, I found the job selection menu gets a tad cumbersome to navigate, even when changing how said jobs were actually sorted. I suspect the game feels the same way, as in my over 20 hours of play on the Nintendo Switch version, I had exactly two hard crashes to the home menu, and both of them were when trying to navigate my list of jobs in the game where I had over 80 available to me. In all other aspects, I was pretty pleased with the performance on Switch; you’ll still get stutters and some framerate chugs out in the open world section of the game, but nothing egregious, especially for a game of this scale and budget running off of the Unreal Engine on a handheld sporting a chipset over a decade old.

The open-world component of the game actually surprised me in how much I enjoyed it. There’s a ton of little trinkets and doodads to discover in this portion of the game, and more and more (and more and more!) steadily become available as you progress the game further, and I shockingly found myself downright addicted to collecting everything I could, to the point where I’ve done absolutely everything in the game I can besides driving over all of the trash and a specific sidequest to find all of an idol group’s merchandise in vending machines scattered across the world. And I’m not even someone that generally likes open-world collectathon checklists! In the case of Promise Mascot Agency, I think it was a combination of how much I enjoyed spending time in its world, coupled with how much fun it is to actually drive around here; despite having access to the game’s (optional and pretty well tucked away) fast travel system, once I unlocked the glider wing upgrade for my truck, I never once even considered fast travelling again. Why would I want to when I could instead launch myself into the sky and shoot down mayoral election posters from on high en route to my next story destination?

If I have any complaints, it would be that the management aspect of the game feels maybe a bit undercooked, especially when it comes to helping your mascots through their jobs with the card system. On paper it’s a very fun idea, especially since finding new cards and upgrading old ones is one of the main things you can collect in the open world, which creates a nice feedback loop between the two portions of the game. In reality though, the card system just felt far too simple and unsatisfying to me, to the point that I was glad to largely not have to deal with them at all once my mascots were levelled up enough. These card battle events are always entirely optional, but failing or ignoring them lowers the amount of money you receive upon the completion of a gig, so in the early game it behoves you to participate in any and all that pop up. I would have also liked even more stuff to do in the open world, particularly some form of racing I think would’ve really cranked my gears, but that’s probably just me being greedy.

Lastly, I always feel obligated to mention when a game’s soundtrack is good, and Promise Mascot Agency’s is really good. It doesn’t miss a beat when it comes to being just as varied and malleable as the game’s story, and I swear to God that I’ll never be able to get the mascot job incident music out of my head.