In 2020, Kaizen Game Works released their first title,Paradise Killer,a quirky, captivating hybrid game featuring elements of the adventure, mystery, open world exploration, and platforming genres. Now, the studio has recently announced their upcoming second game,Promise Mascot Agency,which utilizes Kaizen’s signature unique style to tell a very different story.Promise Mascot Agencyis the tale of Michi, a disgraced yakuza-in-exile sent to restore a flagging mascot agency in a slowly dying, potentially cursed country town. Featuring a cast of bizarre mascots, corrupt politicians, local heroes, yakuza enforcers and more,Promise Mascot Agencyis currently planned to launch in 2025.
Game Rant had the opportunity to both preview a demo of the game and sit down with four members of thePromise Mascot Agencyteam: game director and studio co-founder Oli Clarke Smith, technical director and studio co-founder Phil Crabtree, art director Rachel Noy, and marketing and communications lead Sam Smith. The team discussed creating a world where mascots exist as a separate species, developing a yakuza protagonist sufficiently distinct from the cast of theYakuzaseries, and how they used the lessons they learned makingParadise Killerto create an even larger and more complex game.This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Promise Mascot Agency Shares Similarities And Differences With Paradise Killer
Q:Promise Mascot Agencyis very different fromParadise Killer,but there’s similarities, too - the open-world exploration style most notably.
Clarke Smith:We’ve always wanted to have a “Kaizen house style.” When we say that to people, people always think that what we mean is like a graphical style or an artistic style, but that isn’t it. It was always like: we want our games to have a certain feel with the gameplay and tone that lets you know it’s a Kaizen game.
Q: I felt theParadise Killervibe in the open-world exploration - how you could really go anywhere and do anything. While I was exploring, I definitely drove the truck into the river a few times.
Clarke Smith:The truck’s great. We kind of went back and forth on how it should feel because, for me, the perfect “feel” of a driving game is one of the PSPRidge Racers.So it’s very arcade-y, and it’s almost not like you’re controlling a car. You’re controlling this sliding machine. And in my mind, I thought it would be cool if we did something like that. But then, there’s no connection to the world in our game if we pushed it that far. So what we want to do is try and find a bit of arcade-y mastery in it, which is why we have the handbrake and a couple of other things. We also want to make it feel like a traditionally good-feeling driving game, but have the weight of a rickety old truck. Those types of trucks are good and robust and drive well no matter what you put them through, but the user needs to feel different from a more traditional car. So that means that, hopefully, there is a little bit of mastery. The more you play it, the more you get used to it.
InParadise Killer,we unintentionally made thecontrols, the traversal, have a kind of weight and slidinessto them which we didn’t necessarily intend. But I think it ended up being something that you can master, because when we were playing it, I used to treat it almost like a skateboarding game because of the slidiness, the way the inertia works. The inertia is character-relative rather than camera-relative. And I would jump, slide across a ledge, slide across a rail, and I got used to doing all that. I found it quite fun to master. But when it came out, we got a lot of people saying “This game controls badly.”
Q: SoPromise Mascot Agencyis so delightfully wild - yakuza and mascots and curses and everything. Where did the idea for the game first come from?
Crabtree:I think we lose track of this a bit. Internally, it just seems quite normal. But now, people are playing it, and they’re like “Oh, that’s quite out there.”
Clarke Smith:It initially started when we were partway throughParadise Killer.We needed to make sure that we had the next project lined up, because we assumed thatParadise Killerwas going to come out and not sell very many copies, and that would be, potentially, the end of the studio. We really liked the game. We were really happy with it. But it was kind of a divisive game. So we assumed the worst. We started thinking about pitches for the next game. And Rachel [Noy] wasn’t a full-time employee with us at that point. But she came to us with this idea for a mascot management game in the vein of aKairosoft game. You know, those awesome little pixel-art kind of games. We liked the idea, but our concern was “That isn’t going to be enough.” Those kinds of games make a ton of money and keep the studio going by very rapid iteration. They make one, and then they reskin it and change some stuff and put out another, and it’s kind of low cost. But I think the danger with those kind of games is if it doesn’t hit because it’s just a small 2D game.
I think we wanted to up our chances of having a success, and I think we wanted to build a bigger game. So we were talking and said: “Okay, well, we’ve done open world exploration withParadise Killer,so let’s marry that with that mascot idea.” But we needed a story to attach on to it, and, at the time, we were just rushing to getParadise Killerdone. So when I was putting together the pitch decks, I just put down: “An exiled yakuza runs a mascot agency.” Enter. Done. That’s it. That’s the story pitch. We needed some narrative on it, and there was a little bit of unease about that in the team, like, “That doesn’t feel quite right.” But that’s what we ended up pitching. I was like “Okay, it’s fine. We just need to go. We have to get this pitch out the door, and then we can figure it out later.” But then, when we started pitching it, that was one of the things people liked.
