Thank you to Kaizen Game Works for providing Source Gaming with a Steam review copy of Promise Mascot Agency.
Yakuza. Mascots. Agency Simulation while Truck-bound. I could never see myself playing a management job simulation game; simply having a job would be enough. However, this combination presented by Kaizen Game Works with Promise Mascot Agency was intriguing enough to catch my interest. Did it satisfy? Stick through this review to find out!
STORY
Ensuring the safety of 12 Billion Yen ($81,649,320 as of 4/6/2025) or the life of your Oath Brother. Which would you choose? For Michizane Sugawara, the Janitor and Lieutenant of the Shimazu Family, the answer was apparent that summer night. Amidst the delivery of an allyship tribute of 12 Billion Yen from the Nakamura Alliance, Shimazu’s parent, to the business-conscious Hara Federation was intercepted by the Fujiwara Syndicate. Both of the Shimazu’s Lieutenants, Michi and his oath brother, Tokihira, outnumbered by 10 or more, fight their best but for naught. Those Fujiwara men were utilizing guns rather than keeping it fair with fists, and with Tokihira’s life, the future of the Shimazu, threatened with a bullet to the head – Michi surrenders the money.
Although looking out for family was the right move, it doesn’t change the danger the Shimazu Family now faces. With it being his responsibility, Michi will face the consequences – death… as to be believed by the public. In reality, the Shimazu family still needs to make 12 Billion Yen, and they wouldn’t want to kill Michi. Thus, they’ve given him a different role in the cursed town of Kaso-Machi.
Driven away on the back of his truck in a body bag, Michi is left at the Promise Hotel. This is where he meets Pinky, an assertive delinquent mascot abandoned here who ran the original Mascot Agency before it fell apart and became a dinky hotel. With Michi here, now it’s time to give the Promise Mascot Agency another go and earn some money! However, it won’t be easy, as Michi, Pinky, and their business will not only face the struggles of management and being intertwined in the world of the underground, but also the political drama and suffering that has plagued Kaso-Machi due to its cruel mayor, Maeda.
GAMEPLAY
As one would imagine, you need Mascots to run a Mascot Agency. While your first mascot, To-fu, comes to the agency looking for a job, the majority will be found by exploring Kaso-Machi for various lonely mascots looking for work and enticing them with employment by offering certain worker benefits and/or pay cuts. Then, as you continue in your exploration of the town, you’ll run into various people such as business owners, teachers, farmers, train conductors, and more who are looking to rejuvenate their dreams and establishments with promotions. When these job opportunities open, you can send your available mascots to work these positions to earn for themselves and the business.
With these funds, you’ll not only save up to send money back to the Shimazu family as the story progresses, but also for a variety of other utilizations: giving the previously negotiated bonuses or pay raises to your employees, purchasing items to support your Mascots, and most importantly, paying various bills. You’re still running your business out of a hotel, naturally, you’d have bills to pay. At the end of EVERY DAY. Thus, you must ensure your employees work often to make you money while still supporting them actively and passively. Actively supporting your mascots looks like this:
To elaborate on what you just saw, sending your Mascots out on the job is not the end of your role as their manager. When they’re on the job, Mascots will often face troubles such as being stuck in a door, dealing with broken machines, stalkers, and much more. To help them, you could give them items before the job that have a chance to protect them from such dangers. However, the more beneficial method is sending them with nothing and assisting when they call for help. When you answer their call, you’ll tune into the livestream hosting their event and enter into a one-sided card game with your Mascot Support Hero Cards. As their name states, these are cards of Kaso-Machi citizens and literal heroes that seek to support your Mascots. Thus, with their various card stats, you can damage the current danger by playing your cards right and reducing its health to 0, immediately ending the job and receiving the payout. Such is the reason why I’d say sending mascots with nothing can be more beneficial. Although sending Mascots off with special items allows you to progress with other tasks in Kaso-Machi, receiving payouts urgently lets you send money more frequently to your family. Additionally, I prefer receiving funds rapidly to assess what my utilization for it may be, upgrading the company’s functions, or supporting the people of Kaso-Machi with their dreams.
