Promise Mascot Agency, the “world’s first open-world mascot management crime drama,” is all that and somehow more

It's hard to believe that the developers of Promise Mascot Agency believe in the words “too far.” A few minutes into the game, I met my new assistant at the agency I have to bring back to profitability, which only employs weirdos and outcasts. Pinky is a childlike severed finger with a hair trigger who can fly into a rage. Half an hour later, the first mascot I meet in the nearby town and recruit for my agency is a cum-covered cat (sorry, “Japanese yam”). He loves porn.

And yet Kaizen Game Works insists that they did indeed show some restraint.

“That was worse. We toned it down,” laughed art director Rachel Noy in a recent interview. “It had a specific name that I don't like to repeat.”

Like Kaizen's first game, Paradise Killer throws wild characters at a Promise Mascot Agency with carefree glee. But while that wonderful 2020 detective game had an “anything goes” attitude with its coven of immortal gods, this game is more deeply rooted in Japanese pop culture, something the British developers attribute to their collaboration with Capcom and Tango Gameworks veteran Ikumi Nakamura and their concept artist. They pitched the rough idea for the game to Nakamura – a disgraced yakuza who leads a team of living mascots – and then the designs started pouring in, one by one.

Bizarre designs. For many of them, they simply had to “tone down the sharpness a little,” Noy added.

“There was nothing obscene or too offensive,” reassured director Oli Clarke Smith. “But [cat mascot] Trororo's original name, from Ikumi, would have severely affected the age rating.”

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You never know who you'll meet in Kaso-Machi.(Image credit: Kaizen Game Works)

Encouraged by Nakamura's designs, the team took inspiration from the idea that the world itself is less fantastical than Paradise Killer's magical island. That the characters within it are unbalanced only serves to highlight their strangeness and the game's comical side, enriching an otherwise menu-heavy management game. After recruiting a few mascots, I got to work assigning them tasks that best fit their traits (funny, cute, security-conscious). It's easy at first, but later on you'll need to keep an eye on your finances and make sure your mascots and the recruitable heroes you send to assist them improve their stats to complete more difficult tasks and keep the money flowing.

Minigames give you the chance to play cards in a quick, stripped-down deck builder. For example, after recruiting the tokusatsu hero Captain Sign, I could use his card to perform another action. “We've had God knows how many versions since the beginning, and all of them were terrible except for this one,” Smith said. “We prefer combo-based games, where you have a handful of cards that you combine together. We wanted a simple version of that where the complexity is how the numbers scale.”

The more active part of the game outside of the menus involves driving around the town of Kaso-Machi and finding characters, collectibles, and side quests while Pinky chats you up from the back of the truck. Nakamura was also instrumental in designing this part of the game, suggesting that Promise Mascot Agency should be set in a Japanese town rather than a city that has been largely abandoned by the youth as more and more people leave rural life behind.

I played a few hours of PMA, just enough time to get through the early stages of the story and get into the basics of the systems. There's a lot of driving involved to find mascots, items that can help mascots on missions, and small cosmetic items; as you chug around in your truck, Pinky often chimes in with dialogue about the environment. There's no voice acting yet, but the game will be fully dubbed in Japanese (not English) at launch. Sending mascots on missions is easy at this stage, with some basic decisions about which mascot is best for which type of job, but Smith said this will increase at higher-level jobs.

Promise Mascot Agency

PMA is essentially a management game, so you'll spend a lot of time on screens like this. (Image credit: Kaizen Game Works)

“We wanted players to understand what was going on and get into it without too many tutorials. Then we start unlocking medium and hard jobs. Then you start making decisions like, 'I know I have a good hero bank for this,' or 'I don't know, but I have a good mascot helper object.' You can make some bets like sending a mascot on a really hard job with an object that has a 75 percent chance of staying out of trouble… You have a lot of time to discover the intricacies of the system and different approaches. There are a lot of side things that are tied into the simulation.”

I can't remember the last time I played a game that so gleefully defies categorization as Promise Mascot Agency, with a mix of open world exploration and visual novel-style systems management and character chatter. I guess Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is the perfect comparison point, but this is notable not from a small indie team that delivers the sequel to a detective game.

However, Smith has some clear points of inspiration regarding the core structure of the Promise Mascot Agency.

“We didn't want to make a deep, complex management game – we wanted to make a hangout game,” he said. “I'm a big fan of what I call PS2 games where you hang out and do stuff, like the Disaster Report games and Way of the Samurai games, where you just get a world and a bunch of systems and go off and do stuff however you want. There are actually some really complex systems in there, but it doesn't feel overwhelming. With our management thing, we wanted players to hang out with the system; there are stakes in there and a pretty strict 'game over' system that's woven into the narrative. But there are plenty of warnings and some backup systems. The danger is there, but you can still deal with it in a way that suits you.

“Paradise Killer found a lot of fans who aren't into hardcore games, and I think hopefully this one will do the same.”

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Promise Mascot Agency — Not *yet*, that's not possible.(Image credit: Kaizen Game Works)

The town and surrounding area of Kaso-Machi is deceptively large, and I'm not yet sure it will be as satisfying to poke around here as it was on Paradise Killer's island, which itself was fascinatingly bizarre in design and aesthetics aside from its bizarre characters. I'm not worried about PMA Agency's script, though – even in its first few hours, it's just as charmingly wacky as the team's last game. The setting may be closer to the real world, but the characters, as you can see from the screenshots in this article alone, are eclecticThey are simply not immortal gods.

“The world and story had to be more grounded than Paradise Killer, to show how people try to achieve their dreams, how communities come together and rebuild, and how they fight back against bureaucrats and governments,” Smith said. “When I wrote Paradise Killer, I had just come out of a whole series of jobs where I hadn't felt very appreciated, so I was very angry. In PK, everyone is mad at you, there's this anger in there. I think I let a lot of that out.”

“Mascot is more hopeful. It's like saying, yeah, the world sucks, but you're going to find your tribe and get through it together,” Noy said.

If it isn't the craziest, wackiest, most creative game you play next year, I will offer you my pinky as penance. Just promise me to use it for some fun tasks.

Promise Mascot Agency, the “world’s first open-world mascot management crime drama,” is all that and somehow more

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