Noy:The marriage of something dark and something cute.
Clarke Smith:Yes. So we ended up with this. Themarriage of something dark and something cute. And the cars, and the house style - we always want something that surprises the player. I don’t think any of the games we make will be that tethered to reality. And this gave us an opportunity to define new things about the world. Create a new world, define things about it, and put contrasting elements together. Once the contrasting elements are put together, and you get over the surprise, it all comes together, because the yakuza, and mascots, and this deserted town, they’re all elements of Japanese culture. They make sense when you put them together.
Creating The World Of Promise Mascot Agency
Q: The world ofPromise Mascot Agencyis very out there, but you do a really good job of portraying life in a small Japanese town. What kind of research went into creating the town of Kaso-machi?
Noy:The main help we had was fromIkumi Nakamura. We worked with her because we were really worried about how it was going to feel, as people who live in England making a game set in Japan. We’d done it in a way, withParadise Killer,that was quite Japanese, but we were still worried. We’ve all been to Japan, and we all love it there, but it’s different to having native knowledge. So we got her and Mai Mattori, her assistant concept artist, on board. And they gave us an “Art Bible” with ideas as to authentic things that we could include in the town. You know, the base of operations being a love hotel - that came from them. And we passed things back and forth, and they’d tell us, “This works really well” or “This doesn’t feel quite right.” And they honed it from there. And we did lots of research, scrutinizing Google Maps, holiday photos, just to be on top of things.
Clarke Smith:I think one of the things that I hadn’t appreciated at the time was that they kind of saved us by suggesting the town it was in. When we were pitching it in our heads, we thought it would be a more built-up town, or a city. And the production effort it would take to make that would be enormous. And we wouldn’t have been able to do it, and we certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it justice. And them explaining thisrural town settingto us, and the cultural context of these depopulating towns, informed a lot of the story, but it also, from a production point of view, really saved some of the stuff that we’ve tried to do.
Noy:We were originally thinking of maybe Tokyo, or Osaka, or something like that. But then Ikumi and Mai came along and said “How about Fukuoka?” Because actually, it is kind of a big hub for yakuza activity. And it’s kind of a different vibe. The most dangerous yakuza and organizations come from Fukuoka. The crazy ones, like the Kudo-kai, who used missile launchers and stuff. It sparked some ideas in us: a hot, hazy town in the south, decaying in the sun. We hadn’t really thought about that kind of vibe. But once they suggested that, we were like “Yeah, this is what we want to do.” It all came together, and we got the world from there. We looked at Yubari, inHokkaido, and it was this town with all these decayed movie posters left over from the Showa era. It’s really sad, but really cool visually, because it’s like a snapshot of the past. So, even though our game is set in Fukuoka, we looked at depopulating towns all over Japan and kept the bits that we thought were interesting.
Q: Did you draw any inspiration from real-life Japanese mascots when creating the characters ofPromise Mascot Agency?
Clarke Smith:Yes, we did. But a lot of ourmascot designscame from Ikumi and Mai initially. I think there are two versions of this game that could exist. One has more traditional, cute mascots. And then the other is what we’ve got, where we have these slightly more grotesque and bizarre mascots, and Ikumi and Mai really helped with that. But then we developed some more later on. And I think the ones that Rachel and Amy [Crabtree] developed are a bit more like real life. You could probably find close analogues to those that exist.
Noy:Yeah, it got to a point where we did have a lot of weird and wonderful ones, but we needed some normal ones in there. To make the weird ones seem more weird, almost. So Amy and I designed some more traditional Japanese mascots. And then some of them kind of veer into beingyokai, as well. You’re not quite sure if it’s a mascot, or something a bit more spooky. And then you’ve got the plain kind of cute ones. You’ve got horrific ones. Later, you’ve got ones in underwear. We’ve got a good mix, but we definitely take inspiration from traditional ones as well.
Smith:What I really love about all the mascot designs is that basically all of them are tied, in some way, into some deeper Japanese thing. Like Rachel said, a lot of them are based on yokai. And some of them are even puns. Like Kaki-Gory,[based on the word for shaved ice]which is all gory. There’s a lot that aren’t obvious, at first glance, but I think a lot of Japanese people, or Japanese speakers, or people who have been there a long time will realize that, beyond the surface design, there’s a lot of extra thought that’s been put into it. It’s very cool. Good stuff.
