When Hideo Kojima’s pre-COVID isolationist sci-fi trekking game Death Stranding came out, it birthed the idea of a “strand-like” sub-genre of video games. While the notion drew no small amount of eye-rolling in the run up to Death Stranding’s release, the idea to feed asynchronous shared moments or resources from other players into otherwise single player experiences has filtered through to a number of games since. Calamity Angels: Special Delivery taps into a whole other side of that game that I haven’t seen explored as much: the delivery-man-like. Compile Heart has created a JRPG rooted in the idea of delivering and transporting mail across treacherous dungeons and forests, but as fun of an idea as it is on paper, a severe lack of quality-of-life and challenging combat hold this game back from reaching excellence.
In Calamity Angels: Special Delivery you play as Yuri, a delivery service worker tasked with helping the down-on-their-luck group of bizarre package carriers called the Calamity Angels. While Yuri is a pretty straight-laced protagonist (and the only one in a proper uniform), the rest of the crew is hilariously bizarre. Somnia is a swordfighter struggling with sleep deprivation, Selma is a tanky Paladin who’s mortified by practically everything, and Ivris is a giant-hat wearing archmage who, for some reason, is just really into fist-fighting. They’re a disastrous crew of heroes that I was constantly laughing at, especially thanks to their excellent voice acting in both English and Japanese. These characters and their story end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting for my enjoyment of the game, though.
There’s a really clever concept at the heart of Calamity Angels: Special Delivery that I fear isn’t done enough justice. At the guild, you can accept delivery requests from citizens across the Orkotris Region – and whatever they ask you to deliver needs to fit into your backpack, Resident Evil 4 inventory management style. It’s an awesome idea, but the push-and-pull of it never becomes a challenge. Items outside of your delivery parcels are so basic in this game, I hardly ever felt punished for removing them from my bag or ignoring my bag entirely. Once you set up your sack, you never need to think about it again.
Your delivery route then has you explore dungeon routes laid out like Mario Party boards to reach your destination, with a wheel-spin that lands between 1 and 6 dictating how far you go and which spaces you land on. When you land on a combat space, you’ll trigger some fairly generic turn-based battles.
The most peculiar part of the combat is the fact that your teammates will not only act on their own, but sometimes even downright ignore your orders. My favourite recurring bit is when Somnia literally smacks away the text pop-up of whatever attack you tell her to do in favor of a different ability – sleeping. The charm mostly dries up after that, though. I love the character designs in this game, but in battle they’re portrayed as these chibi sprites with clunky, puppet-like animation that just don’t look very polished. I almost wish the combat sections were toned down or removed entirely in favour of some other system that played more tightly into the dynamic of transporting and protecting your precious parcels.
While Calamity Angels: Special Delivery brings some interesting parcel-like gameplay ideas to the table, and a really charming cast of characters on top, it’s all built on a foundation of rocky, repetitive, and pretty boring gameplay. I’d love to see this world explored more and the balance between package delivery and RPG refined even further in a future entry.
