Written by: Rik
Date posted: July 5, 2024

If you’re here, then you probably know this already, but in case you don’t: Daikatana is one of gaming’s most infamous high-profile flops, which was massively over-hyped, then released years late, over budget, and to a chilly critical reception. The tale of its lengthy and troubled development has arguably reached a level of notoriety that makes it inseparable from any discussion of the game itself.

Under such circumstances, I think to get any kind of enjoyment from Daikatana, you have to have retained some kind of curiosity about it over the years, sufficient to push past an acceptance that the game’s initial reception wasn’t necessarily unfair, beyond the realisation that subsequent reappraisals haven’t exactly been favourable either, and to a point where, despite all that, you’re still determined to see it for yourself.

I first had such a thought more than 15 years ago, when I first bought the game, although I can’t quite recall whether my bad memories of the early stages are from an aborted attempt at the full thing or an earlier encounter with a demo version. Still, I think I had largely made my peace with leaving it alone for the rest of time, and accepting others’ assessments as broadly similar to what I might have thought, if I had ever actually got around to playing the game properly.

But then I had the opportunity to dig through some of the Daikatana backstory again, and while it was – and is – plenty interesting enough on its own, it felt a bit strange to write about the game without having played it. Stranger still, even with some memory of the coverage at the time, and knowledge of how it all turned out, it really struck me how little real information about the game ever came across in any of the preview pieces I read.

Particularly striking, looking back, was the lack of emphasis from John Romero – Ion Storm co-founder, ex-iD wunderkind, and the man behind Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake – on the key parts of Daikatana that would make it stand out from the crowd (if it had been released on time) and indeed from the games with which he had previously been involved.

Romero had apparently felt, and expressed elsewhere, that his new game was going to be so much more than just a shooter, spanning multiple worlds and time periods and integrating RPG elements and story cut-scenes. Such things would certainly have appealed to me at the time, but all I remembered was a lot of bluff and bluster, mixed in with the kind of generic ‘banter’ about multiplayer deathmatch that I always found a little off-putting.

As previously mentioned, there haven’t been too many people over the years willing to make the case that Daikatana is underrated, misunderstood or – you know – a decent game. But I did happen across news of a recent unofficial patch which, apparently, made it significantly less annoying to play. Make no mistake, if we were still stuck with the version that was first released to the public – the one that compounded its general bugginess by not allowing you to save wherever and whenever you wanted, in favour of a not-so-ingenious system of limited ‘save gems’ – then no amount of curiosity would have seen me through to the end of the game.

However, it should be noted that patch 1.2 – the one commercially available, and indeed the version that was present on my mid-00s budget re-release disc – fixed the save system as well as some of the other most egregious errors, without necessarily making for an entirely irritation-free experience.

The new version 1.3, however, promised even more fixes, including the ability to further mitigate Daikatana's other main sticking point – your custody of two sidekick characters – by making them invincible or turning them off altogether. A few people were even found to be claiming that the game was now good. Although I didn’t necessarily believe them, I figured it was enough to warrant giving it another go.

You are Hiro Miyamoto, a master swordsman in a dystopian future Tokyo, who is one night visited by a strange old man, Toshiro Ebihara, who tells him that the current parlous state of the world is down to Kage Mishima – the game’s big baddie – stealing a big sword that is powerful enough to enable time travel (the Daikatana) and fixing things for himself in the past, so that he is, like Biff Tannen in Back to the Future 2, a future all-powerful ruler of everything. Hiro’s task is to steal the sword back, as well as rescue Toshiro’s daughter Mikiko, by infiltrating Mishima’s headquarters.

The action that immediately follows this introduction is, by most standards, pretty dreadful stuff. If you have vague memories of getting repeatedly attacked by robotic flies and frogs in a swamp in the demo, there’s plenty more of that – and worse – to chew through. Quite why they put the hardest and most annoying part of the game first, I’m not sure – I guess it’s just one of quite a few bad decisions made along the way – and the sidekicks don’t even come into play until midway through the episode.

Apart from accurately recreating that relaxing holiday vibe of hearing a mosquito in your room but not ever quite being able to see or kill it, the first section is plagued with what I would call “90s FPS smartarsery”: big baddies hiding behind doors just waiting to kill you, swimming sections that only allow you just enough air to get to the end, the way through the level being hidden in obscure places, and weapons that pose as much danger to you as to your enemies. Oh, and if you do manage to shoot any human baddies, they won’t so much fall to the ground as explode in a shower of fleshy chunks.