Q: What are some of your personal favorite mascots in the game, or ones you’re particularly excited for players to meet?
Crabtree:I’m torn. I really like Pinky. Pinky’s not a recruitable mascot, but she’s really got, sort of humor and a weird sort of humanity in there as well. Otherwise, I’ve always really liked To-Fu. There’s just something about To-Fu. I’m really happy, that from what we’ve shown, people seem to really respond to To-Fu as well. I just think a cube is such a great character.
Clarke Smith:I really like that, with To-Fu, there’s this weird, deep cut reference that I don’t think was intentional, but I really enjoy it. Because To-Fu was designed by Ikumi, who worked withHideki KamiyaonBayonettaandOkami,and Kamiya designed the tofu character inResident Evil 2,which is one of the greatest games ever made. So this through-line is entirely unintentional. But I love this aspect of his design, which only like two people in the world will notice, but here we are.
Noy:Mine is probably Tamageta, the egg in underwear who’s the mascot of the hot springs. I really likehot springsin general anyway, and then, to have an egg that was boiled in the bath running the bath is just kinda weird.
Clarke Smith:I really liked Kabayaking. He’s not in the demo, he’s a late-game mascot. He’s an eel that has been split open down the front and had his flesh splayed out, like a bowl of unagi. you may see his insides, and he’s got this big wide-eyed expression on him, so that when something goes wrong in one of the mascot battles, it has a really good comedic effect. Like when the cash register explodes, and it’s spewing out coins, the coins spew directly into his body and he’s got this wide-eyed, shocked look about him as it’s going on.
Smith:I like Trororo, who you do meet in the demo. We’ve got this relatively friendly-looking game, and it’s like: “Oh, here’s a cat who’s addicted to porn.” And he’s covered in this sticky substance that we’re assured is grated yam. That cracks me up. I’m a big fan.
Michi: A Complex Exiled Yakuza Protagonist
Q: Then, you’ve got your other main character, Michi, this disgraced yakuza. Can you talk about some of the inspirations behind him?
Clarke Smith:So Michi was a blank slate at first. What happened is, we finishedParadise Killer,and we were taking some time off when we got an email from Kowloon, who were funding the project, saying “Would you like to work with Ikumi Nakamura on this?” And we were like, well, obviously. Hell yes! But also, we’ve got nothing to send. So we had to scramble to put together this brief of what the game is, so that we could send it over, and she could start working, and Michi was…Well, all that we knew was that we wanted a stoic, straight main character, so that he could be the fish out of water. The character, for the player, encountering all this weirdness, with people around him to explain the weirdness, which is why Pinky is there.
So we wanted this normal straight man character, and, in doing that, what I always had in my head was justKiryu fromYakuza.I couldn’t imagine anyone else. I just expected a dude in a suit, wandering around this town. And then, what we got back was Michi. He’s got his broom. He’s got a track jacket over his shoulder, and he’s wearing flip-flops. I was really considered that we wouldn’t have a unique-enough looking yakuza man as our main character, but then we just got this completely unexpected design back from Ikumi and Mai. They sent through some variations, but we all landed on the first one. That was Michi. He went through absolutely zero revision. It got the concepts through, we all picked the same one, and then that was just developed into the full art.
Over time, his character’s come out more and more, as we’ve delved into what his history is, and what his motivations are. He’s got this real stoicism about him. His nickname is “The Janitor,” because he cleans up any mess that his boss needs. But at the time, we didn’t really understand why that was. What made him that. And, as we delved into his backstory, and his history, and how he got recruited into the family, we got it. A lot of the game’s themes are about the promises we make to other people. He takes his promises very deathly seriously.
I didn’t want to fall into the cliche, when writing him, of the “fish out of water” coming from a big city to a rural town, and hating it, and wanting to go back to the life that he knew. But then something happens, and they want him around, and suddenly he loves where he is. That’s such a cliched story. You can see it coming just an absolute mile off. So the way that we developed him was that he is someone that just accepts everything. Like “I’ve got this problem to solve, how do I solve it?” He figures that out, and then he just acts on it. Very little in the game fazes him, despite the fact that he isn’t used to any of this life. He doesn’t know the place. He’s coming to a town that’s going to kill him. But all of that is just: “Well, so be it. I have a job to do. We’re gonna get it done.”
