Promise Mascot Agency

Written by Jason Dailey on 4/7/2025 for PS5  

When I first discovered Promise Mascot Agency in the demo section of the PlayStation Store, I recall thinking, “What the hell is this?” After playing the demo, I was certainly intrigued by its gameplay loop but was still left wondering, “What the hell is this?”

In general video game descriptor terms, it is an open-world business management sim crime drama collect-a-thon. You wouldn’t necessarily surmise all of that about Promise Mascot Agency just by glancing at its page on a digital storefront. While it is trying to be a lot of things, it generally keeps its promises while playing it a bit on the safe side.

You play as Michi, who is also known as “The Janitor” in the Yakuza underworld of Japan. Michi is the top lieutenant for the Shimazu Crime Family who experiences a fall from grace after a deal between syndicates goes awry. It’s a classic tale of underworld position-jostling, betrayal, and…hauntings.

You’re sent to the cursed town of Kaso-Machi to revive its derelict mascot agency, conveniently based out of an old love (sex) hotel. To get you started, you become acquainted with Pinky, a severed finger and mascot herself, who helps you run the agency as your right hand, well, your right-hand pinky, I should say.

All the game’s characters are endearing in their own way, but none more so than Pinky, who has a comedic penchant for violence. The town’s corrupt Mayor causing problems? Kill him and bury his body in the woods, says Pinky. Looking for a nice bonding activity between father and daughter? Pinky suggests there is no better bonding experience than looking for the perfect place to hide a corpse. She quickly became my favorite character, and boy there are some characters in Promise Mascot Agency.

The entire game has Japanese voice acting with English subtitles – a bit of a chore for us English speakers. But honestly, I enjoyed the Japanese acting a lot, with Pinky being the best, of course. The artists at developer Kaizen Game Works also did a great job with character art that changes during dialogue scenes to express various emotions, helping to add visual nuance to the Japanese performances that helped me understand the tone and tenor of the moment.

So, just what is a mascot, and why do they need an agency, you might ask? Mascots are these supernatural, sort of demigod beings that have found a niche in society as event-based entertainers. Think of them like the clown you hire to perform at your kid’s birthday party, only more grotesque.

And that’s where you come in. You will spend most of your time locating and recruiting mascots to represent through the agency, sending them out on jobs to earn some cold hard Yen, which you must kick back to your crime family to keep them afloat. Ultimately, not sending money back home often enough will result in a game over.

Hiring a mascot means that you will have to make an attractive contract offer to get them to sign on. They might need an extra 10% cut on each job, or a mandatory day off after so many jobs to sign on the dotted line. Once they do, you can send them off to a job, which usually has a preferred mascot type. Sending the right type of mascot limits the chances of something going wrong on that job, but inevitably things will go south from time to time.

When they do, you’ll need to jump in and help your mascots out through a basic card-battling minigame that uses collectible cards known as Mascot Support Heroes to defeat whatever obstacle is in a mascot’s way. For such a bonkers game, the obstacles standing in the way of your mascot completing a job may or may not surprise you: normal sized doors, poorly stacked boxes, psychotic cash registers, stalkers, and many more.

Mascot Support Hero cards can be found scattered across the world map but are also awarded for helping the citizens of Kaso-Machi through side quests. Cards can also level up by continuing to help citizens, boosting a card’s attributes in the process. In each card battle, you have a limited number of action points to use, and an enemy health bar to dwindle down, so you’ll have choose each card you play wisely to prevail.

The stakes aren’t all that high though, as failing just means you get a reduced payout on the job, and eventually your cards will be so powerful that there is really no fear of losing, or much thought required.

Mascot Support Hero cards are just one of several collectables in the game, in addition to mayoral candidate posters, shrines in need of cleaning, mascot merchandise, trash pick-ups, and more. The collect-a-thon nature of its open world is one of my favorite aspects of the entire game. In fact, it is one of the most engrossing collect-a-thon style games that I’ve played in a while.

When I got into a flow state of driving or flying around the map picking things up, it was tough to put the controller down at times. When I finished the main story after about 23 hours, I had reached 80% of the total game completion, and I must admit that I’m itching to go back to finish cleaning up everything else on the map. With that said, because of the way I played the game, you could probably golden path the main story in less than 20 hours, I would say.

When you’re not busy coordinating mascot jobs or chasing down icons on the map, you’ll be working on upgrading the various resources in your business network, as well as the town of Kaso-Machi itself. The agency building needs upgrading after years of neglect, with each upgrade granting stat boosts to your mascots, as well as an increase in fans of your agency.

Fans are needed to increase the fame level of the agency. Subsequently that opens up opportunities for more, and better-paying, jobs. Your truck can also be upgraded with contraptions that allow you to glide across the world or shoot Pinky out of a canon to bust up election propaganda from the incumbent Mayor Maeda.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Pinky is also running for Mayor against the corrupt Mr. Maeda and you have to help her win debates? Yeah, this game is nuts. Kaso Machi can also be upgraded, re-opening new businesses and tourist locations that will present new job opportunities and higher payouts. After spending a short while in the early game worried about cash, eventually it became the least of my worries as the Yen flowed in constantly. I almost quit worrying about the business management side of things altogether.

That sentiment sums up my thoughts about Promise Mascot Agency. It’s a game that you can put on a podcast, turn your brain off, and just play. Each of its disparate parts are executed just well enough that the sum is an overall good game. It feels like a “lite” version of everything it is trying to be – Japanese crime drama, business management sim, collect-a-thon – and that’s okay. In other words, if it was strictly 20-plus hours of any single one of those things, I probably would have checked out early on.

Instead, Kaizen Game Works has blended each of those aspects together seamlessly with just the right amount of content and complexity to make a compelling game. They’ve threaded a needle, and if it was up to Pinky, she would stab Mayor Maeda to death with that needle before burying his corpse in the woods with the help of her Dad.