Something Kir-newPromise Mascot Agency stars Kazuma Kiryus actor because he had the sexiest voice, but his characters designed to be much more than a supermarket own-brand Dragon of Dojima"We were quite worried about it, actually, because then we're already thinking people are gonna be saying, Oh, [you're] Yakuza rip-offs."Image credit: SEGA/Kaizen Game Works News by Mark Warren Senior Staff Writer Published on Feb. 11, 2025 If your game stars Takaya Kuroda as a tatted-up Yakuza member, you're inevitably going to face comparisons to the main character the voice actor's known for - the Like A Dragon/Yakuza series' stalwart protagonist, Kazuma Kiryu. Promise Mascot Agency is doing just that, but its devs are keen to let you know that their aim was never just to imitate the Dragon of Dojima.As part of a recent interview that also touched on how ex-PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida and Deadly Premonition designer Swery came to be in the game, I asked Paradise Killer and now PMA studio Kaizen Game Works what went into casting Kuroda.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Unlike with Yoshida and Swery, Promise Mascot Agency director Oli Clarke Smith told me casting Kuroda as the game's Yakuza protagonist Michi wasn't something that the Kaizen team pitched or pushed to make happen. "Our game has some similarities [with that series], its an open world Yakuza crime drama," the dev explained, "So, we never asked for him because we didn't want to be the guys that are copying [the] Yakuza games, but then he just turned up to audition."Obviously, his agent is very good at finding roles that say Yakuza man, he just rocked up. So, we had no idea. We auditioned for a few characters, not all of them, and I just let our localiser handle all of that. He said Kuroda-san has auditioned, I think we should go with him, he has the sexiest voice out of all of them, and we dont want to say no to Kuroda-san. I said Thats fine. We will use Kuroda-san.While they were obviously happy to be working with such an accomplished voice actor, how Kuroda's casting would be percieved did play on the team's minds. "We were quite worried about it, actually," Kaizen's art director Rachel Noy recalled, "because then we're already thinking people are gonna be saying, oh, we're Yakuza rip-offs and stuff, which - yeah, we love the Yakuza games. Thats no secret, but we also love a load of Yakuza books."When he came in, we were like, Oh gosh, is this actually going to be a really bad move?, but at the end of the day, we just listened to his voice [as] Michi. It was just great, we loved it, and [being] an indie studio, you can do what you want to do, and like, we don't have to explain this to a PR team.""Michi does have some similarities to Kiryu," Clarke Smith said, "but we wanted to push that a little bit further. You always get a sense with Kiryu that hes not as oblivious as his stony face makes out. He understands what's going on, he just maintains like a complete deadpan expression about it, whereas Michi doesn't have that. When he joined his Yakuza family, he was young and he was foolish, and then he's just devoted himself to that lifestyle, so he's become quite insular with his worldview and now that's exploded outwards, and he's having to come to terms with all of that. So he's a bit more oblivious than kind of the Kiryu stereotype.The developer added the genesis of Michi's personality wasn't mainly down to looking at Kiryu - it was creating the ideal surrogate for the player that'd fit within the Japanese Manzai comedy inspired "buddy cop dynamic" the team wanted for the character and the severed mascot named Pinky he runs the agency with.If you're keen to read more about Promise Mascot Agency and all of its wonderful weirdness, make sure to check out our fresh preview of it, for which I spent a couple of hours helping Michi and Pinky save costumed folks from normal-sized doors.