There are some great things later in the game. Where some really weird stuff happens and, with Michi, it shows his progression. He accepts a little bit more every time something weird happens. But, at the end, we show his character kind of complete. He understands that it’s not all on him. He’s got this team of people around him, this family, that are going to help him through anything. One of the themes is the people you have around you, your friends and the family that you build - whatever problems you have, those people will help you through them.
And at the start, Michi has been torn away from his family and has to build a new one. And we see him in the face of adversity, and in the face of a changingyakuzalandscape. He still holds on to his old values, and the new friends and family he meets respond to that. And he rallies his family around him in his hour of need, because he’s also there for them in their hour of need. So it’s everyone just supporting each other. And we’ve got a few great antagonists in the game that provide all the conflict, but you really get the sense, hopefully, of a family coming together.
At the start of the game, Pinky makes a few jokes about Michi’s “implacable, stoic slab of meat that he calls a face,” and then that sort of cracks over time. Pinky, over time, stops giving him such a hard time, and we see that development happen. I think that some of the characters we see inother yakuza mediadon’t necessarily show that level of humanity. Or, if they do, it’s very unchanging. You know, some of these characters, over the course of their story, they stay who they are. And that’s fine, what they’re trying to do.
But I think, with us, we wanted to show that, because so much about the yakuza world keeps changing - new laws, new restrictions - and they’re having to adapt, and Michi, despite not being that old, still feels like an old man because he’s bound very closely to the tradition and the old ways of doing things. But then, he has to change, I really like some of the scenes that we gt to where we see him go from accepting all of this weirdness to embracing it and using it and being like: “Okay, this is what’s going on. I didn’t understand it. I do now. Let’s make the magic happen.” And I think it’s quite unusual in games, for someone that looks like him initially, to have some of those moments.
Michi And Pinky: A Dynamic “Buddy Cop” Duo
Q: And then you have the other half of this dynamic duo, Pinky - did her design go through any changes? Was she always a severed finger?
Noy:Yeah, pretty much. There were a few sketches at the start where she wasn’t. She was a very traditional mascot earlier on. Then she was a finger. We were always kind of going for this messed upbuddy copdynamic. Like, she’s the unhinged one, even though she’s cute, and Michi’s kind of got it together, even though he’s a yakuza. And we wanted to make it not be too cliché, but they’re two parts of a whole. In the yakuza, they remove the pinkie when they do wrong, so we thought it all tied together pretty well.
Clarke Smith:Yeah, I think it works kind of like a Japanesemanzaicomedyact, where you have a straight man, and then you have the crazy one. And you get elements of that with Michi and Pinky, but then also Shiori as well, because Pinkie is absolutely critical to explaining the game to you. So, if we just made her too crazy, you wouldn’t get that explanation. It would just be this chaotic goblin following you around being weird for weird’s sake. So Pinky is very sarcastic. Very funny. Can be wacky. But some of the larger comedy elements have to come from other characters, because we need to balance that out with having Pinky be the tutorial-giver, the world-explainer and the system-explainer.
Q: I loved the Michi-Pinky dynamic. The buddy cop vibes really came through.
Clarke Smith:I am going to be bummed when we finish this game, and we don’t have to write any more Michi and Pinky because, as you know, this game isbig.It’s like150,000 words, which is a lot to write. And some of that is not as enjoyable to write as other parts, but when I get to write a good Michi and Pinky bit, it’s the best thing. It just flows. They’re really fun to write. By the time we finish it, this game will have been going on for over four years, and some of the dialogue that we wrote at the very beginning is still in the game. Some of the dialogue has been written since then, but it was a while ago. I keep finding bits in the game that I’d forgotten. We’d written them, and they’d get a giggle. I think it’s enjoyable, just hanging out with these two idiots.
I think I’m going to miss these characters more than any of the characters inParadise Killer.Lady Love Dies and Shinji have a similar dynamic, but Shinji isn’t around enough. Should we make anotherParadise Killer,I would be extremely tempted to do another buddy cop thing like Michi and Pinky, just because they’re so fun to write. And it’s a great way of going through the game. You’re exploring the world, but there’s always someone there to bounce off that has something interesting to say, or something funny.
Noy:It’s good to start a game and feel like you’re part of a relationship already. No matter what game you play, it’s just nice to have a “frenemy.”
Q:Promise Mascot Agencyhas a much larger cast of characters compared toParadise Killer.What was it like writing the game and balancing this larger group?
Clarke Smith:It’s been an exhausting nightmare. It’s so much work.
