QCF: Promise Mascot Agency
GeorgieBoysAXE
he Yakuza/Like a Dragon titles are a series of video games that quickly etched their mark onto my heart, especially after I started to lose hope of whether or not the next Shenmue entry would ever happen. In spite of the action-laced criminal drama that the series is famous for, though, the B-Story styled side-quests and activities were what always hooked me for hours on end, more often to the extent that the main objectives of the games were ironically set to the side. While Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio made sure to pack plenty of flashy distractions and gripping stories, there was a certain recurring trend among the low-stakes pastimes that were included in each Yakuza title—a business-simulator-like mini-game. These side-operations didn’t just have some flimsy premise to justify their inclusion, either; these games are often sizable productions, complete with their own wacky gravitas of the “Saving the Orphanage” variety attached to the ordeal, and in some instances were just as deep as the main plot.
Thinking back, I remember spending a whole night grinding away at Ichiban Confections, and just easily lost count over how many times that I had thought to myself, “Man, this should be a whole-ass game with a full-time 40-hour campaign and everything…”
Well, it would seem that Kaizen Game Works must have heard my silly pipe dreams and did just that with Promise Mascot Agency, and even enlisted the incredible talents of Takaya Kuroda for good measure.
Beyond the parallels to the Dragon of Dojima’s outings, Promise Mascot Agency offers an engrossing story of perseverance and redemption through a massive melting pot of gameplay mechanics that have no business working together as well as they do. The end result is a fresh and weirdly addictive venture that delivers an experience that’s even better than the bizarrely solid sum of its parts.
