If you’re anything like me, you scroll to the bottom of a review to see the score before coming back to the top and reading through all the juicy details. I’ll wait here while you do that now. I understand that giving a game a perfect score comes with a lot of weight, and I’ll admit, before I sat down to write this review, I intensely deliberated giving Promise Mascot Agency a full 10 on our scale.
We’ll come to why further down, but it’s a testament to how much I love this game that during my time with it, I completed every single task, hunted down every item, saw everything there was to see, and reached 100% completion. Every hour was an absolute joy.
Kaizen Game Works, before Promise Mascot Agency, created one of my favourite games, Paradise Killer. In that game, you played as Lady Love Dies, a detective solving a multiple homicide. The game shone for being quirky, surreal, and driven by humour. Those same qualities have been shifted over to Promise Mascot Agency, a game that rarely takes itself seriously, despite having a wonderful message at its heart.
So, what is Promise Mascot Agency? At its core, it’s a management sim, but it also features open-world exploration and plenty of visual novel cues that deliver brilliant exposition and snappy dialogue. We play as Michi, a Yakuza lieutenant who finds himself putting his found family in danger through a bungled hand-off of billions of Yen, which was supposed to unite several Yakuza families. Due to this, he’s shipped off to Kaso-Machi, a run-down town with a curse that kills Yakuza men who live there. Oh, and he has to raise the money he lost by running a mascot agency.
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Upon arriving, Michi meets Pinky, probably the game’s best character, who is a severed pinky finger personified into a living mascot. You see, mascots in this world are actual living creatures, rather than humans inside a costume. Pinky is a foul-mouthed, wise-cracking, violence-obsessed young woman who idolises Yakuza culture, and whose dream it is to murder someone and bury the body in the woods.
She is just the tip of a bonkers iceberg that is nutty mascot characters all the way down. You’ll be hiring them all, and sending them on jobs to earn money which will then be shipped back to the matriarch of your Yakuza family in order to save her life.
Among the mascots, there’s Tanukin (a Tanuki who is obsessed with becoming a warlord and owning his own castle), To-Fu (a block of tofu who can’t stop crying), Trororo (a large pink cat obsessed with adult video and safer sex work), Salary Nyan (a cat dressed up as a Japanese salary man, depressed with his life), and many, many more.
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It’s the mascots, obviously, that make this game as brilliant as it is. Each is a fully realised, bonkers creation, with wonderful personalities shifting from the adorably cute to the weird and surreal. Through the Promise Mascot Agency, Michi and Pinky start recruiting mascots and befriending the town’s residents. Lots of them will offer up jobs in need of a mascot to promote their product or business, and you’ll have to choose who to send and when.
It’s all pretty simple; you choose a job, assign a mascot, then send them along with an item to help them. Because mascots are very slapstick and clumsy, while they’re out on jobs, they can run into trouble and these items can help them get out of problematic situations or replenish their stamina, allowing them to fulfil more jobs.
If they do run into an issue and the item doesn’t help, you’ll be whisked away from your current task to play a combat mini-game. In this, players utilise Hero cards that will do damage to the item, scenario, or environment causing issues. These might be a doorway that’s too small, a vending machine gone haywire, perverted stalking fans, rickety stages, or even malevolent spirits. They each have a health pool, and your cards will be dealt at random, then selected by you, to reduce that pool. If successful, the mascot overcomes the issue and earns a monetary bonus for the agency.
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This all takes place on a livestream, where your agency earns fans, raising the status of the business, opening up more options, upgrades, and mascots. It’s a lovely gameplay loop that puts emphasis on helping everyone, discovering hidden items, and sending the right mascots for the job, as the more you achieve, the more fans you gain.
The management side of the game is surprisingly deep, and it would make for a very long review if I were to wade through everything available to you. Suffice to say, there are intricate mechanics like haggling contracts with mascots and conducting employment reviews to gauge each mascot’s happiness which provides buffs on jobs; there are residents to meet who become Hero cards, you’ll end up selling merchandise, and even upgrade the agency itself to provide further buffs to contracts.
All of this takes place in a contained town, fully explorable in your trusty van, with Pinky sat in the back. There’s no on-foot traversal - though there is a fast-travel system - which brings up the only issue I had with the game. Because you’re driving everywhere, even though the van can be upgraded to become aquatic or even glide through the air, traversal can sometimes become finicky and frustrating. It’s rare, but it’s there, and I’ll freely admit this was my only stumbling block on whether the game should get a perfect score.
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Away from that issue, there’s really nothing, in my mind, holding it back from being a practically perfect game. The story of Yakuza betrayal and drama is engaging, and fans of the Yakuza franchise will love this: Michi is even voiced by Takaya Kuroda, the lead actor of Kazuma Kiryu from the Yakuza series.
The town of Kaso-Machi is a wonderful place to explore, and its residents are all brilliantly realised and voiced by a stellar Japanese cast, offering all kinds of characters from the larger than life bored housewife who wants to drag Michi to bed, to the corrupt mayor who plays a wondrous villainous role.
Fans of collectibles will have their hands full, as there are hundreds of items to find and deliver to residents in order to improve the town, or break and receive some kind of benefit for the agency. Nothing is placed in Kaso-Machi for idle busy work; it all has a purpose, even if that’s simply upgrading a Hero card.
I realise that I’ve waffled and dropped a boatload of information on you, and that’s because this is a pretty dense game beneath its delightful visuals. There’s so much to do and see, and none of it feels like a waste of time. Every action, from running the agency, to solving mysteries, is a piece of an intricate puzzle that builds out to construct a genuinely brilliant and wacky world.
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Perhaps my favourite part of Promise Mascot Agency, aside from the sheer number of times I laughed out loud at the constantly funny one-liners or remarks, is the message at the centre of this adventure.
As the game goes on, you get to know each mascot, their passions, and what makes them tick, through one-on-one interactions that visualise chasing their unique dreams. Michi, throughout the story, is a constantly optimistic guy who respects others having dreams, no matter how wild they are. He’s an incredibly supportive person, and his infectious attitude is always pleasing, even if it sometimes veers to being saccharine.
Michi found himself in a Yakuza family when his real family abandoned him for being a ‘bad kid’ and in finding this new family, though somewhat dysfunctional, he has happiness and love. He brings this to Kaso-Machi and pursues backing the underdogs of society, bringing them together as another found family, who learn to love one another through his actions, and dedication to rebuilding the town and its residents.
The overall tone, while also being funny and dramatic, is just lovely. I came away from Promise Mascot Agency feeling overwhelmingly cheery and inspired, and, above all, entertained. Every mascot is brilliantly designed both visually and in terms of their characteristics. Michi is an adorable and gruff protagonist who I’m going to miss now I’ve finished the game, and the mechanics of the agency are smart and engaging.
This is a story of love, learning to love yourself, and owning your identity. It's a welcome message in a world that so often feels filled with hate and obstructions to people who just want to be themselves. It’s not an overly pushed political or social point, but you can’t help but smile as you see underdogs get their chance to overcome and thrive. Weirdos make the best people, after all.
Pros: Genuinely hilarious, filled with charm, engaging management mechanics, delightfully bonkers, hard to put down
Cons: Slightly frustrating traversal
For fans of: Paradise Killer, Yakuza
10/10: Perfect
Promise Mascot Agency is available 10 April on PC (tested on Steam Deck), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.
Topics: Indie Games, Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Reviews