Promise Mascot Agency Review - Put a Smile on That Slab of Meat You Call a Face
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to have your stuffed animals grow to full-size, walk around and talk, and have their own unique personalities and struggles, Promise Mascot Agency is probably a game you’ll want to play.
Promise Mascot Agency, from Kaizen Game Works, is an open-world narrative RPG, management sim where you run an agency of living, breathing mascots. You play as Michi, a yakuza that has been exiled from his home after falling victim to an ambush that has left his clan in shambles. Rather than kill Michi on the spot, the clan boss fakes his death and sends him to Kaso-Machi, a near-derelict town of misfits, corrupt politicians and, of course, mascots looking for work.
Due to the ambush gone wrong, the clan has lost a lot of money and it’s up to Michi to try and send money back home to stop the warring clans from killing his own. In order to do that, Michi teams up with Pinky☆, a thumb mascot with a bit of an attitude but a passion for restoring Kaso-Machi to its (sort of) former glory. The two unlikely partners decide to launch the “Promise Mascot Agency” an agency that hires mascots for events around town. But first, you have to convince mascots to join, find proper jobs, and pull a lot of strings.
Promise Mascot Agency is very much open world and allows you to do things at whatever pace you like. The most important thing to do, though, is to hire mascots and start sending them out on jobs. Mascots, like an employee, require certain incentives before they’ll agree to work for you. You’ll have to outline a contract with them offering them a percentage of job share, maybe vacation time after they’ve completed a certain number of jobs, you can even offer them the occasional job share review allowing them to get a bonus or increase their job share percentage from time to time. I did find the pros and cons of each element of the mascot contracts to be a bit confusing at first. It’s hard, when you’re first starting out, to see how these choices can affect you but, as an example, offering mascots a vacation as part of their contract means that after every seven jobs they’ll leave for an extended period of time. These choices aren’t hugely impactful towards the end of the game when you’ve got a lot of mascots and a lot of money coming in, but when you’ve only got two or three mascots and one of them goes on vacation it can really halt your progress.
There are some other things that you’ll have to do to manage your mascots like speaking to them about their quality of life and doing what you can to increase it. Making sure your mascots are happy means that they’ll do better on jobs and be able to perform more jobs before needing to take a break. Each mascot has their own “stamina” which determines whether or not they’re able to go on jobs. Monitoring the health and happiness of your mascots is hugely important for your business to thrive.
In order to send a mascot out on a job, you’ll be able to review your job board to see what’s available. You’ll get jobs by speaking with people around town like Endo, a businessman with a possessive wife, who will let you know when new businesses are opening up that may need a mascot for an event. Each event will have a mascot whose personality traits are best suited for the job. As an example, your mascot To-Fu is very sweet and probably wouldn’t do well at an event at the town cemetery which is more suited for mascots that are scary or serious. You can send mascots whose personalities don’t match, but they are much more likely to come across an issue while out on the job.
If an issue does arise while a mascot is out, you are able to offer them support. While you’re out exploring the island, you’ll meet people who wish to help out the mascots and you’ll collect their “support hero card.” Then, when you head to the event where the mascot is having trouble, you’ll participate in a mini-game of sorts. It’s kind of like a deck building game where you use the support hero cards you’ve collected and attack whatever is causing the mascot trouble, be it a swarm of bees or a doorway that’s too narrow for them to walk through. With full honesty, in the beginning I had absolutely no idea what I was doing during this mini game and would pick cards at random hoping to solve the issue with brute force but, as someone who has played a lot of deck builders, eventually I was able to piece things together. I found the tutorial for the mini-game to be confusing and, until I got the hang of it, I dreaded having to jump in to help my mascots. That’s why it’s always worth making sure you’re sending the right mascot for the job because then there’s less of a chance they’ll need your help at all while they’re out on the job.
