Promise Mascot Agency opens on familiar scenes. You are a yakuza lieutenant known for your murderous prowess, and feared by many. Your legacy is long, as is your shadow. It’s the sort of opening you’d expect from Like a Dragon, a fact made funnier by the knowledge that protagonist Michi is voiced by Takaya Kuroda, aka Like a Dragon‘s Kazuma Kiryu. But in short order, Promise Mascot Agency blows all expectations aside, introducing a bizarre world of living mascots, where your best friend is a giant Pinky toe.
After a job goes wrong, Michi finds himself exiled to the supposedly cursed town of Kaso-Machi, where garbage litters the streets, and a corrupt mayor attempts to stifle growth for his own ends. The aforementioned Pinky is your guide through this town, and on the strength of Pinky’s persona alone, Promise Mascot Agency becomes a joyful indulgence. Even before you get to its chillaxed driving gameplay, and before you find yourself enraptured by its moreish world, Pinky will immediately endear you to this adventure.
She is the plucky, chip-on-her-shoulder child of one of the yakuza’s toughest enforcers (a giant hand), and fiercely defends the rights of Kaso-Machi. With a strong sense of justice and blazing anger, Pinky sets you on a quest to revive the town – after she deems you worthy – and becomes a loyal ally as you take your next steps forward.
It’s a bizarre sight, to see a giant disembodied toe accompanying you as you travel, but Pinky grows on you immediately, as she lays the trackwork for the rise of the newly re-established Promise Mascot Agency, and the game’s overarching story about found family and friendship.
To describe the game only as a mascot-recruiting sim would be incorrect, although it’s a good point to start. On the outer layer of the game, you have a visual novel crime drama about a yakuza family trying to make ends meet. In the middle layer, it’s also a card-based fighting sim, where players wield special character cards to take down enemies like ‘normal-sized doors’ or dark spirits.
But what Promise Mascot Agency really is, at its core, is a relaxing, exploration-based driving sim collect-a-thon. It’s all of these things and more, and somehow, it all fits together. Kaizen Game Works clearly had many ideas about what Promise Mascot Agency should be, and rather than discriminate, it simply said yes. Yes, make it a driving sim, and a card-based combat sim, and a visual novel, and a mascot management game, and a crane game sim, and put fishing in there too, for good measure. What the hell, make Michi’s truck a boat, and a plane, too.
And with a neat little bow, Promise Mascot Agency came to life.
In individual parts, the game isn’t so strange. There’s plenty familiar in its tale of yakuza vengeance. But with an approach like Frankenstein, the game’s development team added part after part, for an experience riddled with strange and wonderful joys. It’s a game that makes you want to take your time, and to devour it all at once.
Like the best RPGs, its side quests are where the real action lies, but the entire thing is also one big, connected side quest. So you’ll find yourself pursuing one string of the central mystery, and then end up shooting garbage bags or curses for three hours. You’ll set off to find a new mascot waiting in a nearby field, and uncover a string of temples in need of cleansing.
All the while, there’s a layered management mechanic on top, as you need to spend time allocating mascots to jobs (and occasionally accompanying them for those turn-based card battles) to ensure you’re making enough money to keep your family alive. It’s a real balancing act, but one that never grates. The systems in Promise Mascot Agency are so different from one another that they’re consistently compelling, and they all loop in together.
Eventually, you may begrudge the mascots that keep failing their jobs despite being sent off with health items (I’m looking at you, Uguichu), but at the very least, there are other options available to you. The game plays loosey-goosey with strict needs in gameplay, allowing you to set off in any direction, and pursue its central mystery with freedom at your fingertips.
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By the time I was starting to unravel the mysteries of Kaso-Machi and the big, mysterious curse on the town, I’d already cleaned up most of the haunting garbage and mayor signs, and the littler curses, just from driving around and vibing in the retro sunset glow. There’s a real pleasure in the act of ignoring the main plot, thanks to cool, carefree vibes.
Promise Mascot Agency is visually designed with a retro feel in mind, with font work and CRT fuzz giving texture to the game’s world. Colours here are warm and slightly washed out, so you get the feeling of watching an older TV show as you drive. It’s particularly novel when you make it to the peaks of mountains, and you can look out across town and see buildings obscured by early morning fog.
Once you unlock your truck’s wings (by catching a roaming fox spirit), you can set off from these mountains, and glide over the scenery, watching your domain flow beneath you, from far above. It’s a beautiful, peaceful sight, and one that lends a sense of grandeur to the bizarreness of the game’s plot.
In quiet moments, you’ll steal away, watching the sun rise in the distance.
Then, you’ll fall into a field and find a creature with strawberries for ears that can barely fight against poorly-stacked boxes, and you’ll remember that as lovely as Promise Mascot Agency is, it’s also very, wonderfully weird.
In that marriage of substance, style, and strangeness, it’s a thoroughly engaging experience – one that I blasted through in just a few days, barely in control of my need to keep forging on. It’s moreish and brilliant that way, even when it’s off-puttingly bizarre. Strong stylistic choices, and a bundle of gameplay mechanics mashed together in surprising fashion make this a very strong adventure, destined to be weirdo favourite.
As one of the weirdos in question, Promise Mascot Agency was absolutely for me.
Four stars: ★★★★
Promise Mascot Agency
Platform(s): PC, PlayStation, Xbox,
Developer: Kaizen Game Works
Publisher: Kaizen Game Works
Release Date: 10 April 2025
A code for Promise Mascot Agency was provided by the publisher and played on Xbox Series X/S for the purposes of this review. GamesHub reviews are rated on a ten-point scale.
