Promise Mascot Agency

Cool unique little game where you drive around a small Japanese village running a rent-a-mascot agency. The game is divided between the driving sections, which mostly play out as an exploration / collectathon game, and the mascot management, which is split between using menus to send them on missions, and playing a card game if they get stuck on missions. It's a fairly chilled out game over-all. There are only 6 or so missions that could be described as anything close to racing and they can be easily cheesed with a fully upgraded truck. A lot of time will be spent getting to know the local townspeople and everyone's got their own little side mission to play through. I recommend the game over-all. And it's absolutely worth a play if if looks appealing to you, but there are some small caveats. Firstly is that a lot of the side missions are very repetitive. This can lead to them out-staying their welcome a bit. There's a series of missions later on where you must win a debate. I think there's eight of them over all. And while the missions themselves aren't bad, every single one has the same mini intro-cutscene, the same dialogue between each debate question, and the same outro cutscene. Just very tedious. This also isn't helped by the game not being very difficult at all. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, It is a chilled out relaxing game. But when it's almost impossible to fail the mascot card mission minigames they become incredibly frustrating when they keep interrupting you chasing down the last few collectables. Lastly, the game is slightly woke. It's not a big deal-breaker for me, but some are more sensitive so I'll mention it here. There's a character in the game who is an exchange teacher from London. She's a sub-Saharan African. This was so jarring to me that I had to alt-tab out and check to see if the devs were actually Japanese as I had assumed. Because it's such a western woke trope that it just seemed out of place. Sure enough the devs are actually two white English guys. Makes a lot more sense now. This character isn't in the game a massive amount, though they do start to show up a bit more towards the end. So I just ignored it for the most part. There's a few other things that, now that I know the devs are slightly woke, seemed a bit annoying. But nothing is too massively in-your-face about anything. As I said, I found it easy enough to ignore. One last minor snag is that there's no real reward or even recognition of 100%ing the game. I've completed every mascots life fullfillment thing, done every sidequest, found every collectable, leveled up every hero card... Everything complete and full and there's nothing. No little cut-scene in-game. No cheevo... A bit of a let down to be honest. Ultimately it's worth a play if you like these kinds of games. Some minor ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ aside, and a comparatively weak last quarter drag it down a bit, but overall it's a very good game.

I've been having a blast playing Promise Mascot Agency. It is undoubtedly one of the best indie games I've played. Our character, Michizane, is voiced by Takaya Kuroda (aka John Yakuza). And, well, he is a yakuza. After a huge mistake, he has to fake his death and gets sent to Kaso-Machi; a small, cursed town that kills every yakuza who steps into it. I personally loved exploring Kaso-Machi. The town is bizarre, but that makes you want to explore even more. Driving around the town is fun too, and you get a much better experience as you upgrade your Truck-kun. One thing I disliked is the glide; it feels really hard to control in some situations. I wish they had implemented it better, but I can't complain much since this is an indie game. As you spend more time playing, you start to get deeply involved in the town's problems: the mayor is corrupt and uses the town for his personal benefit, businesses are failing left and right, and poverty forces people to work jobs they hate. In order to earn money and fulfill a promise, you start running an abandoned mascot agency, basically rebuilding it from scratch. But there's something truly amazing about this: you can actually save this town, subvert the mayor, and even get Pinky elected! That's when you shine. You can find and recruit mascots from different places, backing them up with your mascot hero cards if they ever end up in a bad situation. You can personally talk to them and help them achieve their goals. You can invest your own money to fix roads and structures, directly helping the locals find their own path and feel hope again. By doing that, you see immediate, rewarding results. People open new businesses thanks to you, tourists start visiting Kaso-Machi, and the whole town slowly comes back to life. I wish the devs success with their game, and I hope to see more from them. I highly recommend everyone to give the game a try. I wish we had a radio to play any soundtrack we wanted. I'd love to listen to Promises Lost while driving around Kaso-Machi, but that's not possible afaik.

(Note: ignoring AFK time would be about 20 hours for all achievements) This is special. While I don't like it quite as much as their previous game, [i] Paradise KIller[/i], I would still put it in the realm of 8.5-9/10. They nailed that comfy, almost liminal aesthetic, yet again. They are just so good at making these compelling narratives that almost just act as an excuse to explore a weird world. If you like cozy, open-world exploration, and weird (simulated) Japanese aesthetics, this is a game for you. What it isn't, however, is an RPG, which is the 2nd most popular tag for it as of this moment on the Steam page. This also isn't really a simulation or a strategy game, either. The gameplay here is almost entirely driving your kei truck around the island doing random chores for the folks living on it. Basically, do not expect this to have any interesting gameplay at all. The closest you ever really get to it are some of the races, and those races are by far the worst/least interesting parts of the game, as there is both something subtly wrong with your boost activating, and something subtly wrong about the car physics. For normal gameplay, these don't matter at all, but some of the races really require you to have a decent grapple of the controls, and they just are not that good. There are also a bunch of superficial gameplay elements going on here, but again, they are just that; superficial. All of your actual mascot agency stuff is intentionally extremely simple and honestly almost completely ignorable (I'm not sure exactly how much of the game is required to 100% the achievements off the top of my head, but it's really not very much). This is a visual novel where you drive to the next section of dialogue. You probably already know exactly how appealing this is to you. If you don't like reading, do not buy this game. You will not like it. If you like reading, or at least like fun narratives, this is a great, short game. If you aren't going for all achievements you could probably beat the game in 8 or so hours pretty effortlessly. If you're going for a real 100%, expect maybe 25-30. All achievements and some extra stuff, maybe 15-25. Really great game. The developers are quickly becoming one of my favorite teams.

