Why was Daikatana so bad?

Superfly is the 'head security chief' of Mishima's headquarters but expresses shock and surprise at the Mishima Burger operation. What kind of security chief doesn't have full knowledge of the building he's charged with securing? As explanation he tells Hiro that he always headed straight to the teleporter upon arriving at work, so it sounds like maybe he just spent his entire shift in his office playing Freecell or something. Even though there are security dudes patrolling the areas he denies knowledge of, security dudes who presumably would've taken orders from the head security chief, he manages to stay in the dark about one of the most sensitive, highest-security sections in the building. Did Superfly really get fired and charged with insubordination for speaking out against unethical practices, or was he just really shitty at his job?

Sup appears very capricious in determining his goals as well. When we meet him he is determined to settle his score with 'the Boss Man,' to which Hiro replies that they are in the same line of work. Later when we free Mikiko from the stasis-thingy he seems to have completely lost interest in Mishima and only wants to escape to safety, that is until Mikiko starts talking about a sword worth four HUNDRED MILLION CREDITS. Damn dude, make up your mind.

Adding to the list of reasons acro is useless for singleplayer, if there's something you want on a high ledge and you A) haven't put points into acro, B) don't have a rocketjump weapon and C) there's no acro temp boost nearby or you already squandered it... just line your partner up and do a quick hop off their head. Sometimes you can just do a running jump up a slope or exploit the environment in some other way.

At the end of the level I just completed, Mishima Labs, there's a long stupid conversation with Mikiko's ancestor. In it Hiro reveals to the guy that his employer, "the man you know as Kage Mishima" is a time-travelling sonofagun. Why would he say it like that? You'd say 'the man you know as so-and-so' if that person was operating under a fake name and concealing their true identity, but that's not what Mishima does at all; he just conceals that he's from the future. I know that games and bad writing are no strangers to each other, but this is just spectacularly bad, The Room-level shit. In fact I'm going to start referring to this game as The Room of videogames.

On the topic of time-travelling, I'm not big on time travel plots, but one thing that seems like a given for a time-travel plot is that when characters travel to a certain time there is a reason they go to that specific time period, whether intentionally or not, to change events and affect the future in some way, or at least learn something about themselves or their family (like from an ancestor). There is a little 'changing the future' crap in the game's ending, but as for being sent back to ancient Greece and dark ages Norway... why? Besides Romero thinking it'd be cool, I mean. Nothing that happens in those time periods has any relation to Mishima other than finding some time-appropriate mystical bullshit plot device to recharge the macguffin and do the time warp again. It's not like Mishima went back and meddled with things in the far distant past and the Hiro squad has to set it right to restore balance to the future; apparently civilization dealt with the Medusa and necromancer threats just fine before, and the only time period they really need to go to is 2030. "Daikatana's story changed on a weekly basis," says artist Bill Daly... if the changes were supposed to be improvements then I'd hate to see the story they started out with.

When the daikatana gets levelled up it starts emitting bright light and blue electricity, but when Hiro holds it in a cutscene it still looks like it did at level 1 without any of the flashiness. I guess having a discotana can be really distracting when you're trying to hold a conversation; good thing Hiro's ancestor had the foresight to implement a dimmer on that thing when he was forging it.

I also find it funny that despite having the fully upgraded, epilepsy-inducing Discotana before the end of episode 2 it still takes killing another 2 bosses to get it 'recharged'.

Let's talk about Ep2's Hades Hammer. It sucks. First there's the windup; it takes way too long (even if you don't charge it, complete with ridiculous stretchy-band sound effect) to be useful against any but the slowest enemies, yet there's only one enemy in the episode which moves THAT slowly. It's also the only enemy you need the hammer to kill. How 'bout that. So it lands and hurts you and has a shockwave which does minuscule damage at best; I can't recall ever seeing the shockwave kill something. You can jump right before the hammer drops to avoid taking damage; it's unclear if this has any effect on the damage output for the hammer or the shockwave. Just a cheap gimmick weapon in a game full of gimmick weapons, its only useful application is statue killing, and one other thing: rocket jumping before you get the trident, which is marginally useful at best. Naturally, you find the hammer of Hades next to a statue of Poseidon.

