Promise Mascot Agency: A tourist’s guide to the wonderful (and cursed) town of Kaso-Machi
2025.4.11
執筆：Francisco Dominguez, Contributor
You’ll put Kaso-Machi on the map as a tourist destination, assembling a crack team of hyperactive mascots in the hazy summer so you can profit from local businesses in need of mascot marketing. With a broom in one hand and a swelling list of clients and employees in the other, you’re going to clean up this town in more ways than one.
You’ll spruce up Kaso-Machi’s shrines, revamp its public spaces, and entice new businesses. You play the role of both a tourist and a tourist tycoon, where you make the town’s ancient temples, paddy fields, lofty mountains, and dramatic coastlines even more special places to explore in your beaten-up truck.
Meet the mascots
Behind Japan’s world-famous mascots like Pikachu or Hello Kitty is an army of B-listers. Behind even those, on the C or even E-list, we find Promise Mascot Agency’s lesser-known roster. You’ll meet characters like your assistant Pinky the severed finger, who’s an invaluable source of information despite major anger-management issues, as well as Trororo the cat, who’s disconcertingly delighted to be covered all over in sticky yams, along with many more endearing oddities.
No matter their quirks, you should staff up and recruit all the oddballs you spot. With your help, they’ll go from pitiable ignominy to cult fame, and they'll take your agency with them. More mascots means you have more jobs that you can accept at one time, which maximizes your income stream. If you don’t see one in the vicinity, just ask Pinky, who’ll mark their locations on the map.
In order to woo them to your agency, you’ll need to negotiate a contract and offer bespoke perks. Early on, you won’t have much cash: Offering them a higher cut from their earnings, an earnings review after a set number of jobs, or a bonus further down the line is a valid strategy.
When you have more mascots, you’ve finally earned some breathing room. When I got to my fifth mascot, my go-to negotiation was offering a 5% job-share increase and regularly scheduled time off. Now that I had enough mascots to rotate, I could avoid paying bonuses and regularly scheduled rate-increases. I may be the kind of boss who refuses to contemplate a well-deserved raise, but that’s why I quickly became a millionaire, and perhaps you can too.
Hit the road and get stamp collecting
As well as those occasionally lovable mascots, the stamp rally is another Japanese tourist phenomenon the world would be wise to copy. Michi joins in the fun—you're given a card full of blank slots ready to be stamped at each major location. Any time you find a notable place, be sure to check the perimeter; there’s a good chance you’ll find a stall tucked away where you can acquire your latest stamp.
During this process, you’re being primed to hunt down all sorts of collectibles, from the floating sins of the past to posters of the awfully corrupt mayor just begging to be run over. The most valuable collectibles early on are those assigned by José. The town’s charismatic mechanic is an aficionado of the town’s many occult mysteries. Unlocking his upgrades won’t transform your dinky kei truck into the latest fully-featured Range Rover, but they radically improve your traversal abilities—if you can find his blueprints after they were stolen by fleet-footed spirits, that is.
The first is found close by: a rocket launcher that fires your assistant Pinky to destroy barriers or retrieve collectibles from a distance. Hug the coast and you can take to the seas by making your truck an amphibious vehicle. My particular favorite, found by exploring the lofty heights, is a glider that lets you enjoy the sights and soar over the island’s mountainous slopes. Just remember that you’re not flying, you’re falling with(out) style, so take care managing that boost meter to gain some much needed elevation and dodge a crash landing back down to earth.
Bankrolling a town’s rejuvenation
Thanks to a corrupt mayor mishandling the town’s regeneration funds, turning this kami-forsaken town’s fortunes around won’t be easy. Luckily, Sato, a disillusioned salaryman in the mayor’s employ, will help you buy town improvements that’ll beautify Kaso-Machi and bring new attractions and mascot events to draw in the customers.
As an investor, you’ll enjoy a cut from the returns, increasing the base income you’ll rely on to pay the bills, draw down your crime family’s debts, and expand your mascot empire.
The festival grounds plans are easily found nearby, and are an important method to up your income early. I’d also recommend looking for the Game Center on the east coast before picking up that amphibious vehicle upgrade. Just leave the lanterns for later; they may be temptingly cheap, but they don’t open up new business options for your mascots.
The cost may be hefty—hundreds of thousands of yen which you may not immediately have to hand—but make it a high priority and save up so you can enjoy the satisfaction of seeing money flood in to restore Kaso-Machi to its former glory. In fact, when your former crime boss comes calling for financial aid, it’s best to pay as little as possible until you’ve established your income stream.
Support local businesses to build your deck of Hero Cards
As any real tourist knows, you should buy local on your travels. The familiarity of a trip to a Starbucks may be hard to resist, but you’d miss Suzuki Coffee and its owner Mieko’s unmissable onigiri snacks, soba noodle dishes, and shaved ice desserts. Sadly, these aren’t for you, but your mascot performances will be supercharged by the items available from her and other friendly NPCs.
This cafe is just one of a network of local businesses you’ll soon find vital. Each one comes with their own entertaining stories, a future client for your mascots, and an ally in the form of a new Hero Card that helps your mascots out of their many calamities on the job.
These Hero Card battles are triggered when a mascot gets in comically dire straits. You draw a hand and use your card’s damage stats to destroy the obstacle’s HP before the timer runs down. They start out easy, but as you take on higher-paying jobs, you’ll need improvements to lock in your full fee. Make sure you buy a few Hero Cards early on (Captain Sign close to your HQ has several useful ones), as these have higher base stats than the cards you initially acquire by discovering new businesses.
However, the true path to victory is in upgrading your Hero Cards by accomplishing Town Quest tasks, given by Kaso-Machi’s business-owning NPCs. Each completed task upgrades their associated Hero Card stats, adding high-impact bonus effects like replacing an action cost to let you play more cards, or letting you draw more. When you’ve completed all quests an NPC has to give, you’ll often receive an additional ultra-powerful card.
Just don’t focus on completing one Town Quest series right away, as different cards are suited for different types of obstacles, so you’ll want an evenly upgraded deck. But when you are looking for a Town Quest to fully tick off, may I suggest Mr. Mori, the feline-loving manager of a train station who finds himself with no train service and no cats, for a sidequest that proves as adorable as its rewards prove useful.
Hotspots and hotpots
Most of your employees have called Kaso-Machi home for far longer than you. Like any good boss, you should show an interest in their lives as well as their billable hours—regular 121s mean you’ll learn about new businesses popping up and get the perfect excuse to visit them yourself.
Over each successful job, mascots fill a meter tracking their Life Satisfaction. Checking in with them is like a snappier version of the Persona series' Social Links, providing valuable buffs and sidequests where you can see your mascots reach true fulfillment by visiting their spiritual home.
I watched the sorrowful To-Fu mascot, so often miserable about the blandness of the soybean curds they’re made from, become inspired by the opening of a new tofu restaurant that proves his doubts firmly wrong. A heartwarming outcome, as long as you ignore how To-Fu is luring customers to eat his slippery, wobbly, but undeniably tasty brethren at the trendy new eatery. Yes, it’s weird. Better get used to the enjoyably twisted logic at the heart of Kaso-Machi’s peculiar but entrancing world.
Promise Mascot Agency is out now on Epic Games Store.