Why I love driving around oddball Japan in Promise Mascot Agency

Everything in Japan has a mascot. Towns, sports, corporations, train stations—even prisons have mascots themed around local delicacies. In Promise Mascot Agency, those mascots aren't just people dressed as a baby otter with a tortoise for a hat or whatever. Every big pink cat or walking block of tofu you see is a real living being who has to earn a living by opening shops and cultural events.

It's your job as an exiled yakuza with the same voice actor and off-the-charts unflappability as Kazuma Kiryu from the Like a Dragon games to manage those mascots, assigning them jobs, negotiating their bonuses, and bailing them out when things go wrong. It's like Kiryu got sick of that real estate management minigame and decided to try something less mundane.

That's just one slice of the strange cake that is Promise Mascot Agency. Equal emphasis is given to the time between jobs where you drive around a Japanese island in a boxy little kei truck.

I've heard Promise Mascot Agency called a "chore game" which doesn't really do it any favours, but pointing out that it's an open world collectathon probably doesn't help either. Ubisoft-style open worlds and the grindy JRPGs Promise Mascot Agency is geographically adjacent to have devalued the genre's currency. This take on the genre is different enough to make me enjoy it again, though.

It took me a while to realise the reason I was enjoying this particular open world more than the last few I played was the lack of combat. Being able to explore freely without having to worry about getting swooped by whatever annoying flying enemy a game's decided to fill itself with really does make things more fun.

The one frustration is that sometimes you're called out of the blue to help a mascot out of a job-related jam (like not being able to fit through a narrow doorway) by playing a card game. Said card game is a bit too simple to support the multiple screens of repeated hoo-ha you have to skip through to get to it each time.

Fortunately you don't have to engage with these the second they pop up and can put them off until you're ready, and even if you ignore them completely you'll just lose some of that job's rewards. They're an annoying interruption but not a fatal one, and by the late game I was drowning in consumable items that minimise the chance of events popping up and could basically forget about them.

There's an entire visual novel's worth of engaging story in Promise Mascot Agency, but the main thing I've taken away from 25 hours with it is that I'd really enjoy tootling around the Japanese countryside in a fuel-efficient little truck.