For a lot of people, the boundaries of their small town can feel like the literal ends of the earth. Every day, the same local folks, unable to find steady work in town but also too poor to go anywhere else, slink around with their eyes on the ground, hoping for someone to help. The truth is that in real life, that help rarely comes. A dying town will continue dying because those who have the power to stop it do not care to do so. Those who have money that might jumpstart the local economy or open a business to create jobs will leave, because they can afford to go somewhere a better life is offered.
And it’s hard to blame those people – we all want the best life we can give our families. It follows, then, in Promise Mascot Agency that help comes to the beautiful, dying rural village of Kaso-Machi only by accident. A man is condemned to spend the rest of his days there, waiting for a curse to take his life, fruitlessly patching the thousand holes from which life is leaking from the town while a corrupt mayor does everything in his power to poke more holes. The system is set up to drain money from working class folks, to force them into dependence on charity, to break their spirits. It’s somehow only in this nihilistic, no-win scenario that Kaso-Machi finds hope; the only person who can bring this town back to life is a man with literally nowhere else to go, bound to a promise to fight in a war he’s already lost.
Michi, a grumbly Yakuza known as The Janitor, heads out with his oath brother Toki to complete a ¥12b deal with a huge Yakuza family who will ensure the safety of his own Shimazu Family. They are jumped by a rival family in transit, and in a split second decision, Michi gives up the money to save Toki’s life. This move, while representative of the Shimazu Family’s values, dooms the entire clan. The debt collectors move in like vultures, scooping up every asset the Shimazu have. The Matriarch orders Michi to fake his death and head to Kaso-Machi, a dying rural mountain town nearby, where he is to post up at a mascot agency and get it running again to help pay off his ¥12b debt.
There’s just one problem with Kaso-Machi: the town is beset by a curse that killed dozens of miners a few years ago, and is watched over by a massive tanuki statue that, according to legend, marks any male Yakuza for death upon their entry. The tanuki appeared overnight after the mine collapse, out of nowhere, and the locals believe it was placed there by some kind of malevolent god. The Promise Mascot Agency, now defunct, is the last asset the Shimazu Family has to their name, and is the only one that nobody knows about. Michi enters town, understanding he is now marked for death, and meets Pinky, the establishment’s owner.
In the world of Promise Mascot Agency, there exists a species of people called Mascots, who come in all shapes and sizes and colors. One looks like a green lollipop, another is a bat with mining gear, another is a giant block of tofu with eyes – you get the idea. Mascots mostly live normally and in coexistence with humans, but suffer from racist oppressors who hate them for who they are. Most of them have regular jobs like cooks, cleaners, or even journalists, but a few get into the tantalizing stardom of Mascot Events. Every time a new shop opens, or you’re having a promotion for your restaurant, or releasing a new book, or even promoting your Twitch channel, you’re gonna want to hold a Mascot Event. People contact Mascot Agencies, book a gig, and let the Mascot bring the money in! The Promise Mascot Agency has one big problem, though; Kaso-Machi has lost so much money and so many residents that there is nothing to Mascot for anymore.
Enter Pinky, a 34-year-old Mascot with an unkillable heart and the unbridled inner rage of a dragon. She’s hilarious, impulsive, and just insane enough to serve as your faithful companion in this quest to restore The Promise Mascot Agency to its glory and save Kaso-Machi from those in power who yearn for its demise. Also, she’s a giant walking severed thumb. Pinky is a wonderful character, one of my favorites in recent years, and honestly I’m pretty damn bummed about not being able to spend more time with her after 100%ing Promise Mascot Agency. I laughed constantly at her comments and angry outbursts, and it never once loses its charm over the 25 hour runtime.
