When writing a lot of my reviews, I end up talking about how unique a game is. This is generally because game developers are a creative bunch, and most games have at least a few interesting ideas that set them apart from their peers. It’s this uniqueness that makes our beloved medium great, and ensures I want to spend every hour of my free time trying out new and exciting video games. When it comes to uniqueness though there are very few games that can compare to Promise Mascot Agency, which I now have to try and describe to you. Wish me luck.
Our hero in Promise Mascot Agency is Michi, a notorious Yakuza hitman (voice by the Japanese actor who plays Kiryu in Yakuza/Like a Dragon, no less) who after a botched job is exiled from his crime family. The rest of the clan expect Michi will have to die for failing to do his duty as a Yakuza cleaner, and because of this the mob boss comes up with the clever plan of faking his death and sending him to make money in Kaso-Machi. This run down town is being drained of funds and happiness by a corrupt mayor, and as an honourable Yakuza soldier Michi decides to help overthrow him all while gathering a big ole pile of cash.
The one business that your family still has its fingers in over in Kaso-Machi is a mascot agency, which you’ll be in charge of managing and expanding with the help of Pinky. Pinky is a mascot who looks like a dismembered finger, and in this game mascots aren’t wearing costumes they just look incredibly different to humans. With a fierce temper, a heart of gold and some truly amusing expressions, it won’t take you long to become a fan of your new partner. Together it’ll be up to you to gather new mascots and send them on jobs to earn that precious yen, all from the back of an old truck.
Despite being at its core a management game (which I promise we’ll get into soon) you’ll spend most of your time in Promise Mascot Agency driving around the Japanese town you find yourself in. There’s a ridiculous amount to do as you boost your truck around the island locale, like smashing the mayor’s signs and collecting the train station worker’s missing cats. A lot of these tasks will grant you useful items or fans for the agency (which essentially function as experience) but there are also more essential tasks you can do. Story missions will send you to meet important characters and find out more about the impoverished locals, and you’ll even find new mascots to hire.
There are so many wacky recruitable characters you’ll meet on your adventure, from a giant crying block of tofu to a Tetris block with sexy legs. You’ll get to know all of their weird backstories too, with lots of opportunities for in-depth conversations about the life of these down on their luck weirdos. Each one of these future employees also has the potential to make you a big chunk of cash once hired, but you’ll have to offer them a tempting contract first. Mascots will be happier with a bigger share of the profits from their promotional jobs or with regular vacation days, but you’ll need to balance this with what works best for your bottom line.
Once you’ve successfully hired a new mascot it’s time to get them off to a job, like helping advertise a new restaurant or adult book store. As you level up you’ll unlock more and more of these opportunities, all of which have specific mascot preferences and chances to fail. If you’re lucky a mascot will simply succeed at a job and bring you back a lovely wad of cash, but often there will be an incident. These are always particularly silly (like getting stuck in a doorway or chased by bees) and will always require your assistance to deal with.
Once you decide to help one of your mascots you’ll be transported to a live stream of the event they’re working, complete with Twitch style comments and an over-the-top presenter. To help save your mascots in peril you’ll need to use the Mascot Support Heroes you’ve gathered to give them a morale boost. These are basically townsfolk who want to help you out, ranging from businessmen to wannabe superheroes wearing road signs. They come in the form of cards, which have specific power levels you can use to attack the incident and lower its health bar. It’s much much simpler than it sounds though, and as long as you keep helping people in town you’ll get stronger and stronger cards to use in this bizarre form of combat to ensure you still earn that cheddar.
Jobs aren’t the only way to earn cash though, there are also loads of extra ways to get some lovely passive income. Certain upgrades you can purchase for the home base will grant you money each night, and you can also find and hire subcontractors to earn money for you outside of town. It’s important to set this all up as soon as possible because without regular donations the matriarch of your family will be overthrown, and the game will end. Fortunately it’s incredibly satisfying to maximise profits in this bizarre blend of idle game and open world driving, and this never feels like a chore.
As if there’s not enough to this weird and wonderful video game mashup, Promise Mascot Agency also features all sorts of interesting side activities. You can sell mascot merchandise that you win by playing a crane game, or maybe you’d prefer to unwind with a bit of fishing. There are even debates you can have with the mayor in which you’ll argue about council policy, which is much funnier than it sounds thanks to Pinky’s antics. There’s just a wonderful variety of engaging activities just waiting to steal away your free time, and they’ll all help you reach that end goal of earning enough money for the clan one way or another.
For me, though, more than anything else, I just enjoyed driving around the island and gathering everything I possibly could that was scattered around the settlements, rice fields, and lakes. Promise Mascot Agency is sort of like if Burnout Paradise featured more conversations about the merit of adult cinema, and apparently that’s exactly what I needed from a game.
As enjoyable as it is to drive around Kaso-Machi and smash shit up, it’s also the driving itself that’s the most underwhelming part of the game. Your truck is hardly the most exciting vehicle in the world to drive, and even with the additional upgrades you can find like speed boosts and a cannon you can use to collect items from afar it’s still a bit of a drag. The card combat is a bit long-winded for how simple it is too, and by the latter half of the game I was often hoping to avoid mascot incidents as much as possible so I could skip it.
Promise Mascot Agency is a game I was so happy to exist in, and struggled to put down. The constant hook of earning more money and spending it to build even more future profits is almost dangerous, and combined with the completely different but equally gripping hook of smashing road signs it’s a recipe for success. The outlandish characters and story never disappoint, either, and the overall wackiness is absolutely infectious. It’s hard to know what sort of lovely sickos will fall in love with this particularly odd video game, but the ones that do will fall hard.
