Promise Mascot Agency

this game is so close to being a good game, I'm not going to go over the good because in all honesty all the reviews are mostly correct, the art style, gameplay reminds me of Banjo Kazooie funnily enough, music, its almost there. the biggest thing holding this game back is its writing and character direction, pinky is such a awful character that at 24 hours I've quit playing most likely for good. most characters have sidekicks whether its a brother, a good friend, or a rival, its always good to have somebody or something to provide the mc with additional support or ridicule when needed, it doesn't always need to be positive, actually quite the opposite, i don't mind a character who butts heads with the mc, and it can be a comedic relief at times. i think there is a fine line to strike to make sure that that it doesn't become annoying though, and pinky is not it. throughout the game i honestly think that this character writing was about as bad a Skyler white, what makes a character type this annoying is continuing hypocrisy, the fact that the mc (the character to which i was supposed to step into) is constantly berated throughout the game by the character architype which is supposed to support you, and like i said this support doesn't need to be positive reinforcement. its just every single time i do a mission where i have to cheer a mascot up or anything close to that pinky always chimes in with something along the lines of "mc was in the yakuza and is an objectively worse person in everyway because of it." now sidekicks butting head with the mc aside, and as annoying as it may be when it happens on a regular basis, is not alone why i stopped playing this game; i honestly think that pinky might be mentally worse than Michi. at the very least when Michi talks about his past childhood, its always in a dreary tone, you can, and a few rare points to the writers here, tell that these memories almost come from a place of regret, while as pinky reminisces on her fairly recent times of extortionism and violence fondly, and you can use the excuse "well pinky is still relatively young" (idk honestly what seems to be the threshold for young in mascot terms but from dialogue and other characters presumed age you can draw a pretty good estimate) and if that IS the case i think Michi should be doing better in trying to mentor this behavior and steer it in the correct direction, that is if he truly means it when he says that the mascot agency is his new family, that's another thing. Michi just lets everybody walk over him, the yakuza i can understand, people tend to let bosses walk all over themselves, but even people he just met he lets walk all over him, i could go on and on about this but I'm going to drop this point here as I'm getting a little tired of typing so lemme just get into the main thing that killed it for me. a little bit into the game pinky criticizes Michi for not participating in the free market and for being a yakuza once again, now at this point in the game we kind know that Michi's backstory kinda led him into the life of crime, in alot of sentences you can say he didn't have much of a choice or maybe HE felt like he didn't have much of a choice, he was a kid after all, either way you learn that Michi's yakuza kind of helps the community so its not all bad, while pinky went to school, runs a business, and is surprisingly able to make ends meet in this dying town, and yet still has a tendency twords violence, extortion, murder, etc. i have found almost no reason for any of that other than that pinky is insane, and you know what if it stopped there it would be fine, but the constant hypocritical moral grandstanding over Michi, its like an annoying cricket, you can deal with it the first few times but as soon as it displays itself as a constant you cant help but put a pillow over your ears. also idk what's up but there seems to be a surprising amount of absentee fathers in the game and sometimes just both parents in general, im going to make a large leap guess and say this is a bit of a self insert on the devs/writers part, no big comment on this just wanted to put that out there. last thing; I'm no intellectual, i just like to play games alot and honestly think that i know from that experience how to distinguish a bad character from a good character. it sucks because i like paradise killer, i really don't think that game had any crazy over the top divisive messaging, or if it did it was subtle enough to feel actually impactful rather than it just being a shoved down the throat message, which unfortunately Promise Mascot Agency didnt get this memo, their messaging seems to be contradictory, the story a little messy, and most of the dialog from pinky at least comes off as ignorant or hypocritical, and another big leap in guessing here but I'm like 99% sure that the devs/writers ended up picking this character to be the mouthpiece for their own opinions, that alone wouldn't make it bad but the delivery and execution seem to be all sort of awful and hypocritical in that way, but anyway thank you for reading.

This game could've 2137 dlcs with additional mascots for easy monetization. It doesn't. And it's great. Addicting and funny AF, I highly recommend even if you usually not into that kind of games

This game was so funny, I already liked this studio because they created Paradise Killer but they outdid themselves this time. The gameplay is really fun and relaxing, at the end of it tbh I didn't even care about doing the main gameplay aka doing my real job of managing my mascot agency and making my mascots work, I was just driving all over the places and talking to NPCs while throwing money everywhere. The characters are all so colourful and have some (weird) and great personnalities and I love the crazy humour of the entire thing. Surprisingly, this game has also a lot of messages about modernization and capitalism, and the story and ending were actually pretty interesting taking this into consideration. All in all if you like mascots, countryside Japan and destroying the careers of corrupt mayors in a daily basis, this game is perfect for you.

Once again another amazing hit from KGW. I'm really sad to leave this one behind, until there is some random update or maybe a later DLC, as I did 100% the game just like Paradise Killer. Mostly because the characters were so well made, the mascots were adorable for the most part and some were just really interesting. The gameplay loop isn't really like anything that I've played before, but it really feels like a collect-a-thon, but each thing you collect actually has a purpose here. Everything is done from inside your vehicle, at least until some missions bring you out of your vehicle in a cutscene, but this really doesn't hamper the gameplay at all. If anything this really helps make it feel fresh, and sometimes challenging, but in a good way. Overall, fantastic game, super sad to leave this one behind.

