Calamity Angels Special Delivery

Time to pick up your mailbag and take to the dangerous plains so that you can fight your way through for post, parcel and country! Calamity Angels: Special Delivery sees you take on the role as the fledgling leader of a troublesome group of adventurers who must battle their way through a fantasy world of enemies to deliver the mail and keep the populace happy.

First, you’ll have to pick a male or female avatar - either way, your name is Yuri and it’s your first day as the leader of the delivery team called The Cutie Angels (more commonly referred to as the Calamity Angels due to their antics) that’s in pretty poor shape. There’s snoozy Somnia, an aggressive witch who prefers fisticuffs to magic called Ivris and the treasure-obsessed healer Suliya. Freiya keeps things together at the delivery office, but essentially it’s your job to whip them into shape.

That’s not going to be easy either, because while you can command your Angels on the field, there’s no guarantee that they’ll follow your orders if they’re not happy with them. Give Inori an order to use magic instead of fighting and she may very well do nothing at all. Somnia might not bother waking up. You need to get to know the girls and their particular preferences to get the best out of them - unfortunately you’ll have to do it while under enemy fire.

This disobedience does make the game a tad more interesting than your usual turn-based SRPG, so it’s nice to see Idea Factory trying something new. The delivery mechanic gives your team a reason to take to the field, and it builds in a natural progression - become more competent, get offered better jobs and reap the rewards. 

Character designs and dialogue are bright and lively

It’s all served up with a good dollop of cute and cheerful presentation - the characters all have distinct personalities, Yuri’s positive attitude is infectious rather than irritating and the character designs are all interesting and ooze personality. If you’re a fan of bright and breezy games, this should have plenty of appeal.

As the game begins, you’ll start at grade F and have no equipment or weapons to equip, so there’s much to do if you’re going to make improvements. You’ll set off from the guild, which is where you’ll manage deployment, delivery requests and equipment. 

Once you head out on your delivery, you’ll enter the world map - here, you’ll traverse via a “join the dots” system. Your willpower is equal to the number of spins you get on the compass, which will move you between 1 and 6 spaces, with an opportunity to get lucky and have extra movement awarded. In this the game feels like a board game.The idea is to make it to the delivery destination within the limits of your willpower, although branching paths, with offers of treasure or combat, might tempt you to deviate from the most direct route. After your delivery you can continue to explore the board, so don’t feel you have to explore everything on the way to the recipient. Because of the allure of the Omoi, you may attract monsters called Omoikurai who will also traverse the board. Should your paths cross, you’ll be forced into combat - lose and you’ll lose Omoi from the package, endangering the mission and potential bonus rewards. These particular monsters can be softened up by your team, but only finished off by you as the team leader, so you’ll need to ensure the monster is properly concussed before delivering the killer blow.  

Traverse the map screen by spinning a dial and getting to the target square before your Willpower gets to 0

And that’s mostly it for the mechanics - take on deliveries, ensure the goods arrive safely and more difficult missions will be unlocked, bringing greater rewards. It’s remarkably easy to pick up and the simple board-game presentation of the overworld makes it feel immediate and simple to navigate.

Once you pass the first chapter, you’ll be joined by the timid Guardian Knight, Selma, and alchemist Numero (who si a bit creepy). This gives you additional firepower and more hands to handle in battle.

And that's basically it for the game - the boardgame mechanic removes any worldbuilding or exploration, it's very much a case of getting from A to B and it really doesn't deviate from that - you'll chat between missions in a visual novel style, take on increasingly risky missions, power up and progress. This both limits the game's longevity and its difficulty. The randomness of your moves, controlled by a dice, will appeal to the TTG crowd, but I mostly rolled 1's and 2's, so movement became less of a choice and more slow plod across the board. The issue with any "random" computerised movement is that oftentimes I just don't believe it. Like the "spin for a discount" wheels you see on some shopping sites, you know you're getting the lowest possible number, and so it proved with Calamity Angels. When a game does things that feel unfair, you do start to resent it a little.

Speaking of...

Let's circle back to this idea of the characters not doing as they're told. It's cute. It's quirky. It's also (at times) infuriating. I like the idea that the developers are trying something novel, to give the characters an element of independence and character, but in practice it can really screw up your strategy and cause enormous frustration. You, as the player, are redundant. If the characters will just do as they please, then you might as well have an auto-battle function. Thus, the game feels like a visual novel with a game tacked on, rather than a game with visual novel elements.

Combat menus are simple enough - cycle through your team and set commands. And they might even follow them if you're lucky...

Where the game does win through is with the characters. They are an entertaining bunch of misfits and can actually be quite funny, but they became remarkably less so when they're trying to be quirky after you've just scraped through a mission (or worse, lost one) because they just did what they wanted in battle. Then you want them to shut the hell up and fall in line.

I get what the game is going for. It's successful with some of its elements, the logic of the game makes sense and (loaded dice aside) I appreciated the simplicity of the board-game traversal system. It just doesn't quite work when realisation sets in that you might as well not be there, because the game will dictate how far you move and what the characters do, not you. I want to be the master of the system, not a pawn of it. So while the game isn't quite a calamity, it's no cutie angel either.