Promise Mascot Agency

Promise Mascot Agency was provided by Kaizen Game Works for review. Thank you!

When I first saw Promise Mascot Agency, I wasn't exactly sure what to think about it. It has an extremely weird premise about running your mascot agency and working with this finger-like mascot to boost your agency to be the best in the business, while also discovering the mystery behind your exile. It had the makings of a quirky story I could fall in love with. And for the most part, I did! It has some quirks here and there, but ultimately, this adventure is worth playing through.

Promise Mascot Agency's story is a bit wild, and it gives me a Like a Dragon/Yakuza-esque feel to it. You play as Michi, a Yakuza known as "The Janitor," who messes up a huge deal and is exiled from his family. Instead of being killed, he is sent to Kaso-Machi to run a Mascot Agency and make the money back that he lost. There, he teams up with a homicidal mascot named Pinky, and together, they will make the agency as profitable as possible to pay back the money you lost and uncover the secret behind the town and the events that led to his exile.

I loved this tale. The main storyline was intriguing and exciting, with twists I didn't consider. I was on the edge of my seat to see what the mayor had done or the secret behind the mines, and the culmination of it all was very fulfilling. However, the fantastic characters raised the plot a couple of notches.

Along your journey, you will meet different people and mascots to work with, and everyone feels like they have a defined, unique personality with motivations that make sense. It was a joy to learn about the town's inhabitants, from Sumire's desire for her mother's old knife set to Sato's love of a specific band. We find out more and more information about them as time progresses, and we find items for them scattered around the world. It's so enjoyable to see what they say next.

Then, we have the mascots, which are truly a colorful bunch, filled with charm. Pinky, our titular, moderately insane partner, sets the tone for the characters we will encounter. We can recruit 20 different mascots, ranging from a piece of Tofu named To-Fu to a cat in a suit, and all of them have some weird quirk that was just hilarious to discover. To-Fu is always crying and needs confidence, while Ichigo Love, a Strawberry cat, is obsessed with adult films. You can learn more about them by growing their Life Satisfaction bar and going through a small cutscene each time, but it's worth it. Getting to know the crazy mascots and seeing Pinky discuss how much she dreams about burying a dead body in the woods are easily some of the best moments in Promise Mascot Agency.

She contrasts Michi's more serious, somewhat innocent demeanor, making for some hilarious moments. I couldn't help but laugh whenever Michi had to talk Pinky down from committing serious crimes or make herself sound worse when she needed to earn public favor.

The aesthetic of the game also ended up growing on me. It has an 80s TV-show filter on it to make the game look more retro, while having a good combination of 3D models and 2D paper-styled portraits. It took me a little time to get used to it, since I usually like more vivid, sharper visuals, but it fits the context of the game nicely. I wouldn't say I would prefer this style now, but I feel developer Kaizen Game Works did a good job making it enjoyable.

While the actual gameplay feels great, some issues stopped me from fully enjoying the experience. Promise Mascot Agency is a mix between a business management simulator and an open-world collect-a-thon. On the business side, you will manage your mascots, send them on jobs, and make the bulk of your money. There are multiple ways to make money, like with mascot jobs, subcontractors, and merchandise sales, and utilizing them all effectively will net some big gains. Doing these will increase your fame, unlocking new, more profitable jobs.

I have a love-hate relationship with this system. I like how easy it is to manage all the parts of your business, and matching mascots with a job that provides extra benefits is obvious, but it can feel a bit monotonous as your agency grows. Sending 15+ mascots all out on jobs one at a time felt time-consuming, and making sure they had items to stave off incidents that occur was something I would end up forgetting, too. These incidents are like little minigames of their own, which utilize support hero cards, and while they are hilarious on their own (I love fighting against Normal Sized Doors). The incidents occur when you are roaming around the open world, so it can break up some of the flow when you start taking on 10+ jobs at once, but

Merchandise is another big money maker, and I liked it a lot. You get more merchandise through a crane game, and then send the merchandise to specific stores that have preferences and can be upgraded for more profits. This became my favorite way to make money, and I could make way more than I expected. Just like assigning jobs, it's a lot of doing the same thing, but I felt better coming back to Merchandise over jobs.

Then, we have the open-world part. You will drive around a solid-sized map to different points on the map to further the story, meet new characters, and find different collectibles spread throughout. There are some side quests to complete, and you can buy new items and upgrade to hero support cards, but for the most part, you will just be finding different items. These can unlock new merchandise, new mascots, upgrades for your truck, clean shrines, and persistent upgrades to get you more money and fans or increase your stamina recharge rate.