Cool unique little game where you drive around a small Japanese village running a rent-a-mascot agency. The game is divided between the driving sections, which mostly play out as an exploration / collectathon game, and the mascot management, which is split between using menus to send them on missions, and playing a card game if they get stuck on missions. It's a fairly chilled out game over-all. There are only 6 or so missions that could be described as anything close to racing and they can be easily cheesed with a fully upgraded truck. A lot of time will be spent getting to know the local townspeople and everyone's got their own little side mission to play through. I recommend the game over-all. And it's absolutely worth a play if if looks appealing to you, but there are some small caveats. Firstly is that a lot of the side missions are very repetitive. This can lead to them out-staying their welcome a bit. There's a series of missions later on where you must win a debate. I think there's eight of them over all. And while the missions themselves aren't bad, every single one has the same mini intro-cutscene, the same dialogue between each debate question, and the same outro cutscene. Just very tedious. This also isn't helped by the game not being very difficult at all. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, It is a chilled out relaxing game. But when it's almost impossible to fail the mascot card mission minigames they become incredibly frustrating when they keep interrupting you chasing down the last few collectables. Lastly, the game is slightly woke. It's not a big deal-breaker for me, but some are more sensitive so I'll mention it here. There's a character in the game who is an exchange teacher from London. She's a sub-Saharan African. This was so jarring to me that I had to alt-tab out and check to see if the devs were actually Japanese as I had assumed. Because it's such a western woke trope that it just seemed out of place. Sure enough the devs are actually two white English guys. Makes a lot more sense now. This character isn't in the game a massive amount, though they do start to show up a bit more towards the end. So I just ignored it for the most part. There's a few other things that, now that I know the devs are slightly woke, seemed a bit annoying. But nothing is too massively in-your-face about anything. As I said, I found it easy enough to ignore. One last minor snag is that there's no real reward or even recognition of 100%ing the game. I've completed every mascots life fullfillment thing, done every sidequest, found every collectable, leveled up every hero card... Everything complete and full and there's nothing. No little cut-scene in-game. No cheevo... A bit of a let down to be honest. Ultimately it's worth a play if you like these kinds of games. Some minor ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ aside, and a comparatively weak last quarter drag it down a bit, but overall it's a very good game.

I've been having a blast playing Promise Mascot Agency. It is undoubtedly one of the best indie games I've played. Our character, Michizane, is voiced by Takaya Kuroda (aka John Yakuza). And, well, he is a yakuza. After a huge mistake, he has to fake his death and gets sent to Kaso-Machi; a small, cursed town that kills every yakuza who steps into it. I personally loved exploring Kaso-Machi. The town is bizarre, but that makes you want to explore even more. Driving around the town is fun too, and you get a much better experience as you upgrade your Truck-kun. One thing I disliked is the glide; it feels really hard to control in some situations. I wish they had implemented it better, but I can't complain much since this is an indie game. As you spend more time playing, you start to get deeply involved in the town's problems: the mayor is corrupt and uses the town for his personal benefit, businesses are failing left and right, and poverty forces people to work jobs they hate. In order to earn money and fulfill a promise, you start running an abandoned mascot agency, basically rebuilding it from scratch. But there's something truly amazing about this: you can actually save this town, subvert the mayor, and even get Pinky elected! That's when you shine. You can find and recruit mascots from different places, backing them up with your mascot hero cards if they ever end up in a bad situation. You can personally talk to them and help them achieve their goals. You can invest your own money to fix roads and structures, directly helping the locals find their own path and feel hope again. By doing that, you see immediate, rewarding results. People open new businesses thanks to you, tourists start visiting Kaso-Machi, and the whole town slowly comes back to life. I wish the devs success with their game, and I hope to see more from them. I highly recommend everyone to give the game a try. I wish we had a radio to play any soundtrack we wanted. I'd love to listen to Promises Lost while driving around Kaso-Machi, but that's not possible afaik.

Pinky is best girl. It's a very cozy collectathon with some light mascot management thrown in. I was pleasantly surprised that they utilized my DualSense controller's adaptive triggers to create resistance based off of my current driving speed/boosting.

Promise Mascot Agency is a small game that I had a lot of fun with. Officially described as an "open world mascot management crime drama", it actually perfectly fits the game! With that mix of serious and goofy, plus its slightly "dumb/wtf" vibe, it's got all the hallmarks of a Japanese game, and yet it's actually a game from a small UK indie studio :) You can really feel the passion they poured into it, which is just nice to see. You play as Michi, a yakuza who, to make up for a screw-up that stained his clan's name, gets exiled to Kaso-Machi, a small rural island village, where he has to take over running a run-down mascot agency to pay off his debt. It's a big mashup of management game, exploration (driving around the island in a kei truck), storytelling, investigation, dumb minigames, and collecting stuff. I'm clearly not an achievement hunter, but I got pretty hooked on the collect-a-thon side of it, if only for the exploration and discovery it gave me. It's not a flawless game, some parts are a bit clunky (I found the mascot rescues with hero cards often annoying, and driving the truck is kind of a drag too, though I think that's ± intentional to keep that beat-up old truck feel... but hey, you can tune it up, and it becomes a lot more fun!). Vibe-wise, it's genuinely really funny, some characters are super likeable (Pinky⭐, To-Fu), and Pinky⭐ in particular is really well written, with her blunt, kinda trashy, no-filter tone. Shout-out to her voice actress, Ayano Shibuya, who played a big part in how much I appreciated the character! I'd only seen the trailer, it looked really dumb and fun, so I gave it a shot, and I don't regret it one bit!

おお、ちゃんとストーリーがわかる！ 「パラダイス・キラー」のクリエイターがおくる。で感じるストーリーの不安は杞憂でした。 全アチーブメント取得。シナリオとしては王道っちゃ王道なんですが、本作独自のマスコット（種族名になるのか？）が良い味を出してる。基本的にストーリーやキャラを楽しみながらオープンワールドを探索するゲームで、そこまで肩肘を張る必要はない。序盤の金策は緊張感があるかも。 [list] [*]アチーブメントが地図に載ってない収集100%「ではない」 [*]移動は快適 [*]つまらなくはないが、何回も遊びたくないミニゲームがある [/list]