I really like the world of Promise Mascot Agency as a place, not so much the things this open world collect ’em up management sim makes me do to see more of it. I feel like I went through much trouble stealing the sticker-coated notebook of the uber-talented eccentric artist kid in class, only to find it filled with page after page of shopping lists for monstrous quantities of canned goods, each item heavier and blander than the last.
Funny. Charming. And, hot dancing dog blossoms, that soundtrack. But it ultimately feels so graspy and nagging and pointlessly numerical to actually engage with. Like being hounded by push notifications, insistent as unscratched scabs.
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Which is all to say that Promise Mascot Agency either makes it very hard to like something I feel I should, or very easy to dislike something I feel I shouldn’t. Each time I find myself stewing on this, something like a distraught bat with a mining headlamp turns up and cries about how his torch is annoying all the other bats, and I start grinning again. Delight-to-irritation whiplash. A bucket of stealth Legos sprinkled on an absurdly comfy carpet.
Never has a man repeated the specifics of tutorial concept with as much quizzical charisma as Takaya Kuroda (Yakuza’s Kiryu Kazuma), although this hasn’t stopped his character, Michi, getting caught up in some darn underworld mishaps. He ends up exiled to Kaso-Machi, a one-Poppo town with a Yakuza-killing curse, and soon finds himself the boss of the titular agency, recruiting and hiring out the local Yokai-like Mascots for things like store openings and restaurant promotions.
Kaso-Machi feels like a water-logged VHS recording of a once-real place; a phantom’s collection of aspirations and hopes summoned to inhabit neglected brickwork and tin slat rooftops. Its supernatural urban legends cloak real decay and corruption. Haunted mines. Closed train stations. Spooky stories for working class children about the ghosts of their own futures. Neither its residents or Michi’s severed-digit sidekick Pinky let their fierce and clumsy spirits be doused by this, making them easy to champion.
The mayor spunks the waste collection budget on endless aggrandising billboards. You’ll gain fans for each billboard you smash and garbage pile you drive through with the truck that acts as your avatar throughout. Later you’ll get a circus cannon that blasts Pinky at them. Traversal is then on defined by thoughtlessly shooting at automatic target boxes, watching your fan and cash counters creep up, minor rewards for baseline attentiveness.
You’ll meet the residents and they’ll give you jobs to assign your mascots to. Assign the right mascot and give them a vending machine item, and they’ll hopefully avoid a minigame where you’ll use the hero cards you collect to knock the health off amusingly minor hazards like badly-stacked boxes or malfunctioning vending machine. It’s the game’s most involved and wide-reaching minigame and it’s framed as a punishment for not preparing correctly or getting unlucky. After about five times I was forced to agree that, yes, punishment is correct.
You hire out mascots for money to spend on town renovations and agency upgrades for more passive income and buffs measured in the region of 2.5% chances to do things like refresh your mascot’s stamina after jobs. You send some home to your Yakuza family’s matriarch and buy more expensive renovations to make more money. The money arrives at the end of each day, and your mascots eventually get fatigued or go on holiday, so you’re compelled to throw yourself back in the collectathon while you wait to progress.
You find gifts for the residents, clean up shrines, shoot more billboards with your cannon. Pinky makes a bid for mayor at one point, prompting multiple choice rallies you’ll need to have collected the right answers for previously. There’s also a claw machine minigame. You have to collect the prizes elsewhere first. The reward is more money and more stickers in another checklist.
My favourite thing to do in Promise Mascot Agency’s open world is to drive up the highest hill I can find then boost my truck off, flying comical distances even without the wings you’ll eventually find as an upgrade. You come crashing down into a fence to excellently chaotic crashing sound effects, and a dazed Pinky gets cartoon stars swimming around their horrible head.
It’s this sort of care put into the small things that made me love the demo, but that demo’s hour time limit ended up disguising a lot of promising ideas that just don’t end up going anywhere interesting. Even my favourite thing from that demo, the ‘Ask Pinky’ button that felt like such a clever solution to drowning the player in map markers, ends up reliant on tiered reputation progression tied to…I can’t even call it bloat, because it’s the skeleton of the game here.
And I feel like a graceless butcher flensing such enjoyable writing and art down to that skeleton, but truthfully it’s not all that laborious of a hatchet job; it pokes through so noticeably, takes so little paring to get there. It’s probably best described as an exoskeleton, honesty. It’s the first thing you notice, encasing the heart of the game in a shell at once so tiresomely heavy and so brittle in substance.
So, yeah. Not for me. Which is a shame, because I’m certain that if I kept playing, I’d keep finding more things that made me laugh or smile or spark more curiosity about the town’s mysteries, but I’m not willing to push through any more of this cold and oddly soulless churn to see them right now. As a functional open map, it’s a treat-sprinkled diorama. Static and mundane. As a management sim, the busywork is simultaneously so insistent and so lacking in complexity or choice that I ended up on a sort of trudging, mildly annoyed autopilot, like an underpaid shopping centre security guard on a deflated Segway. Deflating to say the least.