This is the fourth and final post of my official review of Promise Mascot Agency (Kaizen Game Works). I was obsessed with it as I played it, but as is my wont, once I’m done, I am DONE. Except for FromSoft games; I am never done with them. Here is my post from yesterday.
I may go back and play it again, though, because I was so charmed with the characters. I’m not sure, though, that I could put up with the several little (and a few big) things that annoy me for another playthrough.
I have played several games in the last few months, which is not like me. Normally, I obsess with one big game at a time while I have a FromSoft game going at the same time. I always have a From game on the go. Currently, it’s Elden Ring, but I just played the first half of Dark Souls so I could get Big Hat Logan’s very big hat.
Even though that is my thing (I adore the Sage’s Big Hat in Dark Souls III), I rarely go for it in the OG Dark Souls because his questline, like most of them in the first game, is very elaborate, labor-intensive, and costs so many souls to do.
Here’s the thing, though. One thing I absolutely love about the From games is that they are unabashedly what they are. What I mean is that Miyazaki has a very distinct vision, and he does not waver from it. For example, he has been asked about the overwhelming presence of poison swamps, and he said he could not help himself. He just had to put one in every game.
I don’t like every From game, but I respect each of them. They may not be for me, and that’s ok.* When they released Demon’s Souls, it was not a hit around the world. People didn’t get it and thought it was too difficult, too weird, and to obtuse. I’m not sure when that changed, but by the time I was hep to it, it was Dark Souls, and it was a cult hit.
From have released games very consistently and often since then, and all of them have their own style. Yes, they have Miyazaki’s stamp all over them, but to varying degrees. I know a From game in an instance because of that personal flair.
With the half-dozen or so games I’ve played in the last few months, one thing I’ve appreciated about each one is how true to the developer’s vision it is. I may not agree with that vision, but that’s not the point. Each of these games knew what they wanted to do, and they went and did it.
With this game, (what I infer is) the devs wanted to do an homage to the Yakuza series, but with 100% more wackiness. I mean, I know the Yakuza games are wacky in their own right, but this game is truly bonkers.
I don’t think I’ve said this in any of my other posts, but the mascots are not people in costumes–they are the actual beings they look like. So Pinky is an actual severed pinky as is her father. Kofun is, apparently, shaped like a burial mound, but looks like a female Gumby. Oh, and kofun means burial mound. She’s an emo goth girl who is deeply interested in history, especially the history of Kaso-Machi, the town in which the game takes place. To-Fu is a (crying) block of tofu.
The devs developed this world with a sure hand. They had a vision of what they wanted to fill it with, and that’s what they did. They could have made the mascots be people in costumes, but that really wouldn’t have had the same heft to it. The thing that the game had to do was just take it for granted that the players would go along for the ride in a game in which half th echaracters were people and half of them were mascots.
That’s not that unusual. There are games in which people and animals as people share the world easily, and no one treats that as weird. So a world in which people and mascots share space is not that much of a leap. And, to be honest, it felt right and natural. I didn’t think of them as these weirdos or anything like that. They were just complex beings in their own right, and I loved them all.
I loved some more deeply than others, but there was not one that I did not have a soft spot in my heart for. I mentioned in the last post that I just wanted to spend all my time with them, and that brings me to one thing I had mixed feelings about. It’s the, ah, Life Satisfaction? Yes, that’s what it was, Life Satisfaction (LS) system.
You have to talk to each mascot three times in order to improve their Life Satisfaction, which gives them better stats. You can only unlock each LS after the mascot has done a certain amount of jobs. I did not have a problem with that. In fact, I liked helping them out and taking them where they needed to go. My issue was that the game never explains this system–or I missed it. I did not do them in the beginning because I didn’t have anyone unlocked for that ability. In addition, I thought it was opptional, so it didn’t seem very pressing to me. I mean, it was optional in the sense that I didn’t have to do it, but it would be like not leveling up in a Souls game.
It quickly got out of hand, though. Once I had more than five mascots, it felt like a chore. Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to spend time with them, but I did not like having to juggle schedules and the fact that if I agreed to help one mascot by taking them somewhere, I could not do any other LS quests with other characters.
Again, it’s a great idea, but not executed optimally. I did not mind having to do it three times with each mascot, but I didn’t like all the restrictions around doing it. If the mascot was on a job, recovering, or on a day off, I could not talk to them. Yes, that’s how it would be in real life, but it was really annoying to have to shuffle through five plus mascot’s schedules in order to do these events with them.
How would I have fixed it? I’m not sure. I mean, I definitely would have made it easier to talk to the mascots. In the game, you had to go back to the agency in order to talk to one of the NPCs, and then you could talk to the mascot of your choice if all the above conditions were met. I would have liked to be able to call them on my cell and just talk to them that way. I’m sure that’s harder to code, though, than to just have the player return to the agency.
I’m running long again, so I will be back tomorrow with one final post on this game.
*Well, it’s not, but that’s not the point of this post.