Daikatana

Pros • Some of the Greece and Norway levels look OK • Pretty box • Superfly Johnson weeps like a little girl when you die	Cons • Insipid monsters • Cliched plot • Outdated graphics • Excruciating level design • Impractical weaponry • Everything else • Crappy sidekick combat AI
Bottom Line After three years in the making, you wouldn’t expect it to be one of the most drab, mediocre and tedious games ever to occupy valuable space on a hard drive. But you’d be wrong! Looking past the towering ego of ION Storm founder and Daikatana designer John Romero is no mean feat. I mean, the thing is HUGE, whether you’re talking about the now infamous “John Romero is going to make you his bitch” ad campaign or the fact he transmogrified his formerly cute girlfriend/employee Stevie “KillCreek” Case into a scary, silicone-enhanced Uberfrau straight out of one of his own games. But look we must, in order to give Daikatana the fair shake it deserves. So, pretending that this game had nothing to do with bitch-making Romero, and pretending that it wasn’t three years in the making, and pretending that we weren’t promised, time and again, that it was going to be the ultimate incarnation of the first-person shooter, how exactly can we sum up Daikatana? Easy. It sucks.

There are a lot of things you can do in three years. You could serve in the army, get an accelerated undergraduate degree, compose a few symphonies, make a couple of big-budget movies, go on a life-defining backpack tour of the world … heck, you could even have three children (four, if you really time it right.)

If you’re John Romero and the team that designed Daikatana, though, apparently one thing you can’t do in three years is produce a half-decent game. How this is possible is beyond the comprehension of a gaming industry naïf like me, who merely takes the shiny silver discs out of the package, puts them in his magic box and waits for the pretty pictures to appear. All I know is for the amount of effort and money ION Storm poured into Daikatana, it has no right being so completely and impossibly bland.

Built on a modified version of the aging Quake II engine, Daikatana is a first-person shooter with some fairly pointless role-playing elements tacked on. You are cast as Hiro Miyamoto, a martial arts teacher in 25th century Japan. In an incredibly long and static opening cutscene, you learn of a mystical sword called the Daikatana, which has been stolen blah blah evil villain blah blah time travel blah blah old man who told you all this gets killed before your eyes blah blah must find it at all costs!

Defeating your time-travelling nemesis Mishima means journeying through four eras: 2455 Japan (where you find and can begin using the Daikatana), ancient Greece, medieval Norway and near-future San Francisco. Each era has its own monsters and weapons, though they soon blend together: whether it’s a Griffin, dragon or blaster-equipped hoverbot, you know there’s going to be a nasty flying critter encountered every few minutes, and after a while you don’t really need to know one from the other.

Hiro’s sidekicks, once he finds and rescues them in the first episode, are Superfly Johnson and Mikiko Ebihara, a pair of walking, talking racial stereotypes that raised even this politically incorrect gamer’s eyebrows. One of Daikatana’s much crowed-about features is being able to fight alongside these two, but in reality, it’s like trying to guide Corky from Life Goes On through hostile environments. While he has a gun in his hands. (“Corky! Stop shooting me in the back with that ion blaster!” “Corky! When the big scary monster starts hurting me, attack it!” “Corky, just stay the %$#@! out of the way and when I clear a path to the end of the level, I’ll come back for you!”) While the pathfinding routines are pretty good – Superfly and Mikiko will even crouch and follow you through vents or low tunnels – my border collie with a kitchen knife tied to its head would be a more useful ally in combat. What’s more annoying, you must not only leave each level with your sidekicks, but if they die, it’s game over. Cripes. I didn’t realize they made Adventures in Babysitting into a game.

But that’s just the beginning of the frustration that Daikatana heaps on its unsuspecting players. A person could write a novel detailing everywhere the game drops the ball (or simply fails to pick it up in the first place), but here’s the Cliff’s Notes version: The graphics are generally uninspired, though some of the outdoor locations – particularly in the Greece and Norway eras – look pretty good. The level design is brutal, and drags what might have otherwise been a tolerable game down into the muck. Nobody wants to have to backtrack through humdrum, generic room after room (especially when it means jarring stops in the action while the next level segment loads) to pull switches, find keys or retrieve their tits-on-a-boar sidekicks.

The sidekicks are nearly always a liability, and sometimes don’t even bother to follow your simple “come, stay, get the item” commands. And their comments get kill-me-now tedious after five minutes, when they even make sense (In one hilarious instance, Mikiko was being attacked by a giant, shambling animated statue. As she ran for her life, she commented on how pretty Athens used to be back in its day). Meanwhile, the save game feature requires you to find special gems, which you can trade for saves (sort of like Soldier of Fortune’s limited saves feature). While this has been a much-attacked feature of Daikatana, I didn’t mind it – it helped inject some tension into what is otherwise one limp mother of a game.

Multiplayer action in Daikatana, another heavily hyped aspect of the game, is a mostly laggy and saggy affair, with unbalanced weapons that tend to turn every map into a "scramble for the ass-whomping gun/device/magic item" race in short order. A variety of play modes are included, but none are actually entertaining enough to captivate a player's interest for more than a few minutes, especially when Unreal Tournament, Quake III or multiplayer Half-Life are all clamouring for your precious online gaming time.

Last but most certainly not least, the much ballyhooed role-playing elements of Daikatana are so unimportant as to be discounted outright. You gain experience points for killing critters, and when you level up, you can increase one of five skill areas that affect speed, strength, endurance and so on. These don’t really seem to make that much difference, though, and are quickly forgotten. Slightly more interestingly, the Daikatana itself levels up through use, though the more powerful it becomes, the more it obscures your vision with its ever shinier, screen-bisecting blade.

Had it been released three years ago – don’t forget that Romero initially predicted it would be done in seven months – Daikatana would have been a pretty passable game. The different eras, variety of weapons and novelty of having sidekicks would have made it stand out from the crowd at the time. But this is mid-2000, and many, many games have done it much, much better, leaving Daikatana-come-lately out in the cold. Do yourself a favor, and don’t bother opening the door.

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