The temporary stat boosts start off useless and get even more useless as you level up your stats. Come episode 4 you're starting to max out each of the stats but the stupid temp boosts are still all over the place. Might have been cool if the temp boost was cumulative with the stat's current level, so you could 'overcharge' a stat... but no.

The three stooges are impressively fluent in historical languages and dialects to be able to communicate effortlessly with medieval Norsemen and understand the bellowing of Greek gods and centurions.

Reading the strategy guide I get the impression that Stevie and John were in disagreement about whether to capitalize daikatana when it's just talking about the sword and not the game. In parts where John is clearly the author (like his self-fellating Romero's Design Comments blurbs), it's capitalized.

The E1 cambot. Why was this fuckshit left in the game. Let's see what the guide has to say.

This floating security blah blah locate intruders blah searchlight turns red blah alert nearby forces

The cambot moves slowly and can't attack, but attracting its attention can bring on swarms of forces. Stay out of the Cambot's view and sneak away to safety.

So what, Daikatana was going to have stealth be optional and viable? You guys were gonna put in alternate routes to get by the enemies, Deus Sex that shit up? And what about the forfeited XP from not destroying the cambots and the enemies you'd be avoiding that way? Yeah, just go ahead and make the game harder on yourself by missing XP and staying weak longer. Strategy.

So yeah. Searchlight doesn't work at all, you can jump up and down in front of it all day without waking it. Not linked to any actual alarm system, doesn't alert any more enemies when you wake it beyond the ones already close enough to hear you waking it (so actually it's not alerting anything that wasn't already alerted). That sounds like finished, functional content to me. Let's leave that in the game.

There is an inexplicable behavior of fresh corpses in this game where you can view an enemy's death animation through a doorway and have the door close on you, then when you open the door the death animation plays again, and you can repeat that until the corpse fades from view. So you have the appearance of dead enemies getting back up and falling down again over and over. Nice.

Some of the doors, especially in E2, are only designed to open in one direction. If you open it from the wrong side the doors open into you and, of course, do damage. Expert FPS = killer doors.

This game's ladders are more of a suggestion than a physical substantive thing you can grasp and hold on to. It's like a concept of a ladder, if all ladders were made of butter.

If you decide the constant gibbing is a little much and want to try the low-violence mode, that comes with its own set of issues. There won't be blood, naturally, but that can be a problem when you can't tell if you're landing any hits with a bullet weapon because blood was the only indicator that a hit had landed. It will make it weirder to engage with a couple of E3 enemies, the zombies and werewolves. Rather than gibbing those enemies to kill them for good, the zombies just twitch a little on the ground and the werewolves get back up and do their death animation again, just like with the doors. Then there's robot enemies. You'd think the violence option wouldn't pertain to robotic enemies, and in this case you'd be wrong. Instead of blowing up robots some of them will now do a sad death animation. The flying bots, cambot and deathsphere, don't even get an animation; they just freeze up when they 'die' and eventually fade. Maybe they fall to the ground, maybe they don't.

All those things are minor annoyances but there's one aspect of low-violence mode that really takes the cake. There are two parts to it: first, you can't shoot through corpses. Second, whenever an enemy collapses to the ground, that enemy's hitbox seemingly stays just as tall as it was with the enemy standing up. What this means is that if you have enemies swarming in front of you and you kill some of them, so long as the other enemies are behind or on top of their corpses, the corpses will block your shots, and continue to do so until the corpses fade (takes a few seconds at least) or you reposition yourself, or the enemies move toward you through the corpses.

To put that another way, using the low-violence mode makes the game harder.

Another day, another page written about what amounted to a minor footnote in gaming history, and I still have more notes and 2 levels to go. Am I John's bitch yet?

