Promise Mascot Agency Review
Kaizen Game Works delivers an amazing blend of crime drama and offbeat comedy in this open-world mascot management game.
Promise Mascot Agency. Credit: Kaizen Game Works
Michi is a yakuza lieutenant known as the Janitor—famed for his fearlessness and prowess in cleaning up messes for his bosses. When an important delivery of cash to secure an alliance goes wrong, Michi gets exiled to Kaso-Machi, a dying town plagued by a curse rumored to kill yakuza, where he must revitalize a mascot agency to raise the money needed to pay back the lost cash. He’s got to hire mascots—unique biological beings in this world, not people in costumes—and whip them into shape to succeed.
Promise Mascot Agency makes this ridiculous premise work. As much as the game is about running a mascot agency, it’s also about creating a found family and rallying a town to create a better future in the face of corruption. The game knows exactly how weird it is and leans into it, mixing Japanese crime drama tropes with comedy. The writing is earnest, treating its characters with respect and playing the offbeat plot straight while still being genuinely funny.
Promise Mascot Agency. Credit: Kaizen Game Works
The living mascots are cleverly designed, often referencing Japanese culture in fun ways. Michi’s sidekick, mascot Pinky☆, is a pinky finger severed just below the knuckle, a symbol anyone familiar with yakuza tropes would recognize, and a particularly poignant partner for a disgraced gangster. To-Fu is a living tofu block that can’t stop crying—weeping tofu. Salary-Nyan is a cat in a business suit, a salaryman mascot. These only scratch the surface.
Promise Mascot Agency. Credit: Kaizen Game Works
For most of the game, you drive around in Michi’s Japanese mini truck with Pinky☆ in the flatbed, exploring the town’s open world. There are plenty of collectibles and objectives aside from meeting new mascots and town residents; the game makes it a blast to explore thanks to how good driving the truck around feels. You start with a rocket boost and a jump that helps you navigate all kinds of terrain, and soon begin to find upgrades that allow your truck to fire Pinky☆ like a missile, float on water, glide through the air, and more. Even though you can upgrade the agency office to allow fast travel, I still found myself zooming around in the truck, making crazy jumps and using the glider because of how much fun it was.
Promise Mascot Agency. Credit: Kaizen Game Works
I enjoyed driving around so much that I was often annoyed with the mascot agency management portion of the game. As you progress, you build relationships with businesses and revitalize the town, creating opportunities to send your mascots to events. Most of the time, you just open up the management menu, assign a mascot to a job, and it’ll be completed without incident after some time passes. However, mascots will sometimes get into trouble, and you need to intervene to get a full payment for the job. This takes the form of an optional minigame to salvage the event, where you play Mascot Support Hero cards representing characters you’ve befriended in the game to bring down a hazard’s HP; hazards range from the banal, such as mascots getting stuck in doors or falling over, to the bizarre, like getting chased by malevolent spirits or getting into fights with livestreamers in skintight bodysuits. These segments are funny, but get repetitive after a while and have unskippable animations. I just wanted to get back to driving around.
There’s also a crane minigame you must play if you want to sell mascot-related merchandise for more cash. I admire that the developers included more modes to increase gameplay variety, but this was just tedious to do repeatedly and totally unnecessary in the end because you could make enough money without bothering with it.
Promise Mascot Agency. Credit: Kaizen Game Works
The game’s music and voice acting are highlights. Michi is voiced by Takaya Kuroda, known for his work voicing Kazuma Kiryu in the Yakuza games. Ayano Shibuya is fantastic as Pinky☆. Video game industry icons Shuhei Yoshida and Swery also perform in minor roles.
The graphics are fine; the 3D world and character models aren’t highly detailed. Promise Mascot Agency’s visual design is more impressive, particularly the character and UI designs. The UI is stylish, devoting more attention to typography than most other games. The characters are full of personality, especially the mascots. They’re not very emotive in 3D, but the 2D illustrations you see during dialogue are beautiful and expressive.
Promise Mascot Agency. Credit: Kaizen Game Works
I finished the game in around 17 hours, after spending quite a bit of time hunting for optional quest objectives because I was having so much fun. The story could be completed more quickly. Overall, Promise Mascot Agency is fantastic, succeeding in its blend of crime drama and comedy, but it isn’t without its faults, particularly the repetitive, tedious minigames. These distractions bring down what could have been one of the best offbeat games I’ve played in recent memory.
Promise Mascot Agency will be available on PC (Steam) on April 10, 2025. Console releases (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S) will be available soon.
Overall Score: 8/10
Played on: Steam Deck
