Promise Mascot Agency Review

Apologies for what is upsetting to admit is a dated reference, but you know the “airship moment” in every good old-school JRPG? The one where your mode of transport on the world map gets upgraded from walking or sailing to full-on flying and every previously insurmountable obstacle is rendered instantly and joyfully vanquished? Promise Mascot Agency, the next game from the folks behind the excellent Paradise Killer, has multiple moments that feel like that moment. 

One of them is, quite literally, discovering an upgrade for your beat-up pseudo Mitsubishi Minicab that gives it a set of wings in addition to jet boosters to give you command over the skies. It rules. Another is finally gaining the cashflow to escape a constant, expensive, stressful financial clock that can ruin an hours-long save file without warning. I’ll let you guess which of these was fun and which wasn’t.

But before we compare answers, let’s back this thing up a bit and talk about why we’re flying around in a pickup and desperately paying down massive debts in a video game, when we could just be doing that in real life. Promise Mascot Agency introduces us to one Michizane “Michi” Sugawara, a lieutenant in a prominent yakuza family that finds himself disappeared to the ramshackle, cursed town of Kaso-Machi following a run-in with a rival family. Here, Michi is tasked with picking up the pieces of a failed mascot agency to try and chip away at a ¥12,000,000,000 deficit caused by said run-in, while also dodging a longstanding curse that slowly kills any male yakuza who enters the town.

I’d tell you there’s much more to it than all that, but you might not believe me. And I need whatever open-mindedness you can yet muster to reveal that, in this world, mascots aren’t regular humans in funny suits – they’re living, breathing creatures with their own lives, aspirations and place in society, and they do mascot stuff.

Promise Mascot Agency takes this concept and spins it into an open world management sim-cum-collectathon. The goal is to build your mascot empire by driving around Kaso-Machi, helping out its citizens both human and mascot, and amassing a stable of talent while also bringing economic stability back to the town’s businesses so that they’ll in turn have a need for your services. It’s a promising little loop, and one that eventuates in an assortment of fun mini-challenges like playing a pseudo-collectible card battler to rescue mascots from their on-the-job fuck ups or pulling merchandising stock from a claw machine to range in stores. And of course, as your wealth and opportunities grow so can your investment in facilities and boons to business.

The stars of the show are the mascots, ‘natch. You’ll spend the most time with Pinky, who aside from being a giant, severed pinky finger ironically paired up with a disgraced yakuza, is your constant companion and a driving force in the events to unfold. Pinky is, to put it mildly, a fucking hoot. Crude, impatient and with a penchant for flipping a mean pair of birds (yes, the finger has fingers), Pinky’s impulsiveness is matched only by her sense of justice, making her perfectly placed to help a hardened criminal build a billion-yen empire with some light mayoral overthrowing on the side.

The other 20-odd mascots, some of who’ll join as part of the story and others who you’ll have to find around town and offer tasty contracts to sign on, are an equally-entertaining and eclectic bunch. There’s a horny yam cat that dreams of modernising Japan’s adult video industry, a strawberry syrup-covered snow cone that thinks melting in the sun means she’s a vampire, a half-filleted eel that once campaigned for the consumption of unagi, and a whole lot more.

These mascots, combined with a cohort of entertaining human characters inhabiting Kaso-Machi, are a big part of what is a deliciously immaculate vibe. Promise Mascot Agency’s aesthetic is one of lo-fi, desaturated 3D visuals and 2D elements doused with healthy amounts of grain, distortion and colour shifts to give the thing a 90s, analogue feel. A twangy soundscape that scratches and whines in and out of existence and a score that spans pop, jazz fusion, Eurobeat and metal complete the aesthetic, really selling the grimly offbeat setting and making the world a joy to simply cruise around and exist in.

It helps that Kaso-Machi is such a richly-realised locale, a potent homage to quaint and sleepy Japanese towns that’s grimy and downtrodden under the heel of its corrupt mayor, but full of heart. It’s one of those spaces that worms its way into your mind until you’ve learned every city district and winding mountain road. It feels triumphant to reach its summits, and truly liberating when you’re given the ability to glide off of them. Both this Fukuokan coastal burg and the grossly peculiar mascots birthed from its soot and soil have been concepted from an “art bible” of sorts by the incredible Ikumi Nakamura, making a powerful case for artistic collaboration in the indie game space.

I was ready to be sucked into the mascot management systems at the core of the game as much as the stuff around it, but what initially paints itself as a model based on shrewd planning and decision making winds up being an exercise in blindly mashing through the Jobs menu every time your mascots’ spare time and stamina allows. There are complexities here – the kickbacks you offer your team can determine things like happiness and motivation, and there are ways to ensure jobs are extra successful. But managing your talent feels like more of an interruption to exploring Kaso-Machi than anything else, which incentivises getting in and out of those screens as quickly as possible.

The only real sense of urgency comes from a kind of countdown clock to a kill screen that’s introduced early on and must be quelled with regular cash payments to any of the ATMs around town. It’s a smart way to add some friction and have players think more deeply about where they’re spending money and how efficiently they’re working, but it also kicks in without warning after a certain point in the story. For me, that meant I’d just spent a bunch of money on upgrades and also hadn’t set up the kind of cashflow to support these regular payments, and after fighting constant game overs for a good hour or so, I eventually had no choice but to give up a chunk of my playtime and revert back to a much earlier save file.

The rest of the game is quite toothless when it comes to challenge, even when a mascot suddenly needs help and a pseudo-RPG card battle minigame kicks in, so this early rub stood out as a sour note on the whole experience. There’s definitely some fault of my own in how it all went down, but it’s emblematic of the confusing cadence at which Promise Mascot Agency operates. By the end, I’d amassed such riches that I had no reason to keep giving my mascots work, and very much just let them sit around at the agency’s HQ doing absolutely nothing while I enjoyed the very compelling twists and turns of the story’s final acts.

Final Thoughts

Thing is, I’d do it all again. In fact, I’ve already fired up a new save file just to get a taste of those first few hours where the way I ran my mascot business really mattered, and to re-experience the joy of immersing myself in Kaso-Machi and all of the strange and wonderful folks living there. There’s just something so oddly wonderful about this work, an unmistakably scrappy “indie” texture that permeates the piece. Go in expecting not to roleplay a savvy manager and talent agent, but to cosplay one in a world where a guy can be made of road signs and an asexual ex-yakuza can be hit on by a Tetris block.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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