Daikatana is a game that lives down to its reputation

HomeFeaturesDaikatana

Daikatana is a game that lives down to its reputationDon’t gib it the time of day

Don’t gib it the time of day

When I turn my mind to choosing the next game for Past Perfect, I tend to pick between one of two agenda. The first is to replay a game I remember really enjoying to see if I was right to. The other is to replay a game that has a terrible reputation to see if it’s deserved. I think it’s obviousDaikatanaappears in the second category. But surely,surely, no game can deserve the ire this one received? Surely it must have been a response to an extremely ill-advised marketing campaign, promising the Earth and only delivering an FPS? Played 20 years later, it seems entirely reasonable to assume it’ll just be a mediocre shooter that was crushed beneath the weight of impossible expectation? I have written these words before I’ve started playing.

It’s probably fair to say it doesn’t start off so well.

You remember the backstory forQuake, right? That, um, there’s a big brown temple full of stuff to kill: go kill it. And you’ll likely remember how that absolutelyruinedthe game. Awful it was, just dumping you straight in to one of thebest FPS gamesever made without pratting on about why you were there and how important you were for humanity. That’s why today you can barely find a person who even remembers Quake.

So thank goodness when Daikatana came along they put all that right, and added an introductory expository sequence long enough to make up for the lack of one in Wolf 3D, Doom, Quake, and every sequel along the way. Somewhere between ten minutes and seven thousand years long, it tells the story of how one man wants another man to find a sword. Sorry, no, I mean, it takes that long for one man to tell another man he wants him to find a sword.

It’s eminently reasonable to say it doesn’t immediately get any better.

Doom and Quake were brown, so it’s something of an advancement that Daikatana sports two predominant colours. I mean, I wouldn’t personally have chosen brownandgreen, but still, progress. Slightly more problematic is the placing of you in a high-walled canyon facing a neon-green waterfall, and then covered the floor in ever-so-slightly raised objects that make it near impossible to move around. And then attacking you with thirty giant mosquitoes and tiny poison-spitting froggies, while completely concealing the very first path of the game in a pool of toxic-looking slime. As opening moments go, it’s down there.

And that is as much of Daikatana as I’d ever seen before. Not having found a way to be paid to play it any more than that, I didn’t. Why would anyone? It washateful. It’s not just the monotony of the art, nor the soul-itching irritation of the fiddly buzzy enemies - it’s the level design. The one thing you’d never expect to be the very worst issue of a John Romero game. But wow, it’s atrocious. At every point, every single level seems to go out of its way to be as horrendously laid out as is possible. The game would probably be about ten minutes long if it were ever clear in which direction you were supposed to be going next, rather than offering you three different choices, none of which actually go anywhere at all, with a fourth correct route hidden behind a secret door or requiring you to magically divine that you need to backtrack because a previously closed off way will now suddenly be open.

I played an awful lot further. That never improves.

I honestly had no idea that Daikatana was a) so massive, nor b) also set in Ancient Greece, rural Dark Age Norway, and the near future San Francisco. I shall confess I have given up in Norway, after I’ve gone so far into a completely bugged out level that I cannot face the notion of repeating even a little section just to see if I can dig my way out of a hole of its own creation. I’m not paid nearly enough to do that. And in not realising those things about Daikatana, I’d also not realised how much itlookslike an Ion Storm game.

The point being, it’s quite clear as I play this silly game that it was always intended to be so much more. I know reams have been written about the development issues of Daikatana, of the legions of staff who left during production, about its clumsy switch from Quake I to Quake II, and of course the monstrously awful marketing that embroiled the entire process in a reputation it could only ever live down to. But I’m just writing about the experience of playing the game now, and what feels really apparent is that at some point someone was hoping this game would be a lot more involved. I think the biggest clue to this is the barely implemented skill system, that never mentions itself, embarrassedly flashing a tiny red light in the corner, and barely seems to make a difference when used. But surely it was meant to be something much more.

Eventually this is what got the better of me. After many, many hours, I had just completed an extended sequence in Norway, none of it even mildly entertaining, and discovered that (nnrrgghhh) Superfly was missing. So I re-ran the entire area, and he was nowhere. So I then ran the surrounded larger level, and he wasn’t there either. And the thought of reloading and doing any of it again felt like and act as mad as deliberately contracting the flu.

Oh everything is bad! It’s so odd! The weapons are just so daft. Each new setting you’re given a starting weapon that’s so massively overpowered that you rarely need to bother with the even blastier ones that come next. Most are just too annoying to use, far more likely to hurt you than anyone else, the game so glitchy that mines or rockets more often than not find an invisible bit of scenery to catch on than an enemy to turn into gibs. And when you get the Daikatana sword at the end of the first chapter, after so much build up of its legendary prowess, it’s frankly funny that it’s more feeble to use than the initial punching glove you started the game with.

And yes, it does gibs, and everyone explodes messily, but it’s artless and charmless and tiring. The textures are so haphazardly applied that everything looks like a flagged secret door, except of course for anything that’s a secret door. And while boosting it to modern resolutions and with improved details via the improbable existence of still-maintainedDaikatana 1.3 fan project, nothing can fix what a leaden lump of clumsy unfun it truly is.

Can I still play Daikatana?

Yes, thanks to theaforementioned unofficial 1.3 patch. It’s worth noting there are issues with the 64bit version, that for me caused it to crash all the time. Switching to the 32bit patch fixed this, but horrifyingly saves weren’t compatible and I had to start the godforsaken game over again. You can get it onGOGorSteamfor around a fiver.

Should I still play Daikatana?

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.