Throughout the events of Promise Mascot Agency, I was Pinky’s ride. Anywhere that she needed to go, I had to ferry her in my crappy little truck. As a matter of fact, I was responsible for the transport of any and every mascot that stumbled through the doors of the Promise Mascot Agency and came under my employ. When Kofun needed to go to a nearby graveyard, I was the guy for the job. When Trororo needed a lift to the local adult store, I begrudgingly told him to hop in. Be it by land, air, or sea, it became my responsibility, and mine alone, to make sure everyone got where they needed to go.
Promise Mascot Agency is a game filled to the brim with chores and mundane tasks like this. As I traveled across the isle of Kaso-Machi, drifting in and out of decrepit villages and farm fields, I found that Promise Mascot Agency’s cast was filled with folks in need of some assistance. The English teacher who worked unpaid overtime shifts to put on a night school at her underfunded workplace. The nearby mechanic with an insatiable curiosity for the occult, and no time between his job and family. If a shrine needed to be swept, I was there with a broom in a split second. Whether it was the local barkeep in a gimp suit, the streamer-turned-farmer, or of course, the disenfranchised youth, I was there with an olive branch to extend.
Promise Mascot Agency probably sounds like a convoluted game. It is. In one breath, it is a title about an ex-yakuza–handsomely voiced by the same actor behind Kiryu in the Yakuza games–driving around a countryside, rounding up seemingly endless collectibles and upgrades, and sending living mascots (like a giant crying tofu block) out on jobs via a simplistic management system and card-based minigame. In the latter, you must play support cards with differing strengths and weaknesses as a mascot performs a job in order to beat a troubling interference that arises and assure the job is a success. In another breath, it is a full-throated exercise in the lengths of compassion and empathy. It is rarely sleek and sexy about it–Promise Mascot Agency doesn’t feature over-the-top set pieces or hide slick new super moves to reward the player for completing its long list of chores. But real, tender empathy for your fellow man rarely does look so good, and Promise Mascot Agency’s unglamorous honesty is something I’ve come to admire from one of 2025’s best and brightest games.
When you first arrive in Kaso-Machi and take on stewardship of the mascot agency, your primary goal is to drive better foot traffic to the formerly popular tourist destinations around town. Due to the dwindling economic status of the island, most of the people who have survived its trials and tribulations have moved on from it. All that’s left behind are pockets of increasingly poorer people who are either too proud to leave or simply stuck. The economy needs a shot in the arm, and so it falls on you as Michi–who has been cast out from the yakuza for a job gone wrong–to send in mascots to the few businesses still operating, drum up interest, and invest your earnings into other ventures and mascots around Kaso-Machi.
Progress is slow but steady. Before you know it, districts that once seemed destined to fade into nothingness begin displaying faint signs of life again. A long-dormant festival is resurrected and, with time, this energy ripples outward to the rest of the island. The largely abandoned train station in the heart of town, which is presided over by a charming man and his cat-with-a-hat, is brought back from the brink of redundancy. A few towns over from Kaso-Machi’s central hub, you revive an arcade. As the cultural centers and infrastructure of Kaso-Machi are resurrected, life in the reportedly cursed isle begins to flourish once more, and its residents invest that good will and energy back into you, the catalyst for this change.
Sure, what I’m describing is a fairly standard upgrade system, but something about the way Promise Mascot Agency conveys them makes it stand above its peers. The “power-ups” gifted to Michi and Pinky aren’t really the kind of skills that the player can then turn around and use for their own benefit like a standard skill tree or progression system. For example, you get a turbo upgrade for your truck, but it doesn’t benefit you alone to use it. There are no races in Promise Mascot Agency, though a post-launch update did add time trials. It is, however, useful in getting you, and whomever you’re carrying, to your destination more quickly and continuing to help and delegate tasks around the island. The same goes for the eventual boat and flying upgrades you gain as well.
Spoilers for Promise Mascot Agency follow.
The cannon upgrade you receive partway through Promise Mascot Agency almost appears like the moment the game might introduce some kind of vehicular combat. Instead, you use it to launch Pinky, Promise Mascot Agency’s sociopathic companion character, at piles of trash, since one of the side-activities you’re invited to take part in is to clear Kaso-machi’s abundance of garbage You can additionally fire her at reelection signs for the corrupt mayor, whom Pinky winds up running against in the game’s final act! Otherwise, the cannon is almost comically useless: It will just launch Pinky straight up into the sky to the benefit of no one at all.
It is kind of funny how mundane Promise Mascot Agency turns out to be. It’s a lot like the Yakuza games in that sense, which feature no shortage of oddball characters on sometimes incomprehensible journeys that often resolve themselves in deeply humane, relatable, and sometimes abjectly dull ways. It is a perspective on the human condition I resonate with on a profound level, and it is one I was so happy to find beneath the surface of Promise Mascot Agency. It’s why I reveled in the simplistic motivations of its cast, and why I found myself entranced by the busywork they constantly dropped on me, as well as the mission of bettering the lives of everyone in Kaso-Machi. Of building a community that could withstand the corruption of local governance, overcome its grisly and tragic past, and forge a brighter future together.
All of the community-building the player spends the game toiling away at–all the garbage you clean, signs you take down, and businesses you bring back to Kaso-Machi–comes to a head in the game’s rousing finale. To make a complicated matter short, the continued existence of your agency, which has provided a home to mascots, economic stability to the island, and exposed local corruption, is being threatened. The only way to assure it continues is to win a national competition that is, as becomes obvious, rigged against you.
You lose, and you lose quite badly. But at Michi’s lowest point, he retreats to a mind palace of sorts (Pinky dubs it a “metaphysical nightmare”) and comes face to face with everyone he’s helped–that you, the player, have helped. Every mascot we employed, every business owner we aided, every teenage thug we straightened out, and even members of the yakuza family that had tossed us out appeared to Michi. An island’s worth of friendly faces propped us up, dusted us off, and reminded us that we weren’t alone.
The end of the game plays out like a gauntlet of Promise Mascot Agency’s card-based minigame. Only, by the game’s end, all of your allies’ support cards have been consolidated into a handful of overpowered ones that wipe out any threat with a single play. And as I cruised to Promise Mascot Agency’s end on the back of the community that I’d spent 20+ hours building and fortifying, I couldn’t help but think that of course the strongest power of them all was the power of friendship. Who would’ve thought that I’d find one of the richest examples of community in one of the most bizarre games about driving a human-sized, sentient (and not to mention, homicidal) thumb around town?