by I’m starting to think that there are actually a very small number of games worth playing… for me. Obviously, everyone’s tastes are different, so what is appealing to some may be repulsive to another, but sadly, I must add Daikatana to the same dredge pool that Divine Divinity fell to–a game that was a first impression Tier 1, lowered to a final impression Tier 3.
In the end, it wasn’t the laughably polygonal graphics. It wasn’t the point-and-click combat. It wasn’t the poor storyline. In fact, all of these things were easily forgiven. This game actually has a lot of pluses that I wish I could stomach more of the game to see.
- There’s a sidekick named “Superfly Johnson”
- A katana that slices through time itself
- Gryphons, skeletons, giant monsters, and live alligators that have been converted into tanks
- “McShima” a McDonalds company that converts corpses into burgers
- Time travel to wacky locations
- A shotgun so powerful, that the wielder must unload all 6 shells every time they pull the trigger once
All of these things are great. Ridiculous–but great. The problem is… the game is sloppy. And here’s why.
Yes, as it turns out, it was rather accidental that this game feels like a ridiculous, over-the-top, wacky misadventure. What it actually is, is the over-inflated by-product of John Romero’s inability to remove himself from his fame in the 1990’s. “John Romero is going to make you his bitch,” takes on an entirely different meaning as you play through Daikatana, transforming from “make you his bitch” in a Dark Souls 3 kind of a way to “Make you his bitch” in a “haha, you just paid me for total garbage,” kind of way.
Yahtzee hit most of the problems with the game, so I’ll spare recapping everything except the final straw that made me quit. After traveling through about 6 maps (loading screens between each one) that were all linked together and some requiring to be visited more than once as you traversed different levels of them, I found myself staring at a door that would not open until I had acquired five keys. The keys themselves were an unimportant attempt at adding complexity and length to a game who’s level design and monster placement were the equivalent of “see entity, move within range of entity, click entity.” No, I had killed 198/200 of the 6 levels’ monsters (as the game tells you if you hit tab) but as I was in the school of being made John Romero’s prison plaything, I was instructed that I would need to go back through all of the 6 levels, searching each and every corner of the world, without a map, without a clue, without any monsters, plot or purpose, to simply find 3 more McGuffins that would let me continue playing the game. Not even DOOM (classic or modern) was that bad. After spending about 2 hours liberally using the “no clip” function (a feature of the game that comes pre-loaded, all you have to do is hit the “n” key to activate it, which I think should tell you something) to fly around the levels and attempting to use the singular and solitary walkthrough that I was able to find online (republished on several different sites, but still the same walkthrough) I finally came to the conclusion that I was only playing the game to finish it, which was something that I agreed to stop doing a year ago when Lepcis and I started this site.
No, sadly, in spite of several good things going for it, I would not recommend Daikatana to anyone who did not love buggy NPCs, overly simple combat, poor level design, bland writing and searching endlessly for keys.
