Promise Mascot Agency review: I know this will sound weird, but trust me

When I first arrive in Kaso-Machi, it feels like I’ve stepped into a ghost town. The Japanese island at the center of Promise Mascot Agency, the latest game from Paradise Killer studio Kaizen Game Works, is awash in a brown haze. It’s eerily quiet, with no bodies walking through its streets. I assume it’s fully abandoned, but that’s not the case. It’s simply been run into poverty by a mayor who couldn’t care less about the well-being of his constituents. For the next 15 hours, I make it my personal mission to right that wrong, bringing life back to a place choked by political corruption. It’s a journey that underscores the importance of community, a force that’s more powerful than any king.

Also, my best friends are a block of tofu that can’t stop crying and a porn-addicted cat. This, to me, is what video games are all about.

Promise Mascot Agency fuses weighty sociopolitical commentary with playful absurdity to deliver an open-world game that’s at once insightful and so off-the-rails that it’ll sound like you’re making it up when you try to describe it to friends. It’s a playable anime, a stat-heavy business simulator, a card collecting game, and Forza Horizon all in one.

Does that hodgepodge of ideas fully work? Can its indie spirit overcome the monotony inherent in the open-world genre? Man, just shut up and get in the truck. We’ve got to install dial-up internet in the sex hotel.

Running a business

Taking some clear cues from the Like a Dragon series, Promise Mascot Agency tells a dense tale of Yakuza in-fighting and political deception amid video game silliness. After a clan has its money stolen by rivals, Michi, a feared cleaner for the operation widely known as “The Janitor,” is sent to Kaso-Machi to recoup the money by taking over one of the clan’s fronts, a mascot agency. It’s a death sentence for Michi, as the town places a curse on men that slowly kills them. Before I can finish processing that criminal intrigue, I’m dropped off at an empty sex hotel being run by Pinky, a sentient finger, who seems really pissed off all the time.

If that description already has you doing a double take, then buckle up, ding dong. We’re just getting started.

Promise Mascot Agency is an anime odyssey that makes as strong and loud of an impression as it can in its first act. I soon learn that my objective is to recruit costumed mascots around town and loan them out to local businesses in need. A new plastic model shop just opened? Sounds like a good gig for my green surfer pal. An adult video store is running a promotion? I’ve got the perfect pervert for the job. It all flows through a streamlined job management menu that has me assigning mascots to gigs based on their personality, motivation meter, and stamina. The better they do, and the more challenging a job they complete, the more cash I rake in to upgrade the town and my agency.

Easy enough, right? Wrong, bucko. The joyful absurdity comes from just how seriously Kaizen Game Works takes a silly premise. Every time I recruit a new mascot, I have to negotiate a contract with them that determines how much of a cut they get on jobs, whether or not they’re eligible for a bonus, and if they can have vacation time that makes them inaccessible after every few jobs. I’m constantly balancing my own income with an unpredictable cast of cartoon egos who won’t work for free. I can choose to exploit them, of course, but that’s going to do a number on their motivation stat. It’s a business management sim turned anime satire.

Oh, and it’s also a deck-building game where I need to defeat small doorways and swarms of bees with support heroes I collect. I almost forgot that part, huh? Sometimes my mascots utterly beef it on the job and have their focus derailed by obstacles, from angry spirits to unstable towers of boxes that they knock over with their big cat butts. When that happens, I have one minute to take down that obstacle’s health bar by playing from a hand of collectible hero cards that have their own cost and damage stats. It’s a fairly thin card game hook that never really scales up enough to feel strategic, but it makes for a completely ridiculous visual that adds to the comedic sensory overload of the project.

Wait, I forgot to mention one other thing. I need to use those funds to add more amenities to my sex hotel base of operations and build up businesses in town, bringing in more gig opportunities and keeping my employees hydrated. Oh, and another thing: I need to complete social links with my mascots to learn more about them. Crap, there’s the claw machine too. Right, so, every mascot has merch I can collect, which then goes into giant claw machine games around town, and I have to fish them out and sell them to other locations to make additional income. That’s about everyth– Subcontractors! Sorry, that slipped my mind! I can eventually hire subcontractor mascots and put them in jobs outside of town to get a consistent passive income. Also, there’s a superhero who loves safety and keeps putting stop signs everywhere. Hey, where are you going!?