That last part is where gameplay and story weave together to present the heart of Promise Mascot Agency. With various business owners and citizens you interact with, they want to help you as much as you help them; this is why they’re most of your Mascot Support Hero Cards. However, as they’re all people with their own lives and troubles, you can best support them by tackling their Town Quests. This often pertains to travelling across the city and finding their scattered items, such as treasured anime DVDs, old shmup arcades, cleaning shrines, or finding lost kittens. In doing so, the layers of that character and Michi will peel back, revealing many charming personalities and interests. It’s hard to choose just one as they’re all so charming, but one that resonated with me most was Monouge the Kappa. A retired mascot that saw more passion in giving a home to old arcade shmups. As you collect more trashed arcade cabinets, more special conversations unlock about his interest in preserving these fictional classic titles. What’s best about it is seeing his interests clash with those of the younger Pinky, an older generation gamer, with those of the modern interests, and where the experiences clash or overlap. Your Promise Mascot Agency isn’t just about fixing Michi’s mistake for the Shimazu family. It’s about ensuring the dreams of people and mascots can be achieved. Additionally, helping them out strengthens their Support Cards for helping mascots.
This mindset also applies to your Mascots. As you support them on the job with better working conditions, their life satisfaction will increase. Unlocking each mascot’s satisfaction limit will progress parts of their story, unveiling aspects of their characters, and help achieve their goals, such as becoming permanent mascots of newer establishments or conquering their social difficulties.
By the way, this is all done from the seat of your truck. As stated at the beginning of this review, you are TRUCK-bound. All traversal is done from Michi in the driver seat and Pinky in the back, as you cruise, drift, boost, tumble, and even glide across Kaso-Machi. I think Promise Mascot Agency faces some challenges with this: motion sickness and reversing. When I entered the first big driving sequence, my head immediately drove into mush due to the default sensitivity options. While there are accessibility options with camera re-centering or placing a focus dot onto the screen, nothing could help shake off the feeling aside from reducing some of the sensitivity and just getting used to it. The second issue may be more personal, as I don’t have a driver’s license. Getting accustomed to driving in reverse and turning left or right, which is the inverse of your direction input, is quite difficult.
However, even with those stated challenges, the uniqueness of Promise Mascot Agency’s choice in traversal and the freedom to drive in whichever comedic nature I please make up for it all. There’s nothing like a good stunt drive to make me laugh, despite heights in video games still shifting me into vertigo. Of course, what better to accompany the drive than a fantastic view and nice tunes?
PRESENTATION
Whether it’s in the driver’s seat or amidst conversation with the locals, Promise Mascot Agency wants you to feel immersed in its aim to capture the feeling of Showa-era, 1980s Japan. Where such could be communicated simply due to the rural setting of Kaso-Machi, a large part of it goes to the game’s drab color palette and lack of showing modern technology. Although I did state there were livestreams earlier and characters will occasionally pull out a smart device, your time exploring the sparsely-populated town as you drive by rivers, local shrines, and speak to older individuals, outnumber those instances.
Offsetting the drab and rural setting are also the mascots themselves, colorful and quite goofy. If you didn’t happen to realize it yet, these are not people in costumes. These mascots are just as sentient as humans and aim to stick out with their simplistic designs, making them quite charming as you unfold what they’re about. As you see their character illustrations during dialogue, the thought of, “Oh, I could probably draw these characters as well,” entered my mind quite often, which doesn’t happen too often with games that I play.
As always, there are many music tracks for you to find across Kaso-Machi and listen to amidst your drives. The longer you hear them, the more soothed you’ll be on your journey, which creates a unique blend that Promise Mascot Agency has. Passionately written characters in a dreary dying town, while you’re truck-bound stunt driving alongside silly mascots with a knack for dark humor, soothed by great music and countryside views.
There’s also props to be given for the game’s aims at accessibility. To share a few examples: you can make driving easier on your hand with the use of Tap-driving rather than holding to accelerate; there are various font options to ensure readability; and as stated prior, you can utilize controller sensitivity or display options to make driving reduce motion sickness. One detail within the game that I appreciated was the usage of volume mixing and music alterations. As characters spoke, the background music would turn down to ensure that you could hear the voice acting, whether you could understand the Japanese dialogue without the text or not. Additionally, the music will slow down when menus are open, giving you something to appreciate even while managing the business or checking out the world map.
Final Thoughts
Although I was worried about my enjoyment in playing a game focused on management simulation, Kaizen Game Works wrapped Promise Mascot Agency in a unique mixture of contagious passion and quirkiness. There are more aspects within the game that I haven’t touched upon, such as the political debates that you can have or the supernatural findings within Kaso-Machi, but I think those are all aspects one will fully appreciate once they’ve had the game in their hand for long enough. If you’re someone always looking for unique gameplay experiences, especially from indie developers, Promise Mascot Agency would make a great title for you to experience.
Promise Mascot Agency releases on Steam, in addition to all major platforms, on April 10th, 2025. Thank you once again to Kaizen Game Works for providing Source Gaming with a review copy.
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