Promise Mascot Agency Review (loco motives 🚂)
Consider this more of a "MIxed" review rather than a "Negative".
Promise Mascot Agency is essentially a Yakuza management mini-game scaled up to a full game, with its own open world, story line, and characters to support it. Whether it be thru Kiryu's VA voicing a Kiryu-like fallen yakuza character, its Yakuza-esque story, or the Mascot Hero card visuals matching the card visuals in Yakuza, it is a love letter to Yakuza - and Japanese culture more broadly. It should be noted here that this studio is based in the UK, continuing a broader trend I've noticed of UK studios really targeting the "Japanese Aesthetic".
The gameplay loop in PMA is simple. You manage your mascots by sending them out to jobs in a menu. You drive around progressing the story, recruiting new mascots, and collecting new jobs, items, and hero support cards. At some point, your mascots will "request help", giving you the option to intervene and play a very simple card game to gain a bonus.
The management portion of the game is bare bones. Your mascots have two traits, a stamina bar, and meters for happiness, motivation, and popularity. You gain the last three by handing out bonuses, doing jobs, and doing the aforementioned help video game. Every job has one type that it prefers. There's very little real management to be done here, and most of your interaction with the system will be sending out mascots en masse a few times a day, giving bonuses when obligated to, and occasionally "levelling up" your mascot in a link system. It is about as complicated as a Yakuza mini game, but that doesn't really hold up if it's the main system in the game.
The driving mechanic feels great. The car controls are lenient and you can basically do whatever you want. As you progress, you gain better performance in water and a pair of wings to fly around. The flight in particular feels great, and was the most fun I had in the game. This is what you'll spend the majority of the game doing - driving around, smashing posters, picking up marked items on the map, and driving to story areas. My nitpick here is that the game does not limit any areas access to later vehicle upgrades. There's a few extra items you can grab with flight and nautical capabilities, but the game could've gained quite a bit more structure if you needed wings to gain access to a new area and recruit new mascots.
The card game portion is the weakest section of the game. Each time, one stat is given. Each hero support card has 5 stats, an action cost, an action refund, and card draw number. You have 2 actions and five cards to begin with. There's really not that much too it - if you have been traversing the world you will naturally have strong cards, and you will only very rarely fail. The animations showing the predicament the mascot is in are quite fun, but also very limited. By the end of the game you will be sending out ~20 mascots and praying that the minigame does not trigger. When it does, I found myself spam clicking my way thru it. Very weak portion of the game.
Overall, the game is a very interesting idea. I am glad someone made a "Yakuza Sub Game but expanded" game. The characters and mascots are full of, well, character and the VA performances are high quality (although the mixing is sometimes surprisingly bad). The story is quite mid, and made me appreciate Yakuza's writing more. This game desperately needed a "Secret Korean style" twist. There is no subtlety anywhere, and the game is lacking in depth in nearly every mechanic. Still, I had a good time in the 12 hours it took for me to complete the game. I'm not sure I'd call it a good game. It's simply the sort of game that made me wish I was playing the games that influenced it instead.