Well I finally completed level 3-1. Yeah it was under the dragon. Guess what took me 30 minutes to do? Find the super simple way to get to the object. I think the entire level took me maybe 3 hours. Took me 5 minutes to get through 3-2. I've pretty much gotten through 3-3 twice but someone named Superfly keeps diving into lava. Goddamn this game. I am appreciating the map design, even if you need to pull a level for every door.

Nothing can hurt me. I've gotten so bored of shooting enemies I've decided to melee them and still nothing can hurt me with my 200 - 250 health and 250 armor. Nothing has been able to hurt me since the end of the first episode.

I decided today to fire up Back to the Future: the Game part 2 and chore my way through it. I made it about 30 minutes and that was all I could stand, but I could take a lot more of Daikatana. I guess that makes Daikatana more playable than Back to the Future: the Game.

Another day, another hour in Daikatana. This 3-3 will not end. The only way I can die is lava. The game is starting to have cheap lava deaths.

I am in 3-4 and now I think I've found a game breaking glitch. I discovered a blue wizard once I disabled some giant electrical center orb. Shot him enough where he ran, I followed after him. When I killed him in the courtyard game crash.

Now he won't appear. At all. I've even ran through the bookshelf he goes through and nothing. No wizard.

Why do you guys even do that to yourselves?

Maes said:

Why do you guys even do that to yourselves?

I ask myself that a lot. I feel a little like someone watching an air crash investigation show trying to understand what went wrong in the chain of events leading up to the disaster, but in this case the disaster is just an impressively bad game. Yes, I just compared Daikatana to a tragedy with a massive human death toll.

I finished my latest run through, and also rewatched the Goon LP. Proteus and Suspicious do a pretty bang-up job of imparting the soul-crushing, spirit-draining feeling of playing the game to the viewer. I'm recuperating from Daikatana overload with some nice, relaxing, no-sucking-it-down Viva Piñata before I post the rest of my comments; maybe then I'll finally have run out of things to say about the game.

geo said:

When I killed him in the courtyard game crash.

Congratulations, you've encountered the infamous Wyndrax crash bug. I had thought they stamped it out in 1.3, but apparently not entirely.

From what I remember, the Wyndrax crash would happen if you saved the game at any point during the map, so the best way to avoid it was to play the whole map without saving (fortunately it's a small map).

I did make a save in that map on 1.3 just to test it out, and didn't get a crash. Guess you just got lucky!

Perhaps after Big Rigs, the AVGN should review Daikatana next, as far as PC games are concerned. I'm sure he'll have interesting comments on the bugs and frogs.

All this overreacting is pretty hilarious. That's what drama does to people. Suddenly it's not just a flawed game you're criticizing, but a flawed person. More so, it's a "fallen god" type of person = srsly satisfying to bash.

Maes said:

Perhaps after Big Rigs, the AVGN should review Daikatana next, as far as PC games are concerned. I'm sure he'll have interesting comments on the bugs and frogs.

Perhaps after Big rigs he should have retired. His gimmick is over. Now he does let's plays. Gotta keep that income coming in as easily as possible.

But the game is so much more than bugs and frogs.

And its not the person I'm criticizing. I play games, not devs, even if Steam reviews like to critique devs instead of games.

I agree some with the 'fallen god' sentiment. Obviously Romero isn't talentless and made competent, fun levels at id (and prior to that his own games), but making some good levels clearly didn't translate into being a good project manager with a crazy budget.

If Romero was just some no-name upstart without the attachment to a previous megahit game, Daikatana would have most likely faded into obscurity and we wouldn't be discussing it now. One of the things I find hardest to understand is why Eidos never just pulled the plug. Maybe they just wanted to get something, anything out of all that time and money invested.

The main problem was that there was a lot of drama during development which led to a product that wasn't fully developed and the media was all over it like stink on shit.

The only real issues I had were 1) I needed another hand to use the sidekicks while playing, and I only had two, and 2) the sidekicks were pretty underdeveloped AI wise. 3) The combat situations needed some refinement. The audio visual aspect of the game is really nice.

