On a dark day in Japan, you find yourself in a fight. You’ve been set up by a rival gang, and it’s your money or your life. You choose your life and lose a lot of money. Disgraced, you’re ousted from the yakuza and sent to go run the Promise Mascot Agency set in a dingy hotel in a creepy town with a giant disembodied pinky finger to help you.
You play as Michi, and are marked as dead in society after being kicked out of your yakuza family. Fun fact: he’s voiced by Takaya Kuroda, the official voice of Yakuza’s Kiryu. You’re now tasked with fixing up the mascot-filled town and the Agency to pay back your rather large debts – or else, as there are people waiting to rough you up if you don’t. To gain these funds, you send your loveable mascots out on jobs. Don’t worry, you have the aforementioned finger, Pinky, to help you out. They’re a well of information and act as your assistant. You can even paint their nail in different designs.
Promise Mascot Agency encapsulates the vibes of those wacky, out-of-pocket side-quests you get in Yakuza, with a little bit of GTA and House Flipper mixed in. What on earth do I mean by that? Well, if you’ve played Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s Dondoko Island management quest, it’s a bit like that, except you drive around in a truck and on an open-world map when not managing your mascots in a menu.
Your roster of mascots might call you for help while on a job, which shows you a livestream of the peril they’ve gotten into – such as To-Fu the giant tofu block who gets stuck in a small doorway – and you must use Hero Cards in a minigame to rectify the situation. Once you fix it, you earn more money, and if you fail, you only get basic pay. Try not to make a mistake, as your bills are expensive, so you need all the cash you can get.
I did get into debt pretty quickly as I needed to pay To-Fu a ¥50k bonus for their work, but also needed to pay ¥40k of daily bills, with only a meager amount of cash in my pocket. My advice is to find another mascot as soon as you can to double up on jobs, and also go hunting for dropped wallets to scrape some cash together
While your mascot staff members are out on jobs, you’re free to zoom around the map in your beaten-up truck with Pinky in the back. The map itself is bigger than I had assumed, with plenty of space to search for those dropped wallets and discarded Hero Cards. It’s similar to how I play GTA – drive badly, crash into things, and create minimal havoc.
When I say I’m bad at driving, I mean I’m terrible. Solidly last place in Mario Kart every time. The same goes for Promise Mascot Agency, where I barely stay on the road. This is a me problem, not the game, though. The good news is that if you happen to shoot off the side of a mountain by accident and end up in the water at the coast, you can still float to the shore, even without the upgrade allowing your truck to function as a boat.
You are meant to crash into things, though. You can drive over trash bags to clean up the area, along with breaking down signs with an evil business-developer on them. You can also clean shrines, find vegetables for a gyaru livestreamer, locate missing cats for the station master, and pick up lost arcade machines for a kappa-themed mascot. There’s absolutely tons to do in this game, and I feel like I barely scratched the surface.
Now let’s take a look at how the game runs. The performance on Nintendo Switch is fine overall and very much playable. All menus and cutscenes – all the drawn stuff, basically – look just dandy, but the overworld graphics do leave a little to be desired. I didn’t find it impacted gameplay too much, though, as you can still see every trash bag and sign you need to break down.
To conclude, if you like a zany management game with fun mechanics and a silly but engrossing story, this game is for you. I really enjoyed playing this, and am excited to hop back in and complete more quests like picking up every trash bag. There’s much more to Promise Mascot Agency than I expected, and it more than lived up to my expectations for a weird and wonderful experience.
If you like indie games, we have a list of recommendations for you. You can also see all the Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders here to snag a new Switch to grow your mascot agency on.