Part quirky business sim, part visual novel, and part open world town restoration game, Promise Mascot Agency is a true original. It’s a clever amalgamation of fiendishly moreish mechanics, a nesting doll of novel concepts where each new layer adds to the game’s cohesive clarity of vision. Whether you’re sending mascots out on jobs, getting to know the colorful cast of characters, or beautifying the town, the game’s breadth of content is richly drawn and deeply engaging.
Michi, a disgraced Yakuza lieutenant known as “The Janitor,” is exiled to a spiritually cursed rural town where he must purge its bureaucratic corruption while restoring honor to his crime family — with the help of some truly bizarre mascots. Michi arrives down and out, just a man and his mini kei truck but soon he will create a powerful mascot empire with the help of his peculiar sidekick Pinky, a spunky mascot costumed as a severed finger.
The agency begins with humble origins, as Michi and Pinky take over a dilapidated Love Hotel as their base of operations. From here, they will send mascots out on advertising jobs and reintegrate their profits back into the business. While the mascots are out on jobs, the duo explores the town in their truck — looking for more mascots, job opportunities, and doing all manner of open world busy-work.
Most of the game is spent navigating the open world of Kaso-Machi, a rural island community. Winding roadways twist back and forth up mountain ranges. There’s a massive tanooki statue, town centers, haunted spaces, and plenty to see. Delightfully, the mechanics are well-integrated. The busy work you do in the open world, like finding a variety of objects for characters, will result in those characters becoming heroes, and helping your mascots when they run into trouble during jobs.
The first order of business is to create a self-sustaining mascot agency. With each mascot you hire, you’ll create a contract which aims to keep them happy with a range of benefits and a share of your proceeds. Based on their well-being, the mascots will do better on jobs, and generate energy faster so they can go on more of them. When mascots run out of steam on jobs, we’re called to help them in little mini-games presented as a game show where we present the cards of the characters we’ve helped, to try and defeat whatever challenges befall our mascots — sometimes they can’t fit through a doorway, sometimes they’re up against devilish spirits, and sometimes they’re fighting the machine of capitalism.
The strangest thing about Promise Mascot Agency is that while it’s many things, all of them are cozily designed and low engagement. The card game, for example, mostly entails choosing the hero card with the highest number. There’s not much more to it. Exploration, likewise, is low-stress. It’s a lot of collecting and returning things as you go. Large parts of the map are mostly unused and most of your tasks are centralized in pockets of areas with characters in them. Jutting up against the whimsical design, though, is a ticking bomb: if you don’t send enough money home, your family will die, and it’s Game Over. Before long you will create a self-sustaining business that generates its own automatic profits, but the pressure of the game, oddly, is front-loaded. The more you play, the less it asks of you, and the more you can just freely roam around the world picking up collectibles, based on the mascots and characters you’ve met in the game.
Promise Mascot Agency is an oddball of design. Its closest companion games are Yakuza and Deadly Premonition. These series serve as virtual tourism, not of histories like Assassin’s Creed, but wherein the side content, composed of wild explorations of the absurd and macabre, are the actual heart and soul of the games. Like Yakuza, Promise Mascot Agency shares lead voice actor Takaya Kuroda and also enlists Deadly Premonition director Hidetaka Suehiro (A.K.A. Swery) for voice over work.
That’s not to say Promise Mascot Agency is reductive. Not at all. It’s an inspired mess of influences with its heart worn proudly on sleeve, a design document of Fun Game Design, that shows a serious commitment to individuality by developer Kaizen Game Works. Their last game, 2020’s Paradise Killer proved much the same capacity — that they are out standout developers who understand how to make deeply charming modern games with deep affection for the stylish expression of what games can mean and stand for.
What does Promise Mascot Agency mean and stand for, then, in this game about pimping out mascots to local businesses from your operating base of a Love Hotel? What does it mean about culture and commerce? It’s incisive — by creating an absurdist business simulator with a visual novel wrap-around, the game comments on capitalism and worker issues directly. You’ll feel horrible, at some point, sending all your mascots off to work for minimal cuts for each job.
Games often struggle with interior economies. That’s Promise Mascot Agency, too, which requires some elbow grease and very active awareness and management of your mascot brand but also money being sent back to the Yakuza, in order to not fail in the beginning. So while it has the window dressing of a simpler game, there is depth and a necessity to always be moving and making money early on. By the end, it hardly matters, your debts and sins are absolved by the hard work done, and oddly, for a game with something to say about capitalism, it diverts from this message once you’re successful, and shows this as a means to an end.
There’s also a sense that, for as much as Promise Mascot Agency does, there is still more to do. We spend most of the game in our truck. Generally we’re cleaning up trash, replacing signs of the mayor with mascot signs, and collecting items, but there’s also multifaceted exploration to do. And the game is so well-designed environmentally around its mechanics, both designed to provoke and lead discovery, but also just holistically considered, when it comes to the placements of its tasks and characters, and what it asks you to do. Still, there are large swaths of the map which are practically unoccupied, whole corners of it that you’ll hardly need to go to for any plotty reason at all. So the game still seems open to something — perhaps DLC about what happens after the town and business grow and these areas are expanded with new residents and opportunities.
Movement through the world is also surprisingly joyous. Eventually, your kei truck is loaded with multiple boasts, equipped to turn into a boat in the water, and is set up with a glider so you can fly. Movement, then, feels unrestrained, but is smartly unlocked through exploration of the world. Admittedly all we wanted to do when we jumped in is explore the world, but for several gamey reasons, you’ve really just got to focus on managing the business first.
Promise Mascot Agency is top-to-bottom one of the most thoroughly unique and delightfully engaging games of our times. You cannot go wrong here. In it is a wildly unique business simulator, an excellent visual novel, and an open world you’ll actually want to explore. There’s nothing exactly like it and probably never will be again.