For the most part, it was fun to drive around with the slightly exaggerated driving physics and find these collectibles, clean up tons of trash, and destroy as many signs of the corrupt mayor as possible, but it can also get a bit tiring. Driving around got exhausting trying to get around all of the mountains, and there was a lot of going back and forth that felt like it took so much longer than it should. There is an upgrade that unlocks fast travel, which is nice, but finding these upgrades was hard, and I didn't get to them until towards the end of the game. Getting the launcher upgrade was easily the best and made collecting everything significantly easier, but it wasn't easy to find.

While almost all the collectibles you can find are marked on the map, upgrades weren't, and this made traversing take much more time than I would have liked. Still, it wasn't enough to stop me from enjoying the game, especially on the Steam Deck.

Promise Mascot Agency - Steam Deck Performance

Apart from minor blemishes, playing Promise Mascot Agency on the Steam Deck is great. This feels like the best way to enjoy the game, and I can't imagine playing it any other way. However, I would make a couple of changes to get the most out of the experience and make it look a bit better.

Recommended Settings

For my time with the game, I wanted to balance smoothness, visuals, and battery life, and I feel like I found it. The game's default settings do a good job with visual quality, but the framerate can fluctuate wildly without a cap, so I made a couple of changes. I recommend turning the SteamOS framerate limiter to 40 FPS/80Hz for the most stable experience. There are some slight stutters here and there when traveling around the map fast, but this limit will curb any drops from more crowded areas.

I would also set Shadows to Ultra and change the upscaler to XeSS on Auto. While there is some minor pop-in from View Distance, it isn't as noticeable worldwide. However, seeing shadows load in as you drive is very prominent, so turning it to Ultra fixes that. As for the upscaler, the game defaults to FSR, which works, but I noticed some heavy blurriness in some instances and in the Merchandise Crane game. XeSS fixes these, and the game still looks great.

These changes should get us an average battery drain of 11W - 14W for 3.5 - 4 hours of battery life with some minor spikes up to 17W depending on how fast you're traveling and loading the world. I also didn't see much difference in performance between the DX12 and DX11 versions of the games, so I recommend just sticking with the default DX12:

Quality Settings

Next, I wanted to see if there would be a comfortable way to play the game without using upscaling and with as high-quality settings as possible. I got it running decently with a mix of high and ultra settings and no upscaling at 30 FPS, but there are some minor caveats. There could still be some drops in crowded cities or when going around the world quickly, but it doesn't feel nearly as smooth as 40 FPS or higher, draining the battery a lot. Still, it looks great and it's nice not having the slight blurriness that comes from upscaling:

Framerate Settings

I also wanted to see how high I could comfortably push the framerate. While the lowest settings and XeSS upscaling at Performance can get the framerate to a near 60 FPS, it doesn't look great and has a ton of pop-ins. The compromise here is a medium preset with slightly lower settings in different areas with 50 FPS lock. The game looks significantly better and sticks to 50 FPS 99% of the time, but it does have some minor pop-in and drains the battery fast:

I did play around with the settings to see if I could increase battery life, but the sacrifices were a bit too much for my liking. I could get it to a TDP limit of 8 with minor drops, but it drains in the range that the recommended settings do, so I would say just stick with the recommended settings in this case.

Accessibility

Promise Mascot Agency has incredible accessibility settings to help you enjoy the game. You can change the font style to be more legible, have Open Dyslexic font, change dialogue text speed and animation effects, and enable tap to drive and jump. We can also toggle screenshake, full screen effects, UI animating background and noise overlay, camera recentering, pitch control, and place a dot in the middle of the HUD to avoid motion sickness.

But that's not all! We also have color correction for Deuternaopia, Protanopia, and Tritanopia, scale the color correction, turn on high contrast icons, increase interaction icon size, slow down the animal speed for those you have to chase, turn off traffic, and turn off timers. You can also turn off the Vintage Color Processing to make the game look more modern.

The game supports 16:10 resolutions, as well as controllers and cloud saves. There are no HDR settings.

Conclusion

Promise Mascot Agency is a great game with loads of charm that can feel repetitive the longer you play. The story and characters are fantastic, making the gorgeous town of Kaso-Machi more enjoyable to travel around and discover. The gameplay is enjoyable, and I like the open-world collecting mixed with business management, but it gets a little too repetitive as your agency grows, discouraging me from sending mascots on more jobs. Still, I had a blast playing the game, and it's definitely worth experiencing.

It also runs really well on the Steam Deck, which is a nice touch. It definitely has some wiggle room to enhance the experience, but once done, it's the best way to enjoy the game!

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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