RETRO SHAME - Daikatana

I don't know why I bother, really. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who claims peer pressure forced them nay goaded them into reviewing terrible games. I bought this for myself, for my own delectation. And I don't want my money back, because at £1.50 this kind of god-awfulness is to be treasured. The thing that baffles me is that I worked really hard at finishing the game, putting myself through every moment of it just so that I could say I had experienced this game from beginning to end.

Yes, I finished Daikatana.

From the perma-green swamps of the far future to San Francisco in a slightly less further future, I played it through. Which is probably more than the actual level designers did. This legendary unholy grail is a first person shooter, concocted by then Wunderkind Jon Romero, who was given so much creative control over his pet project that its production costs spiralled out of control and ended up being delayed by almost three years. When the jewel in your crown becomes the running joke of the gaming industry, things do not look good. The infamous 'Jon Romero is going to make you his bitch' ad campaign probably didn't help much either. Basically, it was all a little embarrassing and when it was released to universal indifference, it was the platinum standard for botched releases until Duke Nukem Forever ended up being delayed for fourteen years - a game that was not much better.

One of the many weapons more interested in harming you than the foe.

In the far future, you play a samurai called Hiro, who is tasked by a dying old man to retrieve a time-travelling sword and stop the evil Mishima Corporation from taking over the world, in perhaps one of the most overwrought introduction movies ever put into a game. There is a lot of tedious time wasted before you are finally dumped into the game (literally) and start your quest through time to retrieve the titular sword of the game's title. For reasons best known to himself, Mishima is dressed in full samurai gear and exposits lengthily to you at the end of each episode. It's a long game, rather longer than you'd like. Admittedly most of your time is spent staring at a loading screen, but still that counts right? At the very least you're getting plenty of content for your money. The problem is that I wanted the game to end after half an hour, not ten. 

The time travel locations add nothing to the story itself, mostly acting like padding because their actual supposed character and story developments have either no impact on the 'story' or most of the stuff you need to know is explained to you by the game's boss in the aforementioned manner. Their actual choice of location is sort of confusing in itself. Why in the hell would Mishima send you back to Ancient Greece? And why is the default plan to go and kill the medusa to charge up the sword and go from there to the 10th century? Why does everyone have a non-descript plague? And then futuristic San Francisco? What the shit is the connection between San Francisco and 10th century Norway? It is clearly a product designed by lots of different people working in different teams, and while they do have different arsenals for each time zone, all are hamstrung by lacklustre design and brainless artificial intelligence. 

One of many features trumpeted by the Daikatana PR team was a system of sidekicks, whereby you would be aided in battle with smart AI team players who could be ordered around in battle. It's a great idea in theory, and would be useful if it actually worked. The 'sidekicks' are infuriating. They constantly get stuck in lifts or against obstacles, and just love to get themselves killed. What is doubly annoying of course is that the game ends as soon as they die.It seems sometimes as if the game just wants to stack the odds up against you by artificial means. The games creators went on the offensive about that, saying it was a 'hardcore' shooter and not designed for newbies. Jon, let me explain something to you. Weapons that cause you more damage than the enemy are not hardcore. Sidekicks who spend their time running at walls grunting orgasmically and taking every opportunity to get themselves slaughtered are not hardcore either. And most of all, neither are mechanical fucking frogs.

Oh, screw you Romero.

The game's individual episodes vary in quality, the worst being - appropriately - the first. It is a mix of nauseatingly neon locales that look like somebody has painted every location in sambuca shots and infuriatingly bad design populated by the aforementioned frogs o' annoyance. Sewer level follows swamp level, and with it all come enemies with terrible path finding and weapons that harm you more than they do them. It seems to go on forever, and when you do finally make your first time hop, the banality of Ancient Greece comes as something of a relief. The problem with all these themed locations is that the best design is always at the start; there are some genuinely good ideas, and it is frustrating to see them wasted. The levels start off sort-of-good and then just taper off, like the creative team lost interest in their job after these first maps. Or that they went off and played Tekken or something instead of working. Oh, wait. They did. It is almost playable when you get to the final section, San Francisco. By then however, it's just too late. Any goodwill some of the better parts of these levels had are totally forgotten, and you end up focusing on comedically stupid looking sharks and bad platform jumping puzzles.

Moments later, they ran off a cliff.

When Daikatana finally stops - I say stop because I would not say the conclusion of Daikatana is in any way 'an ending' - It feels like wasted time. Very rarely will you have wasted so much time on something that took so long. It's not difficult per se, although it is unintentionally made that way by your suicidal sidekicks and buggy level design. The bugs are another fun part of Daikatana. This game crashes often and it crashes hard. Believe me. Often it will just dump you out altogether, and on a few occasions, renders itself totally unfinishable, such as a mind-numbingly stupid boss in the medieval hub who just often breