Promise Mascot Agency’s Best Asset Is Its Female Cast

How do you revolutionize the yakuza genre? By respecting women where your predecessors didn’t, of course.

Promise Mascot Agency is perhaps one of the biggest home runs of 2025. Created by the exceedingly talented team behind 2020 murder mystery campfest Paradise Killer and blessed with the touch of Unseen Games’ endlessly talented ladies Ikumi Nakamura and Mai Mattori (as well as boasting a whole host of industry icons in the voiceover credits, from Takaya Kuroda of Yakuza fame to Swery65 and Shuhei Yoshida), its off-kilter yet heartfelt nature has captured hearts and minds all around the indie sphere and beyond.

The story follows Michizane “Michi” Sugawara, the disgraced lieutenant of Fukuoka’s Shimazu Family, a struggling yakuza cell, who is forced to fake his death and move to a small, derelict town in the countryside in order to make up the 12 billion yen he lost in an ambush to his matriarch so that she keeps herself and the family alive. To that end, he has to run the titular Promise Mascot Agency with the help of the delightful Pinky – shaped like the little finger he’s just had to ritualistically amputate.

Following Kaizen Game Works’ mournful look in their debut at a doomed, unsalvageable experiment whose responsible parties seem all too happy to move on from without any sort of self-reflection, the town of Kaso-Machi brims with life. It’s similarly being wrung dry by corrupt parties, usually older men, who see it as nothing beyond what it can financially offer them; this time, however, there still remain those willing to see human value in their devalued home. And they’ll fight for it.

The lifeblood of its resistance is mostly composed of female characters, something revolutionary for the genre it’s been placed in. Japanese society values passive, subservient women above all else: one of the foundational texts of Japanese-style misogyny, the Onna Daigaku, claims that “the way of the woman is to obey her man”, that she should avoid at all costs to question or resent him.

Portrayals of female characters as the “good wife, wise mother”, the paragon of ladylikeness, are ever-present all throughout East Asian media across the ages. Nowhere is that clearer than in the overwhelmingly male category of yakuza stories. Female presences are rare in the underworld, and even rarer still is to see them being portrayed as people over narrative devices – a dead wife, a kidnapped daughter, a raped sister. (This is not to say, of course, that this only happens in Japan; were hatred of women not a problem in the Western world, I wouldn’t have to highlight a game that champions them.)

Promise Mascot Agency’s biggest inspiration, the Yakuza series, is gaming’s greatest exponent of this treatment: as Sam Greszes writes for Polygon, while the franchise mostly portrays women with some veneer of respect, where it falters is providing them agency. Their arcs won’t move forward if there’s no man there to make it happen – sometimes literally, like when known misogynistic viper Shun Akiyama chides Haruka Sawamura for attempting to solve a problem with the Osaka mafia on her own in Yakuza 5 and is fully vindicated for that.

While there have been some advances on that front (Saeko Mukoda, for one, is a character from the recent games who explicitly draws her strength from her femininity, instead of being “strong for a woman”), it has overall been hard out here for a Yakuza fan who cares about well-written female characters. At the end of the day, these stories are all still penned by men, some of which are actively resistant to the concept of fleshed-out women. Why not look across the gender aisle, then?

Promise Mascot Agency is the narrative baby of Rachel Noy, who also works as the project’s art director. Together with partner Oli Clarke Smith and under the consultancy of Nakamura and Mattori, inspired by several male-authored pieces of yakuza fiction (including the game series as well as movies such as Sonatine and Yakuza Apocalypse), Noy sought to create a world where gender is played with.

She tells me in an interview I published in Portuguese that the wacky living mascot setting was well-received by would-be Japanese publishers, but they wrinkled their noses at the fact Michi serves a matriarch, pegging it unrealistic. Never mind that Shimazu’s ascension to the role is perfectly grounded in reality: her position comes from having been the wife of a deceased chairman, one of the only roles real-life women can take on in the yakuza (the boss’ wife is called ane-san, or older sister, and inspires just as much respect and awe).

Shimazu is written with not just respect, as a solely male writing team probably would: she is human. As a leader, she may appear the hypercompetent girlboss at first, but her blunders haunt her every move. She has a strong vision for her family – think Moma Kumakura’s “clean gang” thing from AI: The Somnium Files, but written with dead seriousness – one she is so committed to that she risks alienating her own people.

Her favorite subordinate Michi adores her, but it’s not so much the case for her ugly duckling Tokihira; she has good intentions but is prone to mistakes, not infallible but not a failure. The duality she walks on shows the most, of all things, when a certain character melts away her serious mannerisms and has heart shapes swirling around her.

Michi’s matriarch is hardly the only woman running circles around him. For one, his twin nieces Yui and Nui, Shimazu’s daughters, are the ones yanking his chain while he’s in Kaso-Machi. They love their uncle very much but aren’t above threatening his life if he skimps on paying Mother off – she needs the money to keep the other families from murdering her, after all. Since a curse is rumored to pick off male yakuza some time after their arrival in town, the girls are the only ones who come and go freely.

Down at the agency, it’s still a woman’s world. Michi is the boss when it comes to mascot management, but Pinky and her friend Shiori de facto run the show. Both are young women who love their doomed little hometown, brought down by the whims of a “crusty old geezer” the mayor; as a natural result, they have stamina to spare to make it so that the dreams he keeps crushing come to fruition, as well as relentless violent energy towards those who would badmouth their backwater swamp.

And around said swamp, even more female pillars of the community can be found. They run the gamut of womanhood gender expression and subvert stereotypes. For example, the idea of a gyaru stuck running a farm might immediately spell out the implication that she despises her uncool job, vapid spoiled baby she is, but not for Peaches, the peppy, amiable influencer always streaming rural life with her kind father Makoto. The same goes for the mascots – Neko Roll the matcha cake kitty longs for a tea ceremony culture that allows her to be silly and expressive, away from the arch-feminine image of the Yamato Nadeshiko. These characters reject the idealized and/or offensively vain portrayals usually reserved for their gender and steal the show with just as much charisma as their male counterparts.

Of these, not all of them are evil old vampires out to make everybody’s life miserable. Michi’s male allies, and he himself, are all victims of the mayor’s toxic masculine outlook of power, used as a cudgel to keep all the rest of Kaso-Machi in abject suffering. The highlights are those closest to him: Mama-san, his BDSM-adoring, bar-running, feminine-presenting nephew with not many damns to give, Mr. Sato, a man so unassuming and unspecial he’s able to crawl his way into the machine and retool it for the people, and Mr. Endo, ever the grunt, who resolves to want things for himself with the help of Michi and Pinky.

I’m also forever in love with the implication that Shiori’s mom, a desperately lovestruck woman with a taste for emotionally distant men, had a fling with Matriarch Shimazu. I want everyone to see it.

Bottom line: Promise Mascot Agency is a game about freaks, by freaks, for freaks. It stands to reason that its biggest stars would be those that the yakuza genre most considers freaks: women, women with agency and control over their presentations, women who own businesses and openly lust and laugh and get angry and change the world. I dream of a world where I don’t have to highlight something like this as an exception to the rule. Please, make more of these!

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Hiero de Lima is a Brazilian game journalist and critic obsessed with narrative analysis who will accept any amount of jank if the story’s good. You can find their games writing on Backloggd (short-form) and Medium (long-form), and their bilingual silliness is on Bluesky.