Summary
You know what I love about theLike a Dragongames? Well, a lot of things actually, but right now I’m thinking about their many minigames. I fell for the series because ofYakuza 0. I was moved by the hilarious substories, the thoughtful plot, and the excellently written characters, but ultimately what I spent the most time on was the cabaret minigame - and upcoming indie Promise Mascot Agency is reminding me why.
I’ve always loved management games. My fixation on them started with Diner Dash when I was a kid, and they taught me how to think on the fly about how to do as many things at once as possible to maximise efficiency. Yakuza 0’s cabaret minigame has you pairing the right kind of hostess to each customer, helping customers with their requests, and ensuring everyone leaves happy.
When I first read about Promise Mascot Agency, the new game from the developers of Paradise Killer, I immediately thought of Like a Dragon. It’s not hard to see why: Promise Mascon Agency calls itself “the world’s first (and best) open world mascot management crime drama”. You’re an exiled yakuza lieutenant who’s been banished to a cursed Japanese town. In Japan, mascots can represent companies or even cities – your job is to recruit misfit mascots and put them to work at your agency. You have to pay attention to their needs and negotiate what you give them.
Apart from that, you can explore your creepy, mysterious town in a truck, talk to residents and randos, earn Hero Cards, and chill out in the local onsen. Of course, because it involves an ex-yakuza, it’s almost too easy to draw the parallels – the Like a Dragon series was called Yakuza for years, and revolves entirely around the trials and tribulations of former yakuza. But if that was the only similarity, this would be a pretty weak comparison. The game incorporates a lot of minigames we’ve seen throughout the series too, and while I wouldn’t say there’s necessarily aninfluencefrom Ryu Ga Gotoku’s iconic series, it certainly reminds me of it.
If you’ve played Infinite Wealth, you already know why. Its biggest minigame is practically a spin-off all its own. You can spend hours, even days, managing a resort island named Dondoko Island, which has its own terrifying green and red mascots, Gachapin and Mukku. You can recruit guests to your island from Honolulu, attend to their desires, and give them gifts they’d like. In other Like a Dragon games, you can collect cards around the densely populated open world.
None of these things are one to one matches, which makes me feel like Promise Mascot Agency takes the smaller things I love about the games and mushes them together into something that will tickle my brain like nothing else. It crushes together minigames and elements of Like a Dragon into an entirely different aesthetic style that feels tailor-made to absorb all my leisure hours for at least a week. Promise Mascot Agency likely won’t release until 2025, but I’m already excited.