Promise Mascot Agency’s strength comes from the way it always keeps players guessing as to what’s coming next. It layers on new gameplay systems, more eccentric mascots, and political intrigue as it goes. The wackier it gets, the more serious it becomes too. By the end, I was no longer a shady yakuza member doing the bare minimum to keep the money flowing. I deeply cared about my staff and was cutting them bigger checks to reward their efforts. It all flows back towards the story’s ultimate thesis about community. A group of ragtag misfits can do more to take care of their town than the crooked politicians running it into the ground, so long as they all band together for a common good.

Also, organized crime is cool. I think that’s the other takeaway.

Open-world work

Believe it or not, that still doesn’t fully describe Promise Mascot Agency’s whole deal. It’s not so dissimilar to Paradise Killer in that it’s a narrative adventure with an expanded scope. When I’m not managing my business or pumping money into town restoration, I’m having conversations with the townies and my mascot crew. That’s where I get to dig deeper into Kaso-Machi and its troubled history. It’s very much similar to a Like a Dragon game in how it spins dry local politics into something engrossing – though it’s also similar to Like a Dragon in that it all builds to a long-winded conclusion that’s heavy on exposition. Between all that, my dog pal tells me all about his porno ambitions. That ability to bounce between dense local politics and screwball humor so effortlessly makes it feel like The Wire meets Smiling Friends. I’d argue that it even makes this year’s Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii seem boring by comparison.

On top of everything I’ve already outlined, it’s an open-world game that feels most similar to Forza Horizon (or maybe The Simpsons: Hit and Run) in design. I promise that I am not making stuff up at this point. I get why you are probably suspicious of that.

While jobs play out in menus as a day marches on, Michi and Pinky travel around Kaso-Machi in a pick-up truck. There’s a host of collectibles to discover, including new hero cards that can aid me in workplace accidents, and NPCs to meet who each have a quest for me to complete. For instance, the mayor’s scorned right-hand man really loves pop music and wants me to track down rare idol merch from vending machines. It amounts to a lot of fetch quests and firing Pinky out of a cannon to blow up pictures of the mayor strewn around town. (Man, I hate that old dork.)

Out of all of Promise Mascot Agency’s various parts, that routine is its most mundane idea — and perhaps its most functional, too. Modern open-world games are work, man. They give players an enormous checklist of things to do, junk to collect, and people to meet. Something like Assassin’s Creed Shadows can be as exhausting as it is fun as unlocking every tower turns into a thing that you feel like you have to do, rather than want to. Promise Mascot Agency deals with that tension directly, because everything you’re doing really is a job. I’m cleaning up bags of trash to keep the town tidy as a completion percentage. I’m polishing dozens of shrines. I mean, I’m literally The Janitor for Christ’s sake! It ain’t glamorous work, but someone has to care enough about this town to do it!

Even if it’s a thematically sound pairing for an open-world format, Promise Mascot Agency still has all of the same weak points of the games that inspired it. It contains a checklist of world activities that become repetitive after a while. The town becomes less fun to explore the more the map markers disappear. It’s the only area where the gameplay feels at odds with the story, as Kaso-Machi is supposed to feel more lively as Michi rejuvenates it. Instead, it’s a little emptier each day.

Even as that happens, there’s just so much chaotic energy overflowing throughout Promise Mascot Agency that helps fill in the cracks. It’s a positively zany adventure from start to finish powered by jazzy tunes, hysterical writing, and unleaded gasoline. Though what’s so remarkable about Kaizen Game Works is its ability to invent the most bizarre world it can think of and deftly acclimate players to its logic within a few hours. That strength is what made Paradise Killer so memorable and it carries over here. By the end of my adventure, I felt at home in a world that initially felt absurd. I was efficiently running a business with my pals. I was enjoying my daily scenic drives through the countryside with my rocket-boosted truck. I was antagonizing the mayor on a regular basis, because, seriously, f*** that guy.

Somewhere in all that anime silliness is a utopian vision; a world where misfits can overcome anything and live comfortably in a home that they care for together. It doesn’t have to be a video game fever dream. Band together with your community and discover the joy of mutual aid today. And after you do that, head down to your local mayor’s office and knock that sucker the hell out.

Promise Mascot Agency was tested on PC and Steam Deck OLED.