I think after the first episode the partner AI gets a lot better, but the levels get very flat and wide so they can path easily. Then having to wait for them before you can checkpoint.

The best solution I have re the ai sidekicks is to play the game by yourself in multiplayer mode. Removes all the sidekick crap. Also thought I'd mention that the DM maps can be pretty cool.

I just can't hate the game the way some people like to do. I enjoy it, warts and all.

Found this:
https://bitbucket.org/DGibson/daikatana-1.3/wiki/Home

Played it 5x now. He seems to get stuck in some tree after he runs away.

geo said:

Played it 5x now. He seems to get stuck in some tree after he runs away.

Still stuck on Wyndrax? Might want to try loading a save from the previous map, if you've been reloading from within the level.

Or just noclip through the exit gate, nobody will think less of you.

By the way, noclip is bound to the N key by default. You don't have to activate cheats to use it. That's how fucking broken this game is.

They should totally reboot this game.

SuperflyJohnson said:

Still stuck on Wyndrax? Might want to try loading a save from the previous map, if you've been reloading from within the level.

Or just noclip through the exit gate, nobody will think less of you.

By the way, noclip is bound to the N key by default. You don't have to activate cheats to use it. That's how fucking broken this game is.

Yeah I was gonna skip the level but noclip is probably better. N key it is. It was the blue wizard if that's Wyndrax. He sends some electricity ball after me and runs away.

They should totally reboot this game or again make it in Source engine.

geo said:

It was the blue wizard if that's Wyndrax.

Definitely Wyndrax, the True Final Boss of Daikatana. So powerful he crashes your game repeatedly, makes your save useless and even merges with trees to render himself invulnerable in mockery of your futile attacks. Everything after him is just a formality.

They should totally reboot this game or again make it in Source engine.

I would trust the guys who rebooted Shadow Warrior to pull it off with style.

And to have a sword that works.

Another day, another Daikatana. I floated through the walls, which worked really well. Beyond the gate is a giant stone wall. Time to just cheat skip the level.

Using the level cheat had side effects. I'm stuck with the Daikatana and nothing else. None of my upgrades stuck with me either. Remember how I complained it was too easy? Well melee vs melee + 100 health + 0 armor + having to defend someone that can't attack make for one mountain climb vs enemies that won't stay dead.

After playing Daikatana, I'm pretty sure they went about a better plot of Daikatana while still keeping hold of Daikatana's nonsensical time and space traveling.

a goon said:

At this point in the journey you just accept that weapons are useless, friends are useless, making sense of things is useless. Hope is useless. All that exists is a never ending horde of frustrating things to kill you. You don't even know why you go on.

And after your numb mind slogs into the church, the only thing you're not dead to is how out of place it is. This shouldn't be. I can accept the teleporting zombies, but this religion shouldn't exist. This is the last logical portion of your brain in its death throes. You babble like a madman while everyone else just walks away, going through the motions. You've become that crazy old man you knew as a kid that used to shout at the ocean.

You pick up your cross bow. It doesn't shoot straight, but that doesn't matter anymore. The church is starting to look more and more like reality. The will to make sense of things has subsided. All that there is now is to kill and keep walking. The world is already dead to you. You walk to the lake. You jump.

And after the freezing water sucks the last life out of you, you crumple into a fetal position before uttering your last words into the bubbling deaths.

"I love Daikatana."

If you find the will to press on then you should learn the console cheats to boost your stats back up to where they were. You won't be able to cheatboost the Daikatana. Said UNATCO agent JC Denton in response: "What a shame."

Browsing the Zdoom forum when I see this project called DemonSteele; naturally my first thought was 'Doomkatana'.

I don't see any self-harming weapons or racist caricatures in there yet so this guy really needs to step up his game.

Well I think that I will officially give up on this game now that I'm forced to use only the Daikatana with no upgrades. I cannot imagine the pain others feel playing with just the Daikatana. This is awful. It is slow, I get no sens of range when using it.

I just spent an hour dying on the third wizard before he turns into a giant cut scene snake man and I start beginning to wonder why I'm playing.