When you aren’t actively assigning mascots to jobs or helping them on their jobs, you can freely explore the island in Michi’s truck, always accompanied by the ever loyal Pinky☆. The more you explore and the more townsfolk you speak to, the more you’ll uncover about the history of the town and why it has seen better days. A lot of it is chalked up to a corrupt mayor who doesn’t care about the town or its residents. Thankfully, most of Kaso-Machi hates the mayor too and is all too happy to have Michi and Pinky☆’s help in restoring the town. The more you do around town, the more your agency’s fame will increase and the more jobs and requests that will come in. You’ll also learn more about Michi and his past as well as the history of other characters. There’s loads of lore to uncover and the story is truly intriguing.
It’s easy to forget, as you’re out exploring, hiring more mascots and restoring the town, that you still owe money to your clan. You can send money through ATMs around town as often as possible to keep the warring clans happy and off your clans back, but doing so at the beginning of the game gave me some trouble. Making money when you first start out is very slow going. Once you know what you’re doing and have 15-20 mascots, you’ll have so much money it won’t be a problem but, at the start, I was more than frustrated. If you forget to send money regularly, Pinky☆ will pull you into a brief cutscene reminding you to send money, even when you’ve only got ¥10,000 to your name. And this would happen every few minutes. Thankfully, if you send a big chunk of money, you won’t get that reminder as often, but since you’ll also be worrying about your daily bills and purchasing items to help your mascots, it’s incredibly stressful having Pinky☆ constantly reminding you that you’re about to be in big trouble.
And this is an issue you might come across a lot throughout the game. Like I’ve mentioned, once you get the hang of things it happens less often, but towards the beginning there’s so much going on you’ll be getting regularly pulled into different cutscenes again and again that it becomes difficult to enjoy the game itself. I wanted to drive around, collecting items and smashing posters of the mayor’s face, but every other moment there’s something else popping up that needs your attention. It’s quite overwhelming to have to focus on ten different tasks when you’ve only been playing the game for one or two hours and just want to explore and learn how things work.
All that being said, about around the time I hit the five hour mark, I absolutely could not put the game down. You’ll learn quickly that hiring mascots and sending them out on jobs isn’t the only way to make money. For example, later on in the game you’ll unlock crane machines, which bring you to another mini-game where you collect different charms that you can sell at businesses around town. You’ll also eventually unlock subcontractors at different towns outside of Kaso-Machi which will bring in money at the end of every day as well. It costs a lot of money to hire the subcontractors but it’s a one-time fee versus the daily income they bring so it all adds up eventually.
There’s loads more I could write about when it comes to Promise Mascot Agency like the fact that eventually you can turn your truck into a plane and a boat to get around town faster (though you can unlock fast travel as well.) You can upgrade your support hero cards so that helping mascots becomes easier. You can have mayoral debates to try to run the corrupt mayor out of town and get Pinky☆ into office. There’s so much to do and, once you learn how it all works together, you won’t want to walk away. Promise Mascot Agency is complicated at first, it can get repetitive as you deal with the same cutscenes again and again, but it’s so completely unique I’ve never played anything quite like it. Not to mention, it has had me laughing so much I can’t wait to see how my friends react to certain things once they get the chance to play it. Kaizen Game Works have made a real gem here and I can’t wait to see what they do next.
Breakdown
Name: Promise Mascot Agency
Developer: Kaizen Game Works
Publisher: Kaizen Game Works
Availability: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
Accessibility:
Ability to change font style (supportive of dyslexia)
Ability to adjust contrast of dialogue box
Game Length: 15-25 hours
Reviewed on PlayStation 5
Final Thoughts
Promise Mascot Agency is a game that gets better with age. At the start, there’s so many things for you to manage that it can quickly get overwhelming and especially frustrating when you don’t have enough money to do anything. But the more you learn and explore the more you’ll get the hang of it until it feels impossible to put down. With a truly unique concept, hilarious characters, a banger soundtrack and so many more things going for it, this is one I’ll be thinking about (and going back to) again and again.