Promise Mascot Agency is primarily a management game, but with an entire mountain village to explore while you’re managing. For the management part, you’ll need to travel around town in your indestructible truck with Pinky, collect Mascots, negotiate a contract with them for the agency, and then begin finding jobs that specifically suit their talents. You’ll get new jobs by meeting townsfolk around town, mostly the owners of dying businesses, and helping them with personal problems or finding lost items. The work is there – it’s just getting the businesses and characters in town to believe that you actually care about saving their town, when no one else has in decades. It’s heartwarming, well-paced, and the characters you meet are immediately memorable.
From your management menu, which you can pull up while driving anywhere, you can consult with mascots about bonuses, raises, and performance reviews, send them on the best jobs for their mascot style, and do your bookkeeping. Different jobs require different mascot styles: a tour of cemetery requires someone well-versed in history, while the hot springs need someone chill and cool to bring in the customers. Each job pays out a different amount of money and takes a different amount of time, adding opportunity cost to your calculations when choosing jobs. The real heat of the game is that mascots can often mess up at events when encountering dangerous enemies like “Regular Sized Door” or “Broken Vending Machine” or “Pack of Hellhounds”. And then it’s time for your Mascot Support Heroes!
Support Heroes are essentially every character in town who does not serve as a mascot at the agency. They come in the form of cards that feed into a fun timed minigame, each one with different powers that get upgraded over time as you become closer with the character. For example, the more anime DVDs you find for Ms. Wambui, the British exchange teacher, the more heart-to-heart conversations you’ll have with her, increasing her trust in the agency and her power as a Support Hero card. When you’re playing a card, in the world of the game that character comes rushing to help your mascot get their head unstuck from a honeypot or kill the demon king Beelzebub. It’s a perfectly streamlined system that simultaneously encourages and buffs exploration, dialogue, and your Support Hero deck.
At the beginning, things are dire – for the first part of the game, you’ll have only two or three mascots at the agency, meaning you’re still operating at a net loss each day. Promise Mascot Agency’s management gameplay is basically a really nicely dressed up spreadsheet, and if you’re like me and LOVE economics it’s a dream come true. You’ll need to send out Mascot Items to help your employees avoid mistakes and regenerate stamina, which they need to do more events. You can get these by buying them from Support Heroes, with their potency increasing as your relationships do. When mascots run out of stamina, they need to rest for a day or may take vacation time, so you’ll need to know your mascots’ schedules to optimize their time at the office for maximum profit. My sole issue with the game is that if you’re very good with economics and optimization, about halfway through the game you’ll be raking in more money than you can spend. Perhaps a hard mode is in order?
Promise Mascot Agency is only elevated by one of my favorite soundtracks in recent years, composed by the exceedingly talented Alpha Chrome Yayo. Additionally, the art design for the town of Kaso-Machi was done by none other than Ikumi Nakamura, best known as the art director for The Evil Within, Ghostwire Tokyo, and Bayonetta. The visuals of the town are wonderful, and I insist you play with the chromatic distortion as it was intended unless a disability prevents you from doing so. It brings the town to life in a way that feels more transportive than the most photo-realistic AAA games could hope to achieve. Fans of the studio’s last project, Paradise Killer, will know exactly what vibe to expect.
While this is all happening, you’re exploring the town via Michi’s truck, getting upgrades such as the Pinky Rocket which can fire her like a missile to dispel angry spirits or pick up trash. Your truck will eventually get the ability to transform into a boat or plane as well, so I recommend finding all five spirit wolves for the mechanic as quickly as possible. Phone booths unlock fast travel points, which are handy for going across the island, but you’re going to want to explore on the ground as much as possible to find all of Kaso-Machi’s fascinating secrets. While driving, there are constantly things to pick up, destroy, and investigate, all while you’re managing the agency in real time and doing the bookkeeping.
If you think this sounds like a lot already, you are incorrect, my friend. Another wrench is thrown into the works as the Shimazu Matriarch is surrounded by the knives of rival families that have learned she’s broke, so you’ll need to send her enough Yen every day through ATMs to keep the knives at bay while also managing the agency. And then there’s the Mascot Grand Prix that’s happening once a week where you send a mascot to compete in a national competition to build popularity for the agency. And then there’s marketing, ordering plushes and keychains of your mascots to sell at local shops through minigames and more spreadsheets to calculate each mascot’s merchandising potential in each part of town.