Noy:It’s been worth it. We wanted to create the feeling of a village.Paradise Killerwas very empty. Everyone had left. But this is empty for a different reason - but there are still people there.
Clarke Smith:It’s good. It’s good because, with a lot of the characters, you have much smaller interactions with them than inParadise Killer.With the characters ofParadise Killer,one of the difficulties with writing them was that, often, they were telling you something very important about the evidence or testimony. So it meant that dialogue had to be structured in such a way that critical information had to be delivered no matter what. Whereas with some of these characters, they’re not delivering that kind of information, so you can have a bit more fun with them.
It has been difficult keeping it all in our heads and writing it, and buildingnew gameplay systemsto manage dealing with them all. But I think it’s led to a lot of variety and a lot of freedom to have a bit of fun with them, more than we sometimes could inParadise Killer.And it’s also been good to have more people touch these characters, because some characters were modeled in-house and some of them were modeled by one of our team of freelancers. And then someone else would animate them. So it’s been good to see.
And then we have Inko Ai Takita, who is amanga artistthat has done all of our portraits. We have in our heads, like: “This is who this character is.” By letting other people touch these characters or bring them to life in their own way, with their own focus on the project, we see different parts of the character that we might not necessarily have thought of. Especially with the portraits. We gave our artist, Inko, the concept art and all the emotions that we needed for each character. We said “We haven’t got concept art for these emotions, so please just do what you want.” So she then took that on, and created poses and emotional variants that we totally weren’t expecting. They were surprising and fun and brought some extra life into the project because of us being surprised. Like, instead of us creating everything in the game, we were being surprised by what other people were doing. And that, in turn, allowed us to take that and put a new twist on something that the character is doing.
One of the ones I was thinking about recently is Jose the mechanic. He’s got this emotion variant where he’s thinking, and he’s looking up, and his tongue is sticking out. And it gives him a certain type of playfulness and fun that I hadn’t initially expected. That fed into how we wrote him and used him in the game. So it’s been good to see other people put their mark on these characters, rather than it all falling out of a much smaller group of people’s heads.
Creating Card-Based “Mascot Hero Battles”
Q:Promise Mascot Agencyhas so many fun gameplay mechanics, like the card-based mascot battles. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Clarke Smith:Phil took on way more game design than he did forParadise Killer.WithParadise Killer,we knew what features we wanted to do, and he built it in line to those specs. Whereas the specs I have written for gameplay stuff forPromise Mascot Agencyhave been so slight, comparatively, and he’s taken on not just the implementation but the design.
Crabtree:WithParadise Killer,we were starting from scratch. We had nothing. You needed inventory, so you wrote theinventory system. It was like that.Paradise Killerdidn’t have many systems. You walked around, you spoke to someone, and there were some clever things going on in the background. But, by and large, it was: Do you have this? If so, this can happen.
WithPromise Mascot Agency,there’s more going on in the background. There’s this system that’s constantly ticking, and so it’s harder to design something in isolation. There are a few systems in the game that come in later. And it’s really important to design them in the context of the game. When we talk about ideas, like “It would be cool to have this or that,” we don’t usually sit down and have a big old discussion about exactly how it works, because it’s kind of important to put it in. Let it breathe, and then iterate on it. And because we’ve got this wholemanagement systemin the background, I might be partway through implementing something and then go: “Well, hold on. This is not going to work in this context.” Or “We forgot to take into account this statistic” or something. So then, rather than trying to go back and redesign around all these unknown quantities, it’s easier for me - and, I think, somewhat better - to just go ahead with what I think is sensible. What I think will fit in the game, in terms of the technical requirements, but also what represents the gameplay. And just take it from there.
So yeah, I’ve done more design. But the work I’ve done is based on prior design work by Oli [Clarke Smith] and Rachel [Noy]. I take what’s been established and expand it to see if we can put it in there. Because we had a whole bunch of stuff fromParadise Killer,and because I learned a whole bunch about design fromParadise Killer,it’s been a lot easier for me to do that on this project. It’s interesting to see how it’s worked out.
Like Oli said, the original pitch wasmuch more simulation-based, and now it’s less simulation-based. So some systems in there have sort of been designed down. Some things - there’s a whole load of stuff that’s never gonna work, just because it didn’t fit in the game. But again, those levels of iterations have allowed me to sort of play with the design a little bit, and get feedback. And I will say, whenever I do this, that the things I make sort of sit in my world and work, but it’s Oli who comes along and then makes them actually work in the game. Oli did a big round recently, sort of pulling all these systems together and giving each one of them meaning based on all the other systems. That is a skill I do not have, so it’s definitely a big team effort for sure.
