“The dog wants to play,” screams the announcer, “THE DOG WANTS TO PLAY DURING A GODDAMN MASCOT EVENT!”
He’s not wrong. The mascot I’ve sent on this job is Trororo, a red cat whose main personality trait is really hating pixelation in hardcore adult videos. Poor guy just can’t handle it, and he needs a bit of help to handle this playful pooch.
It’s a good thing, then, that he’s a client of the Promise Mascot Agency, run by a rather psychotic finger mascot called Pinky and a banished Yakuza called Michi. The latter’s voiced by the same actor as the Like A Dragon series’ Dragon of Dojima, and is something like Kiryu’s unofficial mascot realm twin, right down to the dry wit and stoic expression. The pair are quick to pull up the live stream of the mascot event, and start using hero cards to chip away at the nuisance health of the disruption.
Slam! They enlist the help of two stray cats and a bar mama dressed head to toe in latex, and the dog stops chasing Trororo. The day has been saved, just like it was not too long ago, when To-Fu, a white block of tearful mascottyness, accidentally got stuck in a door frame. Briefly, peril ensued, money was at risk. Then, help arrived.
Help from Promise Mascot Agency’s key duo, who form an effective, sometimes disturbing, and regularly utterly hilarious pairing as they roam the simultaneously beautiful and unnerving roads in and around the cursed town of Kaso-Machi in their cute little Kei-truck. As you’d expect from an “open-world narrative adventure mascot management simulator”, the job of these two unlikely allies is to revive the town’s mascot agency and turn it into a rip-roaring success.
Kaizen Game Works
Based out of a former love hotel that’s full of creepy mannequins, you play as Michi and serve as the driver, while Pinky sits in the rear of the pickup, waiting for you to ask them advice that might attract a response that’ll see their artwork adorned with veins popping out or the disappearance of pupils in response to the saying of spooky things. Awaiting them in the open world are an array of utterly weird mascots to recruit – there were three in the demo I played, with the third being a green goth girl called Kofun who likes hanging out graveyards – by offering them deals with the agency.
You’ll have to choose whether to offer benefits like a higher cut or time off every six weeks in order to convince them to join, but once they’re in you can start sending them out on mascot jobs unlocked by twisting the arm of folks around town like Endo, a poor shopping district head honcho who’s constantly on the phone with his wife as he chats to you. The goal is to get your agency’s fame level up and earn more cash, building a business staffed by weird people who’ll be ferried to and from their functions by Shiori, an atomic bomb of a young woman who on at least one occasion during the demo was suddenly surrounded by explosions like an Anime Terminator.
It’s a fun little gameplay loop that’s simple to grasp and delivered with enough irreverent humour to have you perma-sniggering when you’re not bopping along to the game’s soundtrack, which blends funky and haunting better than a zombified Stevie Wonder. The story that gives you a reason to do all of this is very Like A Dragon in the same way that Michi is – the Yakuza’s been forced to go and hide out in a cursed town because of an underworld deal gone wrong, so naturally he gets roped into overthrowing its corrupt mayor.
Pinky’s the driving force behind this, and is one of the most wonderfully unhinged, but also charming, characters I’ve ever encountered in a video game from what I’ve seen and heard of her so far. Her dialogue is delivered with terrifyingly cute flair and venom by Legend of Zelda voice actress Ayano Shibuya, who I’ve found to be the transcendent voice of what’s a very star-studded cast in the just under two hours I’ve played. She’s been given a strong role, with everything down to the game’s cartoony character art feeling like it has more bizarre expressions to swap in for the angry finger mascot than anyone else, but she’s really gone all in with it. The result is a bookkeeping Goro Majima dialled up to 1000, whose blade is her sharp tongue and whose eyepatch is a nail on her back that you can paint different colours, because video game.
She rides your Daihatsu-looking chariot like Caesar touring the colosseum as it motors around Kaso-Machi, finding villagers with cool little stories to recruit into the mascot saviour ranks, cleaning up Shinto shrines for stat boosts, and gathering up all manner of different collectables either for your own safekeeping, or to help out one of those villagers. That’s a part of the game I can see perhaps getting a bit tiresome towards the end of the full thing, if it starts to feel a bit too fetch-questy, but in the early game bit that is the demo, jobs finish just regularly enough to break things up nicely.
Overall, the whole thing has the feel of Like A Dragon/Yakuza spin-off conceived during an evening that saw more drugs inhaled than the entirety of Kamurocho could manage in a month. I say that as a compliment to be clear, this is far more than anything resembling a pale imitation of RGG studio’s works.
From what I’ve played of Promise Mascot Agency so far, it nails the kind of convivial, often outlandish tone that’s still genuine enough to make you buy into the story it’s trying to tell you often get in those games about Yakuza getting up to hijinks and heartbreak. You never feel like the game is in service of the jokes, but instead that they serve the game, and can be swiftly chased away whenever it wants to switch gears.
It’s that – along with how deftly its collecting elements negotiate the line between engaging tasks and tedious busywork – which’ll be the biggest test the full version will face. The things that decide whether PMA goes down as just a fun thing that you play for a little while, then put down. Or something that really takes off as a game you can entice your mates to try for the memes, and watch gleefully as they get sucked so deeply into the world of mad mascots that they start quoting Pinky off the cuff in regular conversation.
We’ll just have to see if, like Trororo with that pesky playful pup, Promise Mascot Agency can properly stick the landing and pull off the wonderfully wacky event it’s trying to stage. So far, I’d say the signs are looking good once the rest arrives like a gang of helpful mascot heroes.