I’m a little rusty on my FPS history, but I know these things aren’t necessarily unique to Daikatana. This wasn’t an era known for its subtlety, which is probably why John Romero might once have reasonably thought that this was the game to bring some to the genre, however ridiculous that notion may now seem. Similarly, I’m old enough for things like progressing by the skin of your teeth and replaying a section with more finesse to conserve health to be part of my FPS memories, although it must be said that these were usually associated with frantic quicksaving, which – as we’ve already mentioned – wouldn’t have been possible in the original build.

By the end of the first episode, you’ll have both sidekicks in tow – the aforementioned Mikiko and ‘Superfly’ Johnson – and have crossed paths with Mishima. It’s a fair point at which to assess the qualities of the supporting dialogue and voice acting, given that all the major players are revealed by that point, and again the signs aren’t particularly encouraging. Hiro’s gritty growl is a bit too try-hard, while encounters with Mishima swiftly descend into gruff-offs, as the main determining characteristic of the antagonist’s voice appears to be that it must at all times be lower and more gravelly than that of the player character. As for your companions, it’s a strange dynamic, with the back and forth between the main protagonists lacking any sense of warmth, wit or charm, of the type you’d normally expect to develop as a band of heroes battle unlikely odds and high stakes together.

The sidekicks are frequently cited as one of the more annoying aspects of Daikatana, although patch 1.3 reduces the need to take practical care of them to zero, if you so wish. I played with them present but invulnerable, which meant that I didn’t need to worry about looking after them too much or sharing available health, weapons and armour, and left making sure that they were able to physically progress through each level and enduring their banter as the two remaining considerations.

On the former point there were one or two difficulties involving them getting stuck on scenery or falling down a big hole and disappearing, but nothing that detained me for too long. On the latter, leaving aside Superfly’s name and characterisation and whatever kind of accent Mikiko’s voice actor is doing (a bad and possibly offensive one, it might be argued), the contrast between Superfly’s guileless threats to harm you whenever you bump into him accidentally and his tears of anguish when you die is arguably representative of the generally ludicrous dynamic.

You may prefer to make different choices with regard to the sidekicks’ settings: my own position was that, even if the game worked as a half-decent squad shooter (which by most accounts it doesn’t, despite offering some rudimentary options to instruct them directly), I’d be reluctant to get involved. Anyway, it’s nice to have the option with the new patch.

Daikatana does get better after the first episode: there’s definitely much less to annoy, and parts of Episode 2 (set in ancient Greece) and Episode 3 (Dark Ages) are reasonably engaging. Weapons, scenery and enemies are changed up in their entirety each time, and if Daikatana doesn’t quite live up to the pre-release promises of ‘four completely different games’ there’s definitely more variety than you’d typically find in an FPS of this vintage.

Some queries persist, however, such as why the lower powered weapons are actually the most reliable to use, while the bigger ones should largely be left alone except in desperate circumstances. (I found little reason in Greece to use anything but the Discus of Daedalus – sort of a boomerang of death, and your initial weapon – most of the time). And even though nothing quite matches the frogs and flies of the first episode, there are equivalent little pests in each subsequent one that are always a bit more annoying than they perhaps should be.

There are also moments where you wonder why the cut-scenes serve mainly to showcase stiff dialogue wherein the main characters string out some fairly tedious plot-related discussions rather than providing some explanation as to what you, the player, might need to be doing at certain points. There’s a fairly annoying level in Greece in which you get to what appears to be the end, at which point you realise that you should have been collecting some rune stones in order to open a gate. Even though you might have picked up one, or maybe two, along the way, there’s little to no chance that you’ll have happened across all of them by accident, and so back you go, trekking across an improbably large map trying to figure out where the missing ones might be.

It feels like a missed opportunity for some exposition; for one of the sidekicks to pipe up and say ‘these look important’ – or, if not, for the player to receive other signposting of some sort. Later in the same episode, from nowhere, a whispered voice indicates that you need to kill a dog with a trident. (There may well have been some other supporting context, but it certainly didn’t warrant a cut-scene or anything that might stick around longer in the memory). In general, while there are lots of dialogue scenes, very few of them actually help the player in any practical sense.

Episode 3 has some good moments, to start off with, although there’s a slight feeling that it’s because its setup – a village afflicted by a plague – at least accounts for the sparsely populated levels. There’s a definite eerie vibe, and there are some nice touches, too, like the bits where you jump into icy cold water and its effects continue to erode your health for a few moments afterwards.

