Promise Mascot Agency

Genre: Open-World Action-RPG / Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Promise Mascot Agency is an Open-World game that Combines a variety of odd, disparate elements into a bizarre hodgepodge that surely must have required some amount of mental illness or illicit substance abuse to come up with. It’s one of those games that’s going to be difficult to describe, but I’ll try.

Promise Mascot Agency takes place in a world where mascots aren’t just people in oversized costumes, but actual living creatures, living alongside humans as if it were the most normal thing in the world… oh, but they also still work at mascots advertising sales and store openings and the like. In this world, we follow Michi, a member of the yakuza with a reputation as “The Janitor”… probably because he carries a broom with him everywhere he goes and seems to really like cleaning things.

Anyway, Michi and his yakuza brother get jumped by thugs while delivering a cash payout, and Michi decides to give up the money rather than his brother’s life, a decision that his yakuza family head approves of but to save face must punish. As a result, Michi’s death is faked and he’s shuffled off to the family’s one business that wasn’t compromised, a mascot agency in a town that happens to be protected by a curse said to lead to the death of any yakuza who remains in the town for too long.

Said curse is no joke, because in the world of the game, spirits and curses are very real and tangible, and the town is full of haunted stuff. And trash. And rust. And… yeah, the entire place is pretty run-down, and not exactly the sort of location you expect to get enough visitors to justify frequent mascot events.

As such, Michi takes it upon himself not only to build up the mascot agency itself, but also clean up and turn around the town, all while facing the dual ticking clocks of the deadly curse and the yakuza family’s urgent need for the cash influx he needs to provide them.

You’ll be assisted by a mascot, Pinky, that looks like a bloody severed thumb with a chipped fingernail with an expression that alternates between cutesy and psychopathic, and this is par for the course for mascots in this game – your first actual recruitment, for example, is a dirty-looking piece of tofu that is permanently crying for some reason.

As for what you spend the game actually doing, you’ll be driving around exploring the town while remotely assigning your mascots to work on jobs for local businesses. Each mascot has their own stats and specialties, and will be more successful if paired with the right jobs, but even if a mascot does poorly at a job they’ll still turn a profit.

During the in-game tutorial section, you’ll be starting out with the one mascot, one job location, and a pair of helper “hero” cards used in a card battle minigame that pops up when a mascot inevitably encounters trouble like an unruly fan, a broken vending machine, or getting stuck in a doorway. If you manage to play hero cards that can overpower whatever obstacle you’re dealing with, the mascot will succeed at the job. Otherwise, they’ll fail and you’ll earn less money for that job.

The Open-World gameplay has you looking for stuff hidden around the town and running errands for townsfolk to improve your earning potential in various ways. You can recruit additional mascots so you can assign more mascots to jobs at a time and give your rotating crew of mascots more of a rest between jobs. You can get agreements with more locations to get jobs for mascots more frequently, and have a wider variety of tasks that might better fit your assorted crew. You can recruit more “heroes” and find additional copies of their card to power up that card when it is used. You can do tasks to earn money to buy things and the fan following that acts as a currency to recruit your mascots. You can catch spectral foxes to gain new abilities for your truck enabling you to explore and interact with more parts of the town and its outlying area. Many of the tasks you’ll need to do are odd, but to the game’s credit, there are plenty of them, giving the player good motivation to explore the area as thoroughly as possible.

That said, the actual driving around mechanics are pretty terrible, and sometimes it’s not clear what you’re expected to do to accomplish a particular task, or if you can even do said task yet.

However, the big problem here has to be the presentation and performance on Nintendo Switch. I’ll start by saying that the mascot characters are all designed with a stylistic suck that makes them frequently off-putting. Pinky is particularly off-putting, and she accompanies you throughout much of the game, calling out to you like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s Navi, but with a voice that’s frequently like nails on a chalkboard in how irritating it sounds. On that note, most of the game’s dialogue is voiced, and fairly well, it’s just Pinky’s voice I can’t stand.

However, stylistic choices aside, the real problem here are the 3D visuals, which look somewhere between PlayStation 2-era and Xbox 360-era in how dated and ugly they are. There’s tons of pop-in, ugly muddy textures, a generally dull color palette, overall blurry resolution, and generally pretty bad framerates. From top to bottom, Promise Mascot Agency is an eyesore to look at.

It’s a real shame too, because the bizarre creativity is off the charts here, the Open World is stuffed full of places to see and things to do, and it’s pretty fun to explore and find new stuff throughout the area, even if the actual gameplay of controlling your vehicle is pretty awful. But it’s hard to appreciate those good qualities when looking at this game makes me constantly cringe and causes my eyes to water. If you have a decent tolerance for that sort of thing, and are cool with a lot of weirdness, I’d still recommend Promise Mascot Agency. But oof, that is definitely an issue that makes this a game that will be a “love it or hate it” thing.

tl;dr – Promise Mascot Agency is an Open-World game with Action-RPG and Simulation elements that has you exploring a town while managing a mascot agency in a bonkers world with an insane story. The Open World is filled with places to explore and things to do, and the creativity is outstanding here, but it’s hard to fully appreciate it with the lacking moment-to-moment gameplay and the absolutely ugly visuals and terrible performance on Nintendo Switch. If you have a high tolerance for those things, this is a unique experience well worth trying out, but this definitely isn’t going to be a game for everyone.

Grade: B

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