At some point I used to research disease for fun. Now I'm trying to beat Daikatana and it won't even give me an achievement. It stopped being fun a long time ago, now its just one of those things where do I keep going on banging my head into a wall for what might be 5-10 more hours or do I cut my losses and go have fun doing something like research disease or at least play something more entertaining.

Naturally there are also cheats to give yourself weapons, which you should use if you have to use the level warp.

weapon_give_#

or

give_all_weapons

Or, like you said, play something fun instead.

I just played through Daikatana on Gameboy Color! I remember it being a lot longer of a game. My save file says 2 or so hours, but I think it was really around 4 human hours, because sometimes I forget to save :-)

While I still like it, I'm not as in love with it as I was a few years ago when I first found out what Daikatana was. A lot of the weapons feel the same. Some of the bosses feel like sprints to see who will kill whom first instead of patterns.

It is a Zelda clone, without Zelda's top notch dynamics or alternate weapons. The A to jump seriously limited the controls. While I'm happy A is to jump, I could only jump over pits, but not enemies. Zelda gives you a shield so you can block projectiles when not attacking. Daikatana made you move. The puzzles still hold up as good diversions.

The cut scenes felt far too long. Way... way... way too long. Especially the flashbacks. Watching NPCs walk, watching them watching each other. Wow.

Sorry to bump the topic yet again.

I really want to give it a try. Back then I tried a pirated version and not only it didn't have quicksave, but it crashed at a specific point in the first level. It was so buggy that I could never even continue playing it to see how bad it was.

Maybe I would buy a cheap version if they have it in gog, just to try going with it. Maybe it's not that bad if I can get over the old bugs.

Meanwhile, the gameboy color version seemed quite nice! The irony..

I blame the Japanese. They know how to make video games. Now would be the time to buy any game since its Black Friday. I've put myself through the supposed 'the worst of the worst' video games, Duke Forever, Legendary, ACM, and A New Reckoning.

Out of those FPS I'd say Daikatana is close to the bottom only beaten by A New Reckoning. All of those games are similar. You get chained to allies. Only thing is in Daikatana they can die and you need to get them out alive making 90% of the game one big escort mission.

ACM they couldn't die, Legendary they could die, but they were worthless, Duke briefly had them here and there. A New Reckoning doesn't have them, but its too awful to have them.

I've had 2 Steam friends randomly write me up to ask if Daikatana is as awful as everyone says. Its worse yet better if that makes sense. I should really soldier through and play again.

Another hour and literally the same level with just a sword and its on easy. If I don't die, Superfly dies. There have been several stupid ways I've died. Accidentally jumping on a torch. Rat attack, because brown rats blend in with brown soil.

Not to mention the secret powerup back at the pre start of the level that you can get and run all the way into the level and if you're lucky get to attack an enemy with the powerup before it goes bad.

As someone mentioned earlier, the weapon Daikatana is awful. It feels very iffy whether or not it will actually attack. I hold the button down and it attacks twice before waiting a while and attacks again. Its awful. I can barely hit anything.

Speaking of hits, the two ax throwing dwarfs are problematic. Their axes halt the game ever so slightly and when I am unhalted, my jump trajectory has slightly changed even if the thrown axes don't hit me.

There's a reason why the game had a game breaking bug before this level. There are only 18 enemies in the level. Not just that, but the undying werewolf that normally dies with claws, but won't with a Daikatana. It follows me through the entire level. All the way up to what I think is the boss.

SuperFly is even more useless because he has to carry that sack of an NPC on his shoulder so he doesn't have guns. Plus he stays way back and hangs out with wherever the werewolf is. Even though the werewolf is knocked out that scares SuperFly to stay away.

Not just that but simple lava pits you need to plaform over are most of the time easy to just run across one then jump the other pit. However, sometimes the running is inconsistent and won't let you run across the first pit. Even when I do it carefully by not letting any of the hills throw me off course.

Holy shit this game.

I still need to give my second steam key to a friend so we can do a lets play together.