Pinky is best girl. It's a very cozy collectathon with some light mascot management thrown in. I was pleasantly surprised that they utilized my DualSense controller's adaptive triggers to create resistance based off of my current driving speed/boosting.

Promise Mascot Agency is a small game that I had a lot of fun with. Officially described as an "open world mascot management crime drama", it actually perfectly fits the game! With that mix of serious and goofy, plus its slightly "dumb/wtf" vibe, it's got all the hallmarks of a Japanese game, and yet it's actually a game from a small UK indie studio :) You can really feel the passion they poured into it, which is just nice to see. You play as Michi, a yakuza who, to make up for a screw-up that stained his clan's name, gets exiled to Kaso-Machi, a small rural island village, where he has to take over running a run-down mascot agency to pay off his debt. It's a big mashup of management game, exploration (driving around the island in a kei truck), storytelling, investigation, dumb minigames, and collecting stuff. I'm clearly not an achievement hunter, but I got pretty hooked on the collect-a-thon side of it, if only for the exploration and discovery it gave me. It's not a flawless game, some parts are a bit clunky (I found the mascot rescues with hero cards often annoying, and driving the truck is kind of a drag too, though I think that's ± intentional to keep that beat-up old truck feel... but hey, you can tune it up, and it becomes a lot more fun!). Vibe-wise, it's genuinely really funny, some characters are super likeable (Pinky⭐, To-Fu), and Pinky⭐ in particular is really well written, with her blunt, kinda trashy, no-filter tone. Shout-out to her voice actress, Ayano Shibuya, who played a big part in how much I appreciated the character! I'd only seen the trailer, it looked really dumb and fun, so I gave it a shot, and I don't regret it one bit!

おお、ちゃんとストーリーがわかる！ 「パラダイス・キラー」のクリエイターがおくる。で感じるストーリーの不安は杞憂でした。 全アチーブメント取得。シナリオとしては王道っちゃ王道なんですが、本作独自のマスコット（種族名になるのか？）が良い味を出してる。基本的にストーリーやキャラを楽しみながらオープンワールドを探索するゲームで、そこまで肩肘を張る必要はない。序盤の金策は緊張感があるかも。 [list] [*]アチーブメントが地図に載ってない収集100%「ではない」 [*]移動は快適 [*]つまらなくはないが、何回も遊びたくないミニゲームがある [/list]

If you’re coming from Kaizen Game Works’ previous title, this game is very different. Kaizen’s DNA is still all over it, and you can see a throughline of tones and vibes, but it’s not the same game at all, nor is it a sequel. I don’t think that judging PMA as a follow-up to PK is entirely correct. In ways where PK is chill, PMA is manic. In ways PK is focused, PMA gives a wealth of variety. Where PK has you play as a double-jumping investigator, PMA has you navigate as a truck–a glorious, physics-y, jumping, gliding, shooting, trash-collecting truck. PMA is even wilder and weirder than its predecessor, with more heart. The main game has you driving around the small Japanese town of Kaso-Machi, recruiting mascots, sending them on jobs, and paying bills. There is also an involved story about the town’s residents, political corruption, and the Yakuza. At heart, though, this game is about business management. Unlike Paradise Killer, this game has a fail-state. If you don’t manage your money well, you could get a game over. There is a satisfying amount of mascots to recruit, business/town/truck upgrades to unlock, and town to explore. There is also a UFO-catcher style crane game. I did just about everything in the game over the course of 11 hours. I do have one criticism, and that’s the amount of spoken dialogue. It’s too much! I counted 47 text boxes after bringing one of may vegetables to a character for a side-quest. That’s pressing the A button 47 times for a minor interaction that gives you some character insight, but does not advance the plot. Unlike in Paradise Killer, understanding the characters is not a central mechanic, and there will be no decisions you have to make based on the information in the conversation. These characters are (mostly) charming, but man do they gab! I ending up mashing past a lot of the side-character dialogue, which could have been a touch more concise. But mostly, I have praise for this game. It is very rare for me to replay a game. It’s even rarer for me to replay a game within six months. That pretty much never happens. Except with Promise Mascot Agency.