From Kaizen Game Works, the talented team that brought you the wacky, wild, and wickedly stylish murder mystery adventure game Paradise Killer comes Promise Mascot Agency, a game that defines itself as an “open-world management sim crime drama.” Don’t be intimidated if the words ‘management’ and ‘sim’ set off alarm bells because Promise Mascot Agency promises approachability in its gameplay about as much as it promises zany, offbeat antics in its world and story. And oh, how it delivers on both those fronts and then some.
Clearly inspired by the works of Suda51 and Swery65 (who even makes a cameo as one of your agency’s clients in the game), Promise Mascot Agency puts you in the shoes of Michizane “Michi” Sugawara (aka “The Janitor”), a disgraced Yakuza lieutenant who is exiled to the cursed town of Kaso-Machi after a deal gone wrong and forced to run his family’s failed mascot business and build it back up from the ashes to become a money-making enterprise.
There, you meet Pinky☆, a giant sentient sassy pinky finger and sole remaining employee of the business. Together, you must take to the streets and country roads of Kaso-Machi and make Promise Mascot Agency a household name once again.
So, what does it take to run Promise Mascot Agency? Why, mascots, of course! In this world, mascots aren’t merely people in costumes but indeed characters with sentience, goals, and ambitions all their own, and throughout the game, you’ll help them on their quest to self-fulfillment and to build their confidence up. As you scour the open world and invest money in the agency, more and more local mascots join you, until you have a full roster of over two dozen by the end.
The day-to-day operations of Promise Mascot Agency generally involve driving around, helping the town’s residents with their problems, and sending your mascots out on jobs to promote local businesses or to make media appearances. This is, of course, where the ‘management sim’ of it all comes into play. When you send mascots on jobs, you generally have to send a mascot help item with them for good luck. These ensure that they have a high enough chance of completing the job without errors and make sure they have enough stamina to go on more jobs afterward.
However, these things don’t always go smoothly, and why they don’t, you view their current predicament as a livestream in the form of a goofy game show that monitors mascot antics. These predicaments can range from creepy stalkers and online bullies to a malfunctioning cash register or even a doorway that’s a bit too narrow for your mascot.
To help them through their strife, the game then initiates a turn-based card battle game where your cards represent the Promise Mascot Agency’s current allies, along with numbered stats. You then apply these stats in battle to lower the enemy’s health bar. Be careful, though; you only have a certain number of actions on top of a 60-second time limit before you automatically fail the battle—so be sure to pick your moves carefully.
Really though, I would say that managing and assisting your mascots is not as taxing nor as frequent as you may expect. In actuality, the bulk of Promise Mascot Agency‘s gameplay involves exploring the town of Kaso-Machi and the surrounding area in Michi’s beat-up truck, gathering collectibles and upgrades, and chatting with local residents to learn more about the town and help them with their problems.
I won’t lie. The first couple hours of Promise Mascot Agency are slow. While it throws a lot of tutorials for its various mechanics at you initially, don’t be surprised if it takes a while for the gameplay to actually click. There was a point at the beginning where, although I was enjoying driving around town, I wondered whether it would be enough to sustain my interest across ~20 hours of total gameplay.
Thankfully, it is. That’s due not just to the management sim and card battle aspects that show up occasionally, but thanks to the near-constant flow of upgrades that you unlock. These upgrades come in the form of cosmetic upgrades to your office, new nail colours for Pinky☆, fast travel upgrades, and even new additions to your truck, including a glider that you can combine with the boost function to fly around town with relative ease.
Speaking of ease, when it comes to driving around, what impressed me most of all was how tight the vehicle controls are. Not only can you turn on a dime, but you can stop and start incredibly quickly at any time. For someone like myself, who is not as proficient or even necessarily interested in driving games at all, I was able to pick up the driving controls quickly and easily and found myself enjoying it almost instantaneously. It’s not hyperbolic to suggest that Promise Mascot Agency is like the Mario 64 of driving-based games, given how tight and enjoyable it feels to roam around its world.
This wonderful driving gameplay benefits from great usage of Dualsense controller features on the PS5 version. Generally, the implementation of these in many games borders on gimmicky, but at least with Promise Mascot Agency, it certainly enhanced the experience for me. You get the appropriate rumble and trigger resistance for your truck depending on the speed you’re going, and feeling the controller shake when you’re laying on the boost button is always a good time. Of course, these features can be turned down or off as appropriate if you’re not a fan of how they feel.
