Daikatana My Thoughts
Played on PC digital copy purchased from gog.com
Questions and thoughts that I spoke out loud as I played Daikatana.
Really Super Fly Johnson? Is it my ass? Is my ass going to be yours later? Please say it again for the 200th time as I accidentally bump into you in the heat of battle.
Oh I’m the one that needs to watch out? Really? you are standing in the doorway doing the fucking running man while I’m getting shot in the back trying to get out of harms way.
What do you mean I can leave without Superfly? Where did he go? Oh he is stuck on a ledge at the beginning of the level. That’s just great!
What kind of starting weapon is this? It bounces off surfaces and…hurts me? oh I can’t use it underwater either because it hurts me?
What does weapon do, oh it fires a mine that hurts me?
What does this weapon do… oh it fires a giant ball that hurts me! What the hell!?
A snake staff what does this do, oh it bounces back at me and poisons me. Eat pig penis John Romero.
These are the questions I kept asking myself as I played the game and grew more and more frustrated with every step I took into the lame backwards game that is Daikatana. A game that will forever live in infamy for its hype.
How did John Romero and his team fuck up the basics of first person so badly? The co creator of the genre that changed the way we played video games makes a game that is not only one of the worst games that I have ever played but literally… of all time. However, I am not here to discuss the history of that game as it is well documented and doesn’t bear repeating. I have provided links below for those of you readers who are too young to know the hype of the famous ad that stated the John Romero was going to make us his bitch.
I’m just here to tell you my experience playing the game 24 years after its release. I play bad games for educational purposes and Daikatana has been on my list for a while. I started over a month ago and have about 11 hours of gameplay on it according to the gog launcher. Sometimes games are created to walk so that other games can run. They have purpose even though they don’t play so well. An example of this would be the original Alone in the Dark. A game that was an important step in what is now known as the Survival Horror genre. Play Alone in the Dark today and I would like to find anyone that can stand more than 5 minutes of it. The game is slow, ugly and controls awkwardly. I beat it of course because I needed to know the roots of one of my favorite genres and for all the things that have aged so poorly in Alone in the Dark the influence of its design can still be felt in modern day masterpieces like Alan Wake II.
Daikatana is not one of those games. This is a game who’s ambition got in the way of just making a game. Daikatana did try and push the FPS genre forward with AI controlled friends and big story telling, so I will give it credit for that but that is all it gets. Playing Daikatana was a constant test on my patience. I didn’t even beat the game, it is rare when I don’t see a game all the way through, as of this writing I have about 825 games beat under my belt and only 14 games that I have quit… 15 now. As you saw in the quotes the flaws are many and irritating to the core. The guns are no fun to fire, I hate 95% of the weapons in this game because some way or another most of them hurt you to use or your AI allies. It is a constant fight to gain as much distance from the enemies because if they are up close your weapons hurt you just as much as it hurts them. I don’t know what the purpose of this was, there is no logical innovation in having so many weapons that players would not want to use.
In addition, enemies are right out of a 8 bit Nintendo game. You ever wanted to blow up a robot spider and robot dragon fly? How about blowing up like 500 of them because for the first part of the game that is all you do. The game gives a horrible first impression and I am surprised I got as far as I did which was to the 3rd act of the game. To make the game challenging most enemies ambush you, open a door, you automatically take unavoidable hits because they are placed right behind the door ready to fire. The only reason I think they did this is that the enemy AI is really as basic as it gets, enemies are sometimes too big for the areas they are in and get stuck... a lot. Pretty much they run in a direct straight to you when games released two years before were already showing much more advanced AI with their enemies. Daikatana's enemies were AI was not even as good as the original DOOM's monsters AI.
Of course there is the AI controlled friends and yes it is as bad as everyone says it is and it is due to one big part of the game design. The levels are too small, you are in doom style corridors with no place for the AI to go or move. You can’t walk through the AI either so if you are behind them in a hall you at the mercy of holding down the move key as you bully them inch at time out of said hall. If they die it is game over and that happens way too often as they have their own health bars that need to be managed. You must direct them to get health, health that you need a lot of times because you just got blasted in the ass trying to move them out of way.
It simply is no fun at all in anyway to play Daikatana and that is what John Romero forgot to do which is to make the game fun. I don’t feel bad as I only played 1.25 USD for the education of this game but for those of you who are not gluttons for punishment the games legacy should be enough to know to avoid it.
https://youtu.be/5Qy9ihyQ75M?feature=shared