Marketing is one of the most powerful forces on earth. It steers human society, telling us what is important and what to think. It has caused immeasurable harm as it single-mindedly puts profit above everything else. We have never been without marketing, but it’s become so much more unstoppable with the increased access to information. Humanity’s downfall will probably be traced back to marketing.

Yet, somewhere along the way, Western advertising stopped having fun with it. I’m talking mascots. They used to be more commonplace, and now they’re seemingly relegated to the cereal aisle and insurance agencies. Japan has mascots everywhere. It’s incredible. When a celebrity tells me how great something is, I couldn’t care less. When an anthropomorphic pickle does that? I’m listening.

Promise Mascot Agency is about that. Kind of. It’s about taking misfit mascots, sending them out to do some marketing, and helping them realize their dreams. What do mascots dream of? Sometimes porn.

YAKUSOKU

You play as Michizane Sugawara, a legendary Yakuza enforcer, sometimes known as “The Janitor” because of the way he endeavours to clean up problems. After a deal goes horribly wrong and his clan is robbed of an impressive amount of money under his watch, his death is faked, and he’s sent to Kaso-Machi to revitalize the only Shimazu Family-owned business that can’t be touched by other families. That’s because the town hosts a curse that supposedly kills any Yakuza that enter its boundaries, which he is unlikely to be immune from.

The business in question is the eponymous mascot agency. Both the agency and the town itself have suffered under the rule of a corrupt mayor whose history of embezzlement has caused the economy to flatline, driving out businesses and practically isolating the town from the rest of Kyushu. In order to turn the business around, he not only needs to grow it to profitability, he has to fix the surrounding economy. A tall order, but no mess is too big for The Janitor.

If you ask me how to improve basically any game, my first response would probably be to add business simulator elements. That’s Promise Mascot Agency. In one half of the game, you drive around the town in a kei truck doing quests and collecting crap off the ground. In the other, you send out mascots to do jobs and earn money. The business is mainly menu-driven and works in the background, but every so often you have to play a card game to help out a mascot in trouble. But that’s about as easy as it comes, so long as you’ve been doing the appropriate amount of driving around and picking up crap.

CLEANING UP THIS TOWN

It’s somewhat disappointing that, in terms of gameplay, Promise Mascot Agency lacks depth and leans rather heavily on microprogression to be compelling, but saying that’s all it is would be doing a great disservice. The gameplay is more a means to and end for what it is trying to convey, and what it’s trying to convey is a lot.

Promise Mascot Agency isn’t just an open-world game slathered in business mechanics, it’s also trying to tell a story that is simultaneously conventional and bizarre, it proudly displays its personality-rich cast, it centres this in a well-realized setting, and wraps it in atmosphere. In many ways, it could have just been a visual novel, but it would have lost a lot of itself, and that’s maybe key here.

The story largely unfolds by having you travel to place and talk to person. I believe that some of the progression is tied to the popularity of your agency, with gaining fans levelling you up, and I can think of at least one moment where I needed an upgrade for the truck to reach something (if I recall), but mostly, there aren’t many obstacles thrown in your way. You’re presented with dialogue choices, but aside from maybe a few, I don’t think they change much.

There’s no combat, which I appreciate. Not that I dislike combat, I just like it when a game can tell a story involving conflict without it involving violence. Okay, there’s some violence, but hopefully you know what I mean. Not every game needs fighting, but it sometimes seems that way.

SIMPLY BUSINESS

The benefit to Promise Mascot Agency being 80% driving around (you can’t get out of the truck) is that the driving feels great. The soundtrack is so terrific that it’s making me consider getting it on vinyl (when I have money, if that ever happens). Driving around the countryside, taking in the sights, watching the town improve as you clean the place up; feels great. They even added a dashboard view to get you right in the kei truck.

The biggest obstacle that is thrown in your way is that your boss needs you to send home money frequently. It’s a decent system. When I first hit the part where this starts being a requirement, I struggled for a while to keep the needle from going horizontal, which gave me good motivation to hurriedly push the mascot agency into the black. I had to take risks and make difficult decisions as to whether I spent money to buy more time or spent it on a big upgrade that would increase my revenue.

I wish this sort of resistance stayed constant, because I eventually broke away and started making money hand over fist and, at that point, things start to drag. Well, okay, that’s sort of my fault. I spent a lot of the early game doing the aforementioned hoovering, so there was less to do in the open world in the latter half of the game. I was left with the mechanical dregs of sending out mascots, dealing with their problems, then talking to them when they needed to increase their social level. Don’t do that. Try to find a good life/work balance. It’ll make it drag less.

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

Like a lot of the game, the business elements are very broad, but not very deep. The deepest part of business, really, is making the offer to new mascots and enticing them to join the business with options like extra shares of the profit, bonuses, guaranteed vacation time, and work share reviews. I quickly learned that promising to increase their profit share at regular intervals because it’s a 5% increase (minimum), every few jobs, and that adds up over time. But, that’s just my advice.

For the most part, all you really do is make selections from a menu and complete a simple card game every so often, which you power up by collecting stuff in the open-world and completing quests. You stock up on items to improve their performance, you make sure they match the jobs you’re sending them on, and then repeat, and repeat, and repeat. You can pick up additional money-making opportunities, but they’re just extra breadth with nothing penetrating deeper.

The worst is the merchandise side-job. You have to keep on playing this crane game to get stock to sell for extra money. The business aspect doesn’t run alongside the crane game, so everything stops for you to play with a UFO Catcher. I love UFO Catcher’s, but that’s not the game I signed up for.

THE DRAGON OF SHIMAZU

While the idea of mascots just being weird creatures that cohabitate the world with humans, the story could be ripped from one of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games. That’s sold extra hard by the fact that The Janitor is given speech by Takaya Kuroda, the voice of Kazama Kiryu. At times, it’s apparent that he’s trying to give a distinct performance, but since Michi is a hyper-competent Yakuza enforcer, exactly as Kiryu is, it still comes across similarly.

However, the story does a better job in showing the shades of grey in the characters than most of the Yakuza games I’ve played. In some ways, it’s more believable, even when it’s centred around promoting mascots. At the same time, it is very dramatic and, like Kaizen’s previous game, Paradise Killer, is great at maintaining a mystery. It’s impressive stuff.

If there’s one weird thing I can point out: a lot of aiding Kaso-Machi comes from creating tourist destinations. If you’re trying to preserve the spirit of a town, making it into a product isn’t really a good way to do it. Good for the economy; not for the culture. But that’s maybe reading into it too much.

DREAMS CAN COME TRUE

Again, I am a bit disappointed by Promise Mascot Agency’s lack of gameplay depth. There’s a lot of stuff to do, but it’s all surface level. However, the same can’t be said about just about everything else. The narrative, the characters, the music, and the atmosphere, are all top shelf. The microprogression might have been what sucked me in for the 25-hours it took for me to (thoroughly) complete the game, but the personality is what made it worthwhile.

There aren’t many games about cruising around in a kei truck. In fact, I can’t name another. There are, perhaps, fewer games about helping chunks of tofu and porn-addicted cats achieve both their dreams and attain gainful employment. Promise Mascot Agency is probably the only one. And that’s reason enough to play it. Everything else – and there’s a lot of everything else – is just butter.

8/10

This review was conducted using a pre-release digital Steam version of the game. It was provided by the developer’s PR.