When it comes to story and characters in Promise Mascot Agency, I’m happy to report that both are as unexpectedly charming as the gameplay fundamentals. Not only is your core cast of Michi, Pinky☆, and Shiori (your agency’s mascot manager) very well-written, lively, and funny, but so is the roster of mascots and townspeople that you come across. By far, my favorite of an already well-rounded group without a weak link (in my opinion, anyhow) is the first one you recruit, who you may have already met in the demo, To-Fu.
To-Fu is a sentient block of tofu (with a small bite taken out of him) that suffers from chronic, crippling anxiety that manifests in a constant stream of tears from his eyes and warbly, stuttering speech when he talks. To-Fu is your plucky group’s bedrock, their north star, and a total sweetheart. While they all have great personalities and journeys of their own, To-Fu’s arc is the most engaging and warm. To see this timid creature blossom and come out of his shell to become his own person (or mascot?) was genuinely sweet and inspiring to witness.
It’s not all sweetness and warmth, though. There are stakes and drama in the story of Promise Mascot Agency, and despite its lively presentation, it doesn’t short-change you on any of that, delivering a genuinely gripping yakuza crime drama with excellent villains, morals, and themes. In fact, I would be so bold as to declare that it’s narratively on par with a fair few Yakuza/Like a Dragon games. I can’t guarantee that it’ll reach those high heights for you, but when it comes to what I wanted from the narrative versus what it gave, that’s how Promise Mascot Agency landed for me.
The soundtrack by Alpha Chrome Yayo is also a riot, perfectly matching the vibes of the game and the town of Kaso-Machi, mixing Japanese wind instruments with more modern beats to great effect. It’s always wonderful when a game’s soundtrack can serve as a good casual listen even outside of the context of the game, and Promise Mascot Agency‘s soundtrack delivers that.
As if all of this wasn’t enough, the voice acting in Promise Mascot Agency is stellar across the board. All of the voices are in Japanese, with no option for English, which is a bold choice for a Western game, but it pays off significantly. Michi, the protagonist, is voiced by none other than Takaya Kuroda, most famous for being the voice of Kiryu in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series since the beginning. He, of course, delivers a fantastic performance here as the hardened Yakuza protagonist.
The cast is rounded out by other talented voices, including Ayano Shibuya, who voices Purah in the Japanese dub of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, starring here as Pinky☆, and Eri Saito (of Chainsaw Man fame), who voices Michi’s boss, Matriarch Shimazu. There are other surprising and no less talented performances here from none other than Swery65 himself and Shuhei Yoshida, the former president of PlayStation Studios, both of whom play some of the weird and wonderful clientele you meet in your travels.
Despite all of the above, Promise Mascot Agency isn’t perfect and can still be quite janky. Besides the aforementioned pacing issues early on, there are various smaller, but no less irritating, quibbles, like the fact that you can’t switch or prioritise certain objectives, which can be overwhelming when you’re juggling a number of them at once.
The audio mixing is also quite a mess. While there are volume sliders for nearly every kind of sound in the game, there are certain sounds, like the music to indicate your mascot is in danger, or the confirmation sound when you buy an item from a vending machine, that are way higher than any other sound, independent of what volume sliders you’ve manipulated.
Speaking of overwhelming, since there is more to Promise Mascot Agency‘s gameplay than initially meets the eye, there comes a certain point towards the tail end of act two where you’re inundated with stuff to do and keep track of at once. While I had my priorities and could manage at the time, I could easily see someone losing track and disengaging with the game due to how many plates there are to spin. Luckily, there are a bounty of accessibility options in the settings menu that can help alleviate some of this chaos, should you need them.
Overall, though, no one needed doubt that Kaizen Game Works would deliver another wacky, stylish escapade into a fantastical world. With their previous title and now Promise Mascot Agency, it’s clear that there’s enough talent to go around, and with this game especially, they’ve surely solidified their place as a studio to watch and root for, wherever their creative endeavours may take them next.
As for Promise Mascot Agency itself? I like to put it like this:
Remember that weird Japanese PS2 game you picked up on a whim in 2004 because it had an interesting cover and the description on the back caught your eye and it turned out to be one of your favorite games of all time? Yeah, that’s Promise Mascot Agency.
