As a Like a Dragon (nee Yakuza) fan, I’m very familiar with the appeal of the long standing Japanese series. We love its outlandish characters, its madcap sense of humour that often barrels straight into surrealism, the way it renders Japanese cities into familiar open worlds, its satisfying combat (whether that be turn-based or beat-em-up), and many of us even devote ridiculous amounts of time to its minigames.
Promise Mascot Agency has a lot of things in common with Like a Dragon, which is why many of us here at TheGamer have had our eyes on it for some time now. You play a disgraced yakuza, an earnest, helpful character reminiscent of the series’ protagonists, and voiced by Kazuma Kiryu’s Japanese voice actor Takaya Kuroda himself. It possesses the same absurd sense of humour and bizarre characters. A lot of the people you’ll interact with are wonderfully odd, ranging from a gigantic severed thumb, to a perpetually crying block of soft tofu, to a bartender dressed in a gimp suit.
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It’s also open world, though the way you traverse it is different. The game is set in a Japanese Showa-era town, a far cry from the metropolitan cities of most Yakuza games, but no less compelling. And man, if you love minigames, Promise Mascot Agency feels like a Yakuza management sim minigame expanded to full-size.
You can opt to play the game with a beautiful vintage camera filter overlaid, which gives the whole thing a wonderfully dreamy, nostalgic quality.
Save The Agency, Save The Town
While the demo skips over the intro and plonks you straight into the beginning of the game, the premise is that main character Michi has his death faked at the hands of a yakuza boss and is sent to a run-down, near dead town in the countryside. His job is to bring the agency back to life with the help of Pinky, the gigantic severed finger I mentioned earlier.
The mascot agency was converted to a love hotel when business dried up, which means Michi can lie on a slowly rotating red velvet bed in his downtime and ruminate on his life.
He can’t do that without a business license, though, which Pinky lost after ruining the mayor’s granddaughter’s birthday party – something to do with putting a knife somewhere it shouldn’t have been and saying something that shouldn’t have been said, from what I can gather. Pinky’s quite a character. Michi and Pinky have to go beg the corrupt mayor for their licence back, which means getting in a truck and driving on down to town hall.
This is how you move through the open world, and it’s a wonderful way to get around. Considering that the town is far larger than a compact urban neighbourhood, you can only cover the necessary ground with the help of your hardy, invincible truck, smashing into things with abandon, using a booster to speed up far more than can possibly be safe, and even hopping up ledges. Pinky directs you across a bridge to the office, where the mayor steadfastly refuses to give you the licence till you bribe him. Tracks.
After that comes the meat of the game, which is actually managing your agency. You’ll have to track down new mascots to join your agency and negotiate job perks with them to make them more amenable to your offer (this is an employee-centric business, after all, so your employees have to be happy). Then you have to find them jobs – this might come through the pretty much dead shopping street or elsewhere, but basically any kind of business opening in this deserted town is cause for celebration and hiring of mascots.
I was reminded of the Real Estate Royale in Yakuza 0 here.
When you send them on jobs, you can match the type of mascot they are to the job for a bonus. But things will probably go awry, and your mascots will probably get into trouble somehow. For example, the tofu mascot couldn’t fit through the doorway, triggering a battle that was incredibly captioned “To-Fu vs. Normal Sized Door”. Another mascot, a cat covered in traces of milky yam slime (who’s super into supporting an ethical adult entertainment industry – can’t argue with that) is chased by an overly excited dog.
When these events happen, you can tune in to a livestream of the event and send Mascot Heroes to save them. These heroes might be ordinary people you find around town – the steward of the local defunct train station, or a guy who calls himself Captain Sign while, aptly, wielding shields made of street signs – or heroes summoned through cards you picked up off the road or bought off the sign guy. There’s a very light deck-building aspect to this in that the heroes are represented by cards, which you must use to do damage to the obstacle. Fail, and your job will garner you less money.
You can also send mascots out with items that will lower their risk of getting into trouble and maybe even refill their stamina so they can work more.
Make A Bad Thing Better
But wait, there’s more! Much of the game revolves around upgrading things, as is common in management sims. You can upgrade your heroes by finding duplicates of their cards. You can upgrade your truck by running over ghostly spirit foxes with your vehicle, because they’ve stolen the local engineer’s upgrade plants. (One of these upgrades lets you launch Pinky at stuff like a rocket. Another lets you hoover up trash on the road for money.)
You can upgrade your business by adding branding or upscaling the water system. You can upgrade the town by finding plans and investing in those areas. Look, it’s all very good, and without getting into the storyline because, you know, spoilers, the whole vibe is optimistic and earnest as much as it is weird and irreverent.
I’m already sold on Promise Mascot Agency and am eagerly looking forward to its launch in April, but don’t just take me at my word. Try the demo yourself and get hooked, too. If you love the Yakuza games, this one is gonna get you good.