Promise Mascot Agency review: "Yakuza management mechanics are messy, but I'm won over by its truly immaculate bizarre vibes"

When a job goes wrong in Promise Mascot Agency, yakuza lieutenant Michi is forced to fake his own death and live in exile on the orders of his crime family's Matriarch, Shimazu. Put into a precarious position and on the hook for losing loads of money, there's only one business left in the Shimazu family's portfolio: an off the books mascot agency in the backwater town of Kaso-Machi – it's there that Michi must somehow make back billions of yen.

If that's not bad enough, Kaso-Machi is said to be under a curse that slowly kills all male yakuza who set foot in the town. Oh, and the mascot business? That already went under, leaving its sole employee, Pinky, to turn it into a love hotel. Michi has to get back the permits from the corrupt town mayor who has served near limitless terms, and take Pinky under his wing as he recruits enough mascots to make the titular agency thrive – all while sending enough money back to his boss to keep the knives from her throat. With a broom over his shoulder, Michi is known as The Janitor – but even for him this is one heck of a mess to clean up. Doing so means combining a management sim with open world vehicle exploration. Not a common combo.

Like a mascot

Pinky isn't just a cute nickname, by the way. Mascots in this world are people like you or I – not cute suits. Pinky is a literal living, breathing mascot who resembles a giant severed little finger (a reference to yubitsume, the practice of cutting off your little finger in atonement often synonymous with Japanese crime cinema). With ties to the crime family of her own, Pinky is young but fierce, desperate to commit daring crimes alongside Michi and have a good time while doing it.

It's an odd design for a mascot, but Kaso-Machi – rundown as it is – is home to all sorts of misfits and oddballs. The easier to love mascots, after all, have left town for greener pastures with their mascot magic in tow. You'll end up meeting all sorts of strange characters, such as the eternally wet and crying To-Fu to the straight-faced business cat in a suit Salary Nyan.

Residents you befriend are just as eclectic, and can jump in to help at mascot events, from Mr. Mori and Tora, a train conductor and his feline friend who stand watch at the now dilapidated final train stop in the town, to an arcade game obsessed kappa who collects loose change on the cup on his head. There's a lot going on – Promise Mascot Agency is a heady mix between bizarre vibes and multiple gameplay styles that makes it like little else.

One thing Promise Mascot Agency isn't, however, is a straightforward followup to Paradise Killer, the vaporwave murder mystery that put indie developer Kaizen Game Works on the map. Which isn't to say there are no throughlines at all. Promise Mascot Agency is just as visually striking, trading in the bright colors for a film grain showa era effect. Otherwise, the most DNA the two share is how eclectic and hard to pin down both are. Promise Mascot Agency was also developed in collaboration with Ikumi Nakamura (formerly of Tango Gameworks) and Mai Mattori from Unseen, further giving it a unique flavor.

Here, like in Paradise Killer, there is still a lot of exploration. However, in Promise Mascot Agency, it all takes place in Michi's trusty pickup trick as Pinky bounces around in the back. Growing your business means getting out and about in the open world Kaso-Machi, which is spread across a fairly large mountain with ports and farms surrounding it. Meeting mascots allows you to recruit them by offering them a range of perks from better profit percentages from jobs to time off, and meeting business-owning residents means you can start taking jobs from them.

Between them all are numerous collectibles, like bashing down adverts for the mayor's re-election to, once you get the upgrade, scooping up garbage to clean up town. Everything you do increases your fans, and levelling up gets you access to higher paying jobs. Rinse and repeat as you earn enough money to keep progressing through story milestones.

Which can be easier said than done. While Promise Mascot Agency eases you in as you first explore the map, the knives of rival clans begin to come for Matriarch Shimazu soon enough, represented like a fuel gauge with a dagger constantly creeping closer to her. Sending money keeps them at bay, but even what feels like large amounts of cash early on barely moves the needle. Jobs take time to complete too, happening in the background as you send mascots off while you continue to drive around. While the final inches of the Matriarch's death meter takes some time to completely deplete, it can feel dicey as you wait for completed jobs to give you enough to buy just a little more time, rushing to an ATM to send the payment. It can be genuinely tense.

Getting the job done

Jobs themselves can complete automatically, but often your mascots will end up in trouble – a portion of their payment locked away unless you can successfully swoop in to rescue them. These take place as quickfire card games, where you have a limited amount of resources to apply your mascot heroes – the friends you've made and helped power-up along the way. Always comical, these revolve around mundane incidents like mascots getting stuck in a "normal-sized door", streamers trying to get a rise out of them, playful dogs, or malfunctioning vending machines gone wrong. Whether categorized as Social, Engineering, or something else, different stats can help in different situations – and you can also cleverly use mascot heroes to keep drawing and playing extra cards.

The problem with all the above is that, to be honest, on a mechanical level, Promise Mascot Agency is really poorly balanced. Once you've played for long enough, keeping payments going across to Matriarch Shimazu will suddenly go from being really stressful to essentially trivial (for me, around the time I unlocked merch drops for my most popular mascots), raking in more than enough cash for it to matter. Likewise, hoovering up enough collectibles to level up my mascot helpers means that they can easily overcome any of the mascot challenges; that's if the expensive items I can give mascots to lower the chance they'll run into trouble don't trigger (which is all well and good, as these card challenges can get repetitive fast).

Even exploring becomes much more trivial after a couple of truck upgrades – one allowing you to literally target and blast most pick-ups from a distance. Similarly, you quickly learn that being as stingy with perks you offer mascots is for the best too, keeping them active longer – as their other stats will quickly balloon alongside the better jobs you take on. The management aspect of the game becomes meaningless. A power curve is one thing, but it meant Promise Mascot Agency suddenly went from really difficult plate spinning to near perpetual-motion with just the tiniest of nudges.

Still, even though the mechanical systems are flawed, that's not really what the game is all about. At its heart, Promise Mascot Agency is all about the vibes, and there it's nearly flawless. Rocking some fantastic Japanese vocal talent (including Takaya Kuroda as Michi, known as Like a Dragon's Kazuma Kiryu, as well as the likes of Shuhei Yoshida, Ayano Shibuya, Hidetaka Suehiro, and many more), the characters are the true heart of the game.

The story, while silly at first, manages to nail some real emotional beats, while spiralling out into a genuinely twisty crime conspiracy that balances grounded plot elements with its magical mascot powers seamlessly. There's a real sense something sinister is going on as you drive through certain areas too, like empty and ruined apartment buildings abandoned after the town's mining industry fell apart.

Even though there's nothing particularly deep about the way you manage your mascots or improve your friendship with the citizens of Kaso-Machi, the act of driving around and helping them out does mean you feel like you get to them well – and that you're building a sense of community. It might be a town down on its luck, but despite corrupt forces trying to squeeze all it can out of its last gasps, there are real people – human and mascot alike – who want to make things better.

While I was left a bit disappointed there weren't deeper mechanics at play, I finished up Promise Mascot Agency with plenty of fond memories of the new pals I had made along the way. That's one important promise kept.

Up for a similar theming with more action? Check our ranked best Yakuza games for plenty more!