It later descends into ‘what if Quake was sort of naff?’ territory, and as the above ground world of ice and freezing water is replaced by subterranean lava, it’s worth noting that a temporary dip into the volcanic molten rock does not seem to have any similarly lasting impact on your health once you clamber to safety – although, to be fair, if you linger too long, it does also kill you a lot quicker than the icy water, so perhaps it’s a reasonable compromise.

For the closing chapter, we return to more generic shooting in a fairly grim near-future, almost everything about which evokes memories of a time when games were commonly associated with young men who liked pornography, heavy metal and avoiding the shower. The aesthetic is pretty bleak, and during the opening level on Alcatraz I realised at one point that the action I was engaged in revolved around repeatedly stabbing prisoners – who growl like dogs – with a big sword, until they exploded into splattery hunks of meat.

Admittedly, it was my decision to belatedly start using the Daikatana, the only weapon that remains consistent across different episodes, at this point, having not quite taken on board the fact that you must do so to increase its power, and reasoning that there might be a point later on where the game forces you to use it (there isn’t).

(There are RPG-lite elements that apply to your character, too, which allow you to ‘level up’ a handful of attributes. In the version I played, the game seemed to direct me towards the choice of skill I should upgrade, and I blindly followed it, assuming it was a form of additional help provided by patch 1.3. Having checked the details, though, I don’t think it was. Still, I managed to get through while largely ignoring this part of the game, so it can’t be a deal-breaker, although I think if you don’t take swift action to invest the points you earn, it makes for a much harder game).

Episode 4 does, admittedly, get a little better, although I experienced my one big game-breaking glitch shortly after one of the more exciting levels involving a tower climb, the only way around which was to use a level skip, erasing all of my Daikatana-levelling work in the process. It was an unfortunate break in momentum, as my march into the final stages was halted by repeated re-loading of different saves and checking various walkthroughs and videos. (The only other significant bug I noted was in the first episode, during which I walked down a corridor that was completely empty, and then found myself, after a loading screen transition, suddenly in the middle of a firefight).

After the (ludicrous) finale was done and dusted, I wasn’t sure that I was much better equipped to evaluate Daikatana than I was when I started. Throughout, I was fuelled – and you do need some fuel, because it’s not exactly a short game – by the sense of curiosity that took me towards it in the first place. If you start from that point, and don’t have very high expectations (and based on its history, that hardly seems likely) then there’s probably enough here to sustain your interest. Patch 1.3 does flatten out some of its features, some of which were supposed to make it a distinctive experience in the first place, although by common consensus they also made the game annoying to play. If you’re hesitant at all about whether the game will be palatable, I’d opt for the patch.

The best that can be said for Daikatana is that if it had been released, in its current form, when it was initially supposed to have been released, it might have found a more sympathetic audience. It belongs to a pre-Half-Life world and a pre-Half-Life tradition, one that never particularly appealed to me in the first place. There are things that I don’t like about this game that are also present in SiN, probably the most appropriate point of comparison from my own recent experiences of late-90s FPS games, and so I don’t want to judge it more harshly than necessary.

It is sort of playable and the fact that it all hangs together – kind of, and years after the fact – does make it sort of interesting. There are even one or two good-ish bits. But then you think back to the terrible first episode, the added ideas and features that have ended up being patched out again, the often empty-seeming levels, the lack of memorable weapons and enemies amongst the huge variety included, and the embarrassingly adolescent storytelling, and it remains hard to make a case for Daikatana being anything other than a fairly poor game.

As I said at the outset, it’s probably impossible to separate Daikatana from all of the stuff that preceded its release. There’s an argument for saying that since all of the fuss and criticism died down long ago, we can now more easily assess the game on its own merits. By those criteria, though, I’m not sure Daikatana is a particularly good example of its type and age. And I’d also argue that all of the noise that will forever be associated with it is, actually, the one thing that still makes it an interesting proposition all these years later: if you’re wondering whether to play Daikatana, it’s because you’re also wondering whether it really was as bad as all that.

That’s certainly what drew me in, as an ageing retro-gamer with much more potentially enjoyable pieces of gaming history to dip into, and absolutely no sense that – although I tried to keep an open mind – my views were likely to be out of step with the majority in any significant way. If you find yourself in a similar position, I’m not going to try and talk you out of it: I’m certainly glad to have played Daikatana. As to whether I enjoyed it, though, I’m still not exactly sure.