Promise Mascot Agency

2025-05-14
Promise Mascot Agency won me over immediately which I guess isn’t a surprise when on paper it’s a game seemingly built for my weeb ass. A game where you drive around a podunk Japanese town in an amphibious/flying kei truck as a yakuza voiced by Kiryu’s VA, paired with an anthropomorphic severed finger, signing up mascots that range from a wet egg to a gutted eel to your ever-expanding capitalist venture. All while engaging in side hustle after side hustle.

In reality PMA is a game of side hustles. Running the mascot agency itself is a management game only a little more sophisticated than your average Yakuza side game (think Real Estate x Cabaret Club). After that you’re picking up trash, raiding vending machines, shooting ghosts, and running over signs. Really, what you’re doing is map clearing. PMA is one part visual novel, one part management game, and one part open world map clearing sesh. And instead of that being a black mark against it--like it often is when the developer starts with “Ubi” and ends with “soft”--here it’s delightful. This is largely due to how not large the landmass is, meaning you can cover it all in a reasonable time. More importantly it’s due to the fact that everything you collect and do ties back to the mascot agency. Drifting into that sign causes your fans to go up, your fans going up means you unlock new mascots, new mascots means more jobs, more jobs means more money, on and on. It’s a brilliant little flywheel that means every minute you sit down to relax and hoon that little Japanese truck around you are making progress.

At its heart, Promise Mascot Agency is all about progress. It’s about Kaso-Machi, a small down-and-out town stuck in the doldrums until you and your posse of weirdos rouse it and bit by bit help it to change, to improve. It’s one of my favorite things in a game when all the small things you do in-game start to add up and are visually represented in the game. Here you get to see Kaso-Machi start as a proper Dump Supreme ghost town covered in trash bags and the corrupt mayor's garish signs to get converted into a quaint little town with paper lanterns on every building and people milling about.

The only thing holding me back from slapping this with a fat 5/5 rating is that that progress does begin to slow as you play. The first 5 to 10 hours I couldn’t wait to sit down and visit Kaso-Machi but fundamentally what you're doing in hour 2 is the same thing you're doing in hour 10. And after the 50th time intervening in one of my mascots tripping down a flight of stairs I started to get tired. It doesn't help that the story that weaves all the gameplay together doesn't feel sophisticated enough to carry the game for its 15 hour runtime. Narratively the game's core mysteries surrounding Kaso-Machi, its curse, and the mines end up being terrifically uninteresting. You can tell the developers wanted to go for the Yakuza “big time conspiracy” plot but the end result comes up a little short. Both in terms of the let down of the reveals but also how damn plodding and repetitive it can be. Yeah, why don’t you tell me what went down in the mines for the 8th time, Grandma of Anthropomorphic Severed Finger?

These are minor quibbles in the face of such pristine vibes as Promise Mascot Agency has. Where else are you rewarded by exploring the world by having more bangin’ tracks get added to the soundtrack as you drive around? Or watch an otherworldly mascot who speaks only in abstract telepathic riddles be taken very seriously by a yakuza? Hop in the back of the truck, I’ll show you around. You'll like Pinky. Actually you might hate her.

BONUS My Top 5 Mascots

1. Kaso-Kamouri. Goofy bat boy who feels ostracized by other bats because of his miner-helmet lamp? Yes. YES.
2. Fuji-Kun. Only mascot who knows about shreddin’ that gnar gnar, dude.
3. Salary Nyan. A cat in a business suit. Need I say more?
4. Kaki-Gory. She’s so cuuuute. The speech impediment because of the fangs is so good.
5. To-Fu. Why’s he missing a chunk? Who did this?!