There’s also subcontractors out of town you can lease tenant space from and hire more workers there on a per diem basis, not to mention the intense mystery of the mines and the curse that Michi must solve before Kaso-Machi’s demons find him. You also need to keep paying to upgrade the agency to improve the mascots lives and earning potential, as well as rebuilding spots around town to bring in tourists for more potential high earning jobs. And I haven’t even mentioned the dozens of different items and artifacts you’re tasked with hunting down, and fishing, and mascot life contentment reviews to boost their happiness potential… Basically, my love of microeconomics and absurdist comedy coupled with my intense ADD makes this my perfect video game.
While the gameplay is effectively perfect, fitting together a dozen different systems with seamless ease, the heartwarming story of community and rebellion against corrupt systems is what makes Promise Mascot Agency my likely Game of the Year. Michi is a broken person, only given purpose by his Matriarch and only finding happiness in doing his duty for her. He has no concept of pleasure, self-love, or even a normal friendship. Pinky is his antithesis, hopeful and fierce and full of humor even after the sordid hand life has dealt her. Of course, their opposite personalities, approaches, and management styles make them not only perfect business partners – they also (eventually) become best friends in the most organic, grounded story one could tell about a big thumb lady and a disgraced Yakuza. And on top of that, each of the other characters is so built out at such a good pace that by the end I felt that I knew them better than characters I’ve spent 100 hours with in other games.
The story is centered around the corrupt mayor, who years ago embezzled funds from a federal grant called the Kyuushu Rejuvination Fund, leaving the local businesses to rot and fester while driving tourists out of the town entirely. Why would any mayor want their town to fall into disrepair? Kaso-Machi is a town trapped in the Showa era and left behind by the modern world. and everything in Kaizen Gameworks’ management game reflects not just a love of Japanese culture, but a true understanding of it that could only come with the help of the many Japanese consultants they worked with to build out the world. There’s a huge story to unravel involving the Yakuza, government corruption, federal investigators, media conspiracy, and environmental scandal, and betrayal – but it all comes together so seamlessly, in a real, grounded story that is way too realistic to feature a demonic snow cone vampire topped with strawberry syrup. And yet, it does.
As a local government worker, the story hits me a little harder than I expected and explores many of the anxious thoughts plaguing my own brain day to day. As Pinky runs for mayor against the 30 year incumbent dinosaur whose hands are soaked in the blood of hundreds, players get a real breakdown of what democracy even means in practice. Why is the mayor still in charge? Why has he run unopposed until now? Why has every citizen relegated themselves and their families to simply “dealing with it”? It’s because the mayor, and every person in a position of power like him in this world, broke their spirits. It is so, so difficult to build up hope, and it is so very easy to crush it all with just a few small jabs. The death of the mining crews. The loss of the town’s income. The “curse” that killed a dozen men. The landslide. The slow deterioration of its history and cultural practices. Every piece of the fragile idea that is hope is breakable, and just like our populace in real life, Kaso-Machi has been broken. The bad guys already won.
The central message of Promise Mascot Agency, however, is that it is always worth fighting a battle you’ve already lost. These guys, like the mayor of Kaso-Machi, or even our real leaders of the current time, absolutely thrive on people giving up. That’s how they keep winning elections. That’s how they keep defunding vital systems, and repressing information, and taking away rights from our minority populations (such as mascots!). The battle is not over. The battle against tyranny, dishonesty, and a system built to oppress those that it exploits is never over. If a masked bird man that only speaks in poems, a sticky cat who’s only true love is pornography, and an eel king with its ribcage pulled apart can come together to overthrow a tyrant who has all the money, power, and connections in the world, Promise Mascot Agency asks this: what is stopping you?
Nirav reviewed Promise Mascot Agency on PlayStation 5 with his own bought copy.
