Promise Mascot Agency is a management sim that’s very openly inspired by the management minigames from the Yakuza series. You run a mascot agency by finding mascots in the open world, sending them out on jobs, and then supporting them through said jobs using cards and items that you also find in the open world. Yakuza business minigames have often been praised as being deep enough to be their own games, and PMA is here to finally put that claim to the test.
Despite the name of the game, running the mascot agency turns out to be relatively shallow and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. It’s a crucial source of income at first, and the game will endlessly nag you about it if you don’t keep at it, but once you unlock the ability to fund town construction and subcontractors for passive income, the money you can earn from agency work quickly becomes irrelevant. Worse, the card minigame for helping mascots becomes pointless even faster. You start with a hand of 5 cards and have 2 actions to earn enough points in whatever stat to save the day, but there are many cards that cost 2 actions while giving you 3 in return and even more that cost a net zero actions, and these only become more common as you advance quests and unlock better cards. The result is that the card game is completely brainless – you just play all your positive action cards followed by all of your net zero cards, and since many of those will have also drawn additional cards along the way, you’ll almost certainly win unless you drew a terrible hand and never had a way to win in the first place. Worse still, every mascot job has a chance of making you play this minigame, and the long animations that play before it never become skippable. You can technically choose to just ignore the giant warning that you need to play this until it goes away, but that can take up to 8 in-game hours and it will override the normal function of your menu button until then. Some items do at least make it so that the card game is unlikely to trigger for any given mascot job once you can afford to buy them, but you’re still going to be playing it pretty frequently if you’re sending out mascots on jobs with any frequency.
Luckily, the world exploration is better. Most of your time in PMA will be spent driving an indestructible truck around the island and finding random crap. All of the major characters conveniently need you to find 5 items, so most of the dots on the map are somebody’s quest item. The rest are a mix of extra help cards, subcontractor cards, some customization items, and truck upgrades, although that last category isn’t shown on the map. All of it is pretty easy to find, but there’s a certain satisfaction in slowly clearing the map of notification icons and seeing the numbers on your cards and income streams go up along the way. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s able to carry the game thanks to solid map design and driving mechanics. You’ll have a good time if this part is appealing, and I think you’ll struggle to stick with the game if it isn’t.
The difficulty of the game is going to depend pretty heavily on how you prioritize open world side quests versus the main story. If you’re like me, and probably most players, and do all the side stuff first, then the difficulty becomes trivial pretty quickly as you drown in passive income and wildly overpowered cards. If you go for the main story first, you’ll be stuck doing terrible mascot jobs that hardly earn any money and constantly under various financial pressures. There aren’t difficulty settings, so there’s no way to tune the experience to keep the challenge if you’re an explorer or give you a boost if you just want to rush through.
As for the story, it does a good job of being entertaining. The main cast is broadly likable and the personalities are all big enough to make everyone feel distinct and memorable. None of it makes a ton of sense if you stop to think about it, though. The corrupt mayor seems to just always do whatever is worst for the town even if it’s unclear how shutting down all the businesses and infrastructure could possibly help his corruption, and the rest of the cast can never quite make up their mind about whether they want tourists and development or if they want everything to stay the same. Sometimes you condemn the mayor for wanting to redevelop a neighborhood or bring in food trucks, despite the fact that the town has no economy or transport links to speak of, but at other times you’re after him for not bringing in enough tourists or not completing construction on a hotel. No one in town seems particularly concerned about the issues that would plague a real life rural town in Kyushu, either – I don’t think anyone ever brings up the birth rate issues that are unavoidable in Japan, and issues of abandoned properties and young people moving away are only touched on indirectly. Many of the controversies feel transplanted from the dev’s native Britain rather than reflective of the setting.
Conclusion
Overall, Promise Mascot Agency is a good game that’s held back by the uneven depth of its systems. Its open world is exactly as large and varied as it should be for a 20+ hour game, but the business systems are stale by the halfway mark and the story’s inconsistencies may come from how many different locales there were to explain on the island. The ideal way to play the game is probably to play just enough of the open world to keep the game moving rather than going for 100% or just rushing through the story, but I don’t think many players will do that, and you’ll see more of the pacing flaws as you get closer to either extreme. It’s worth a look on sale as long as you’re prepared for some rough edges.
Rating: 80%
Time to beat: I did almost everything in 25 hours
Price: $25
Feel free to leave a question or comment below!
For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041