Throughout the events of Promise Mascot Agency, I was Pinky’s ride. Anywhere that she needed to go, I had to ferry her in my crappy little truck. As a matter of fact, I was responsible for the transport of any and every mascot that stumbled through the doors of the Promise Mascot Agency and came under my employ. When Kofun needed to go to a nearby graveyard, I was the guy for the job. When Trororo needed a lift to the local adult store, I begrudgingly told him to hop in. Be it by land, air, or sea, it became my responsibility, and mine alone, to make sure everyone got where they needed to go.
Promise Mascot Agency is a game filled to the brim with chores and mundane tasks like this. As I traveled across the isle of Kaso-Machi, drifting in and out of decrepit villages and farm fields, I found that Promise Mascot Agency’s cast was filled with folks in need of some assistance. The English teacher who worked unpaid overtime shifts to put on a night school at her underfunded workplace. The nearby mechanic with an insatiable curiosity for the occult, and no time between his job and family. If a shrine needed to be swept, I was there with a broom in a split second. Whether it was the local barkeep in a gimp suit, the streamer-turned-farmer, or of course, the disenfranchised youth, I was there with an olive branch to extend.
Promise Mascot Agency probably sounds like a convoluted game. It is. In one breath, it is a title about an ex-yakuza–handsomely voiced by the same actor behind Kiryu in the Yakuza games–driving around a countryside, rounding up seemingly endless collectibles and upgrades, and sending living mascots (like a giant crying tofu block) out on jobs via a simplistic management system and card-based minigame. In the latter, you must play support cards with differing strengths and weaknesses as a mascot performs a job in order to beat a troubling interference that arises and assure the job is a success. In another breath, it is a full-throated exercise in the lengths of compassion and empathy. It is rarely sleek and sexy about it–Promise Mascot Agency doesn’t feature over-the-top set pieces or hide slick new super moves to reward the player for completing its long list of chores. But real, tender empathy for your fellow man rarely does look so good, and Promise Mascot Agency’s unglamorous honesty is something I’ve come to admire from one of 2025’s best and brightest games.
When you first arrive in Kaso-Machi and take on stewardship of the mascot agency, your primary goal is to drive better foot traffic to the formerly popular tourist destinations around town. Due to the dwindling economic status of the island, most of the people who have survived its trials and tribulations have moved on from it. All that’s left behind are pockets of increasingly poorer people who are either too proud to leave or simply stuck. The economy needs a shot in the arm, and so it falls on you as Michi–who has been cast out from the yakuza for a job gone wrong–to send in mascots to the few businesses still operating, drum up interest, and invest your earnings into other ventures and mascots around Kaso-Machi.
Progress is slow but steady. Before you know it, districts that once seemed destined to fade into nothingness begin displaying faint signs of life again. A long-dormant festival is resurrected and, with time, this energy ripples outward to the rest of the island. The largely abandoned train station in the heart of town, which is presided over by a charming man and his cat-with-a-hat, is brought back from the brink of redundancy. A few towns over from Kaso-Machi’s central hub, you revive an arcade. As the cultural centers and infrastructure of Kaso-Machi are resurrected, life in the reportedly cursed isle begins to flourish once more, and its residents invest that good will and energy back into you, the catalyst for this change.
