I’m back with part two of My (actual) Official Review of Promise Mascot Agency (Kaizen Game Works). Yesterday, I started with what I did not like about the game, and did not get very far because I just want to talk about the game in general. I did not get past my intense dislike for the mechanic of sending money back to the yakuza family who was threatening my yakuza mother. I hated it so much, I actually was thinking about quitting the game. I know it’s a me-thing because of my various issues with gauging spatial distances, my terrible reflexes, and my inability to accurately gauge altitude of the map, but I really don’t understand why it was in the game.
In fact, for the first several hours of me playing the game, I was mentally knocking a point off the score I was going to give the game because of it. It was only around the tenth or so hour that I didn’t feel constrained by it. Or rather, that it wasn’t weighing heavily on my mind. I still felt constrained by it, but it wasn’t as oppressive as it was in the beginning. When I started having thirty or forty million yen on me on the regular, sending a million or so was no big deal. But, and I cannot emphasize this enough, having that artificial time constraint added nothing to the game. In fact, I still think the game would have been better without it.
The other major things that bothered/irritated/annoyed me about the game mostly had to do with the truck. Once it was upgraded and I was able to use the Pinky launcher (firing her out of a canon to break things in the environment and to clean up the trash–it was loads of fun), I did not mind the regular driving at all.
What I did mind was the boating (somewhat) and the flying (to the depth of my soul). There were items to pick up/shrines to clean up on islands that were very far away from the main city. It took five to ten minutes to get there, which would not be so bad except for the ever-present/every-annoying sending money to the yakuza family bullshit. I had to make sure I sent enough before boating out to the island I was trying to reach.
I will say the one saving grace on the island jaunts was that if I used the respawn button, it sent me back to the main city. I will praise the respawn button to high heavens because it got me out of a jam more than once. Anyway, that meant that I did not have to boat/fly back to the mainland after reaching an island. I will say that one time, I reached an island, cleaned the shrine, and then had to hurry back to the mainland to send money. I realized by looking at the map that I had mised one item to pick up, so I had to go back again. That did not make me happy.
The acual mascot agency activities could have been fleshed out better as well. Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoyed the different mascot events and how off-beat they were. At any given job, there was a chance that something would go wrong. If it did, then Michi would be called in to send in the mascot support heroes to help out. The stats for the mascot support heroes could have been explained better as by the end of the game, I still did not understand what the symbols meant. I could not find any explanations online, either. I did realize at some point that some cards gave me an extra action point and some did not, but it took me watching a few battles to realize which icon/symbol denoted that would occur.
I ended up just playing the heroes with the highest number in the stat that was highlighted for the fight. Sometimes, I won handily. Sometimes, I won by a nose. Sometimes, I lost handily, and sometimes, I lost by a tiny margin–and I never figured it out.
At a certain point, I would sigh heavily when I got the call that a mascot needed me. I think this was after a dozen hours and when I was rolling in the yen. In part it was because I had seen all the incidents, and in part it was because I was still confused as to what was actually happening. It was in a larger part because I just wanted to tool around with Pinky, and the calls from the mascots interrupted what I considered the meat of the game.
Part of the problem is that what was fresh and new at the beginning of the game with three to five mascots became tedious and a bit of a grind when I had twenty mascots, all of whom needed to be placed. I went from carefully matching each mascot to the perfect job for them, to just bashing it out as quickly as possible. If there were three green checkmarks, that mascot was good to go.
About halfway into the game, there was an added mechanic of a mascot grand prix. I had to send a mascot to it every few days, and then that mascot would be out of commission for a few days as well. If I did not send a mascot, I l tumbled down the leaderboard. This happened once, and I was so irritated. As a result, I would deliberately not send one mascot to a job, even if they were ready to go, just so I would have a mascot ready for the regional grand prix. Oh, and I could not rest my laurels when I made it to the top because if I did not send a mascot, I would slide back down as well. I had thought that something different would happen once I made it to the top, but no. Nothing changed.
I would have to say that this is the root of my biggest issues with the game. There is so much thrown into the pot, including the kitchen sink, and the game would have benefited from some judiicous pruning. I would have cut out the crane mini-game, the sending the money back every ten minutes, the flying, and made the mascot placement more engaging. And, this is blasphemy because I love every single mascot, but I might have thought about only having fifteen (there are twenty). My instinct was to say ten, but that’s too few.
The trouble is that when I think about which ones I would cut, there are maybe three I would feel comfortable getting rid of. The rest I love or at least I cannot rationalize cutting them out. But the mascot placement part of the game grew to be one of my least-favorite activities in the game (not including anything vehicle-based).
That’s pretty ironic given the name of the game. And given that I absolutely adored the mascots. In fact, spending time with them was one of my favorite activities, and I could have spent the whole game just doing that.
I will get more into that in my next post when I expound on everything I loved about the game. Which was so much.