Clarke Smith:The mascot battles, when they get stuck in a door and that sort of thing, that was in from the start. But it was dreadful. It was getting to the point where I thought: We’re just going to have to cut this. I think the game needs it. The game needs to see mascots in trouble. But the design for it is dreadful. The implementation is dreadful, and the amount of work it will take to get what we currently have to a shippable standard would be immense, and would still not be worthwhile. This was mid-last year. We were having a Skype panic-crisis meeting. Like, “This is dreadful. We’ve got to cut it.”
But then Phil said: “What about thiscard gameidea?” And that was all his design, and the amount of iteration that I’ve done in terms of what the actual design is has been minimal. The implementation has been hard, but the design was good. I feel like that’s a good example of how, when we have a problem, the team is full of people that we can trust to make something good. To turn a bad situation around, because nothing ever goes smoothly. But a lot of the people we’ve worked with, all the people that were working on this project, they’re all people that we can trust when we say: “Here’s a problem? Can you please help us solve it?” And they do. And I’m really happy with how that card game turned out, compared to what was there.
Crabtree:We did try to make it really complex initially. And I was like: “Dial it down.” Weall play card games together, and I realized the joy isn’t in having these high-value cards. It’s in chaining things together. It’s that: “I’m going to play this, which lets me play that, which lets me do this.” And inPromise Mascot Agency,the more cards you collect, the more opportunity you have for that.
We’ve never been scared to change systems. For something that’ll work, obviously we can’t just completely rip things out and start again, but I think we’re all quite good at seeing what is and isn’t working and not being too precious about it. Like “Something good is here. This part’s not working. Let’s experiment with another option.” And because we are such a small, agile team, we can test and implement things quite quickly. Like the card game. I think I just made a web page, an HTML page, that sort of demonstrates it at its core. You know, that might never get through in a bigger company, because it was so basic, but we could see: “That works. It fits in the game. Let’s push ahead and try it.” I’m happy with that.
I’m happy with how thecards play into the characters you meetand the action of the world. It’s always really important for us to reward the player, perhaps in non-typical ways, and for your actions to have some effect in the world. To have these cards upgrade as you do positive things is a pretty nice feeling.
Q: The card battle system works really well. I loved it. It was so fun.
Clarke Smith:It wouldn’t stretch to a standalone game. Some of the feeling of this game is almost like aJRPG, where you need that friction. Just exploring the world wouldn’t give you enough friction and engagement in the game. But then the card battles are just enough to provide a little bit of friction that you can engage with. And all the rewards, well almost all the rewards in the game, tie into the simulation in some way. So you get a new, better hero, which means your mascot can do harder jobs, which means you can get more money, which means you can buy more upgrades, which means you can avoid a Game Over. It’s been a long round of iteration to tie it all together like that.
Q: I like the bizarre “superhero” character cards you can collect from Captain Sign.
Clarke Smith:That was something that Ikumi and Mai initially sent us with the mascot designs, and included them as mascots. But the problem is, they’re not the same shape as a mascot. So, we couldn’t have Captain Sign get stuck in a doorway. So then we had to find when we wanted to use him. We had to use him, because he looks really cool and adds a lot to the law. So, we had to find a way of bringing him in.
Establishing this kind of “group of freaks” that call themselves theMascot Support Heroes, I think, gives a lot of good gameplay stuff. But it’s not just that. We want to try and think about how these mascots fit into the world as a whole. And mascots in this world, and the mascot industry, is so much bigger than it is in the real world. And so there are references to “mysterious masked figures,' and then we have the Mascot Support Heroes. So, you get the sense that, although you’re stuck in this rural dying town on the coast, you are part of something bigger.
Noy:There’s all kinds of factions. [Captain Sign] is a mascot human. A human who wants to be a mascot. So there’s Captain Sign, but there’s also normal villagers who just want to live a quiet life. Lots of clubs you could be a part of, or not be a part of.
Q: My favorite of the hero cards I collected during the demo was Bottle Ningen. What’s his deal?
Clarke Smith:So one of the things that’s missing from the game at the moment, that we’re going to add, is bios for all the heroes, so that in your inventory you can take a look at all of that. And all the local heroes are heroes of something. So Captain Sign is a hero of traffic safety. And Bottle Ningen is a hero of recycling because in Japan, sorting your garbage is a big deal.
Q: I look forward to playing the full game! When willPromise Mascot Agencybe coming out?
[END]
