Promise Mascot Agency review

The thing you need to understand about the world is that it's run by money. Absent normal signifiers of human society, absent any semblance of structure or narrative that makes sense, this is a truth that remains. Promise Mascot Agency is a game that understands this, among other fundamental truths of the world, like how the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb and how an unchallenged incumbent mayor in a town that people mostly leave is a destructive force rivaled only by natural disasters and anonymous internet commenters. At its core, Promise Mascot Agency is a fanged ode to the responsibilities of civic life, to bureaucratic idleness and indulgence, and to the numbers going up at the center of it all. It is brutally funny, brutally mercenary, and brutally good.

Kaizen Game Works were already veterans of absurdist genrefuckery with Paradise Killer, but with Promise Mascot Agency they've reached new heights. The plot is bizarre: presumed dead yakuza fixer Michi gets exiled to a cursed town after a deal gone wrong, must team up with a severed pinky and a host of other living mascots to Win The Big Game and make Mother's money back, and in the process uncovers personal, political, and spiritual conspiracies, learns about the power of entrepreneurship, and occasionally drives his truck directly into the sea.

What's tremendous about Promise Mascot Agency is that the excessiveness of its concept only serves to anchor it deeper in our own material reality. Everyone Michi meets is real, even the people who aren't. A noble-minded bureaucrat stifled by his idiot boss is found down the street from a dissected eel whose sole purpose in life is to stop people from eating unagi; a foreign teacher who's trapped in town for visa reasons is right next door to a sentient grave marker giving unprofitable tours out of historically minded selflessness. Michi is equally likely to have a heart to heart with the owner of the local coffee shop as he is with a moss ball that speaks in beeps. Kaso-Machi is both a total freakshow bizarro sideways world and a patient and thoughtful representation of a dying town somewhere in rural Japan.

The management sim elements of Promise Mascot Agency are the chief contrast to the cheerful irreverence of the game's setting. Michi starts out so far in the hole he's probably technically somewhere else on the map entirely. The early game is a tightrope, as Michi's few employees work desperately to turn a profit while bills and obligations send him into the red nightly.

It's not as simple as doing a job and making a buck. Every mascot Michi recruits needs a benefits package to join the agency, so on top of their share they make extra profit, get bonuses, or have scheduled share increases. Also they will routinely get attacked by demons or architecture while advertising local products and need to be bailed out by the roster of Mascot Support Heroes (Yu-Gi-Oh cards) that Michi has recruited from around town (added to Pinky's speed dial.)

I found these mascot incidents incredibly fun: they're single-round so they never drag, but by the end of the game I was giving some of my buddies less protection against incidents spawning so I'd have an excuse to occasionally pull over on the side of the road and Blue Eyes White Dragon a bitch. It's a cute mechanical interpretation of the importance of community that cards representing your friends get more powerful as you help them with their quests, and also it's never not satisfying to watch the lovestruck mom that works at the fishing marina one-hit-KO a stalker.

Mascot events aren't the only way to make money, though. By the end of the game Michi has a business empire. He's got subcontractors. He's got merchandizing. He's got ads all over town. He's competing in the Mascot Grand Prix. The agency is booming; it's got plants and better internet! Pinky's running for mayor! She is constantly moments away from curb stomping an old man! It is an absolute deluge of numbers and an impressive approximation of what I assume businessmen in movies are seeing in their heads when they're talking on the phone.

There's this sense of the spiraling of money: at the beginning you're presented with a thousand layered systems you can't imagine you'll ever be able to afford, chipping away at a fraction of a fraction of money owed, and then all of a sudden you have more money than you know what to do with, and all that money can do is make you more money.

I will go to the train station and buy one hundred onigiri from the nicest man I have ever met without blinking an eye. I will empty every vending machine in the game. I will put so many stickers on my car. I can and will become god-king of Kaso-Machi through extreme financial benevolence. And yet… those spiraling millions of yen barely make a dent in the debt.

This is where Promise Mascot Agency comes into its own. Past the management sim and the truck driving (it is a great little truck), Promise Mascot Agency has one of the best stories I've encountered in a videogame, and somehow the yakuza politics and curses are the least interesting part of it. Because of the way that Michi's business ventures are tied to characters throughout Kaso-Machi, financial milestones leading to plot beats both makes sense narratively and feels incredibly natural, and I found myself on tenterhooks to discover the resolution of threads about civic fund allocation and visiting lawyers.

NPCs are memorable and well-written, and the plot is interesting and easy to follow despite taking place primarily elsewhere. It's drip-fed to Michi across time and geography, through phone calls and clandestine meetups and paper trails, despite the secrecy with which an outsider is received in a small town. It doesn't make sense how well it works, except it really does.

Promise Mascot Agency is not concise, but it is focused. All excess is intentional; all numbers point in the right direction. It is an exceptionally fun game about driving a truck around an island and chatting with the local flavor, and about managing a booming small business slash outsourced mascot corporation, and about the financial corruption of massive criminal conglomerates and your average small-town mayor.

It is, I want to be clear, totally fucking absurd.

It is so frustratingly well-constructed, balancing so many opposing tones and mechanics with such a genuine, honest, and effective narrative, that I can't imagine the next games I play aren't going to suffer without Pinky in the back of my truck tagging along. It doesn't need coherence, or genre, or solemnity; it understands something bigger than all that.