All through the occasions of Promise Mascot Company, I used to be Pinky’s journey. Anyplace that she wanted to go, I needed to ferry her in my crappy little truck. As a matter of reality, I used to be liable for the transport of any and each mascot that stumbled by the doorways of the Promise Mascot Company and got here underneath my make use of. When Kofun wanted to go to a close-by graveyard, I used to be the man for the job. When Trororo wanted a carry to the native grownup retailer, I begrudgingly instructed him to hop in. Be it by land, air, or sea, it grew to become my accountability, and mine alone, to verify everybody bought the place they wanted to go.
Promise Mascot Company is a recreation crammed to the brim with chores and mundane duties like this. As I traveled throughout the isle of Kaso-Machi, drifting out and in of decrepit villages and farm fields, I discovered that Promise Mascot Company’s solid was full of of us in want of some help. The English instructor who labored unpaid time beyond regulation shifts to placed on an evening faculty at her underfunded office. The close by mechanic with an insatiable curiosity for the occult, and no time between his job and household. If a shrine wanted to be swept, I used to be there with a brush in a break up second. Whether or not it was the native barkeep in a gimp go well with, the streamer-turned-farmer, or in fact, the disenfranchised youth, I used to be there with an olive department to increase.
Promise Mascot Company in all probability feels like a convoluted recreation. It’s. In a single breath, it’s a title about an ex-yakuza–handsomely voiced by the identical actor behind Kiryu within the Yakuza games–driving round a countryside, rounding up seemingly limitless collectibles and upgrades, and sending residing mascots (like an enormous crying tofu block) out on jobs by way of a simplistic administration system and card-based minigame. Within the latter, it’s essential to play help playing cards with differing strengths and weaknesses as a mascot performs a job with a view to beat a troubling interference that arises and guarantee the job is successful. In one other breath, it’s a full-throated train within the lengths of compassion and empathy. It’s hardly ever glossy and horny about it–Promise Mascot Company does not characteristic over-the-top set items or cover slick new tremendous strikes to reward the participant for finishing its lengthy listing of chores. However actual, tender empathy on your fellow man hardly ever does look so good, and Promise Mascot Company’s unglamorous honesty is one thing I’ve come to admire from one among 2025’s finest and brightest video games.
If you first arrive in Kaso-Machi and tackle stewardship of the mascot company, your major purpose is to drive higher foot site visitors to the previously in style vacationer locations round city. As a result of dwindling financial standing of the island, the general public who’ve survived its trials and tribulations have moved on from it. All that is left behind are pockets of more and more poorer people who find themselves both too proud to go away or just caught. The financial system wants a shot within the arm, and so it falls on you as Michi–who has been solid out from the yakuza for a job gone wrong–to ship in mascots to the few companies nonetheless working, drum up curiosity, and make investments your earnings into different ventures and mascots round Kaso-Machi.
Progress is gradual however regular. Earlier than you recognize it, districts that when appeared destined to fade into nothingness start displaying faint indicators of life once more. An extended-dormant competition is resurrected and, with time, this power ripples outward to the remainder of the island. The largely deserted prepare station within the coronary heart of city, which is presided over by a captivating man and his cat-with-a-hat, is introduced again from the brink of redundancy. Just a few cities over from Kaso-Machi’s central hub, you revive an arcade. Because the cultural facilities and infrastructure of Kaso-Machi are resurrected, life within the reportedly cursed isle begins to flourish as soon as extra, and its residents make investments that good will and power again into you, the catalyst for this modification.
Positive, what I am describing is a reasonably customary improve system, however one thing about the best way Promise Mascot Company conveys them makes it stand above its friends. The “power-ups” gifted to Michi and Pinky aren’t actually the form of abilities that the participant can then flip round and use for their very own profit like a typical ability tree or development system. For instance, you get a turbo improve on your truck, but it surely does not profit you alone to make use of it. There are not any races in Promise Mascot Company, although a post-launch replace did add time trials. It’s, nevertheless, helpful in getting you, and whomever you are carrying, to your vacation spot extra rapidly and persevering with to assist and delegate duties across the island. The identical goes for the eventual boat and flying upgrades you acquire as properly.
Spoilers for Promise Mascot Company observe.
The cannon improve you obtain partway by Promise Mascot Company nearly seems just like the second the sport would possibly introduce some form of vehicular fight. As an alternative, you utilize it to launch Pinky, Promise Mascot Company’s sociopathic companion character, at piles of trash, since one of many side-activities you are invited to participate in is to clear Kaso-machi’s abundance of rubbish You may moreover hearth her at reelection indicators for the corrupt mayor, whom Pinky winds up operating towards within the recreation’s closing act! In any other case, the cannon is nearly comically ineffective: It would simply launch Pinky straight up into the sky to the good thing about nobody in any respect.
It’s form of humorous how mundane Promise Mascot Company seems to be. It is loads just like the Yakuza video games in that sense, which characteristic no scarcity of oddball characters on typically incomprehensible journeys that always resolve themselves in deeply humane, relatable, and typically abjectly uninteresting methods. It’s a perspective on the human situation I resonate with on a profound stage, and it’s one I used to be so pleased to search out beneath the floor of Promise Mascot Company. It is why I reveled within the simplistic motivations of its solid, and why I discovered myself entranced by the busywork they continually dropped on me, in addition to the mission of bettering the lives of everybody in Kaso-Machi. Of constructing a neighborhood that might stand up to the corruption of native governance, overcome its grisly and tragic previous, and forge a brighter future collectively.
The entire community-building the participant spends the sport toiling away at–all the rubbish you clear, indicators you’re taking down, and companies you deliver again to Kaso-Machi–comes to a head within the recreation’s rousing finale. To make a sophisticated matter brief, the continued existence of your company, which has supplied a house to mascots, financial stability to the island, and uncovered native corruption, is being threatened. The one method to guarantee it continues is to win a nationwide competitors that’s, as turns into apparent, rigged towards you.
You lose, and also you lose fairly badly. However at Michi’s lowest level, he retreats to a thoughts palace of types (Pinky dubs it a “metaphysical nightmare”) and comes head to head with everybody he is helped–that you, the participant, have helped. Each mascot we employed, each enterprise proprietor we aided, each teenage thug we straightened out, and even members of the yakuza household that had tossed us out appeared to Michi. An island’s value of pleasant faces propped us up, dusted us off, and reminded us that we weren’t alone.
The top of the sport performs out like a gauntlet of Promise Mascot Company’s card-based minigame. Solely, by the sport’s finish, your entire allies’ help playing cards have been consolidated right into a handful of overpowered ones that wipe out any risk with a single play. And as I cruised to Promise Mascot Company’s finish on the again of the neighborhood that I might spent 20+ hours constructing and fortifying, I could not assist however assume that in fact the strongest energy of all of them was the facility of friendship. Who would’ve thought that I might discover one of many richest examples of neighborhood in some of the weird video games about driving a human-sized, sentient (and to not point out, homicidal) thumb round city?