Promise Mascot Agency review: Showa-era Japanese retro vibes, modern game design chores

If you've played any recent Yakuza / Like A Dragon games – read our Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii review to see what you're missing – there's always one substantial mini-game that feels like it could be its own stand-alone game. Which, in a way, is what Promise Mascot Agency feels like.

Even this game's story of disgraced yakuza lieutenant Michi (coincidentally also voiced by Kazuma Kiryu voice actor Takaya Kuroda) feels like it could have been cribbed from one of Sega's crime dramas – loyalty and tensions between sworn brothers, an incident that involves the loss of 12 billion yen, and bonds between the unlikeliest of characters who've fallen between society's cracks.

After an important deal goes south, Michi's yakuza matriarch fakes his death before dispatching him to Kaso-Machi, a town in Fukuoka that's been in decline for decades, hence why despite the contemporary setting it looks like it hasn't left the 70s.

It's here where his crime family has one remaining business that he now has to try and turn around and make money for in order to help pay off the impossible debt looming over the organisation.

It's a compelling narrative motivation for the management side of Promise Mascot Agency, which has its own quirky charm since you're trying to turn around a failing mascot agency that's also using a love hotel as its office.

It's the kind of weird and wacky scenario that fans of Yakuza developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's games would no doubt gravitate towards, although similar to those series' mini-games, what sounds goofy on paper doesn't always translate so smoothly in the execution.

Promise Mascot Agency review: Showa don't tell

Although the work of UK-based Kaizen Game Works, the Showa-era Japanese retro aesthetic of Promise Mascot Agency is nothing short of exquisite, whether that's the 2D portraits of characters or their 3D renderings in this backwater ghost town.

(I met Promise Mascot Agency's art team and discussed its approach to design and style, and it's worth reading.)

That's largely thanks to concepts from Ikumi Nakamura and Mai Mattori, whose character designs have such rich cultural specificities for its misfit mascots, such as one modelled after a Japanese burial mound or another that's not just an egg but an egg cooked from the heat of an onsen.

These two female collaborators have incidentally also created some unique female human characters, including your matriarch, her two unhinged high school girl bodyguard assassin twins, as well as Shiori, your mascot handler with a habit of radiating cheerfulness one moment then raging demon mode the next.

As you try to help revitalise the town by getting local businesses to hire your mascots, there's some strategy involved as to which mascot to assign to a certain business, while you also want to recruit the quirky locals to be your support heroes.

They basically show up as cards that can help your mascot out when they're in a jam at their job, like getting stuck in doors, being chased by angry bees, or being bombarded by social media trolls.

While there's some strategy involved in selecting the right hero cards, these mascot skits sadly get old very fast and you'll soon wish you can just fast-forward them. You can also opt not to help your mascot but then if they fail their job they also lose more stamina while your earnings are less. Alternatively, you can also buy help items that have a chance of mascots not running into any incidents.

Promise Mascot Agency review: paradise filler

The fundamental issue I have with Promise Mascot Agency is that it constantly bombards you with things to do, which while typical of management sims, really drags the open world exploration.

Despite the charm of driving Michi's beat-up old truck, I also often wished I could just explore the town on foot instead of grappling with the vehicle's physics up hills or when colliding into fences and guardrails.

For the first half of the game as you're exploring Kaso-Machi it's almost every 10-20 seconds that you're getting alerts such as checking on a mascot asking for help or there's another new quest to track before you have to reorient yourself with where you were and where you're trying to get to next, especially in the absence of a navigation system.

I appreciate Kaizen Game Works designing a management sim that's less about fiddling in menus and more about giving you different interactions but the distraction of one fetch quest collectathon after another gets very off-putting.

It makes me appreciate why Yakuza / Like A Dragon mini-games tend to be siloed off into their own interfaces that you can easily sink a few hours into.

One other fundamental difference is that while Yakuza mini-games help you make money to spend on cool items and upgrades, Promise Mascot Agency's loop often feels like you have to put more in just to make seemingly less.

Crucially, it's about sending money to your crime family so that your matriarch stays out of danger from would-be usurpers, but then you're also having to spend money to open new businesses or cut deals with your mascots, and paying running costs each night.

What kept me invested was gradually uncovering the web of corruption and lies of Kaso-Machi, with a conspiracy as deliciously convoluted as any mainline Yakuza game as Michi also finds his redemption with his new family of misfits.

The irony is that I only felt I could enjoy the story in the latter half when I had made enough investments that meant I was able to passively generate enough income and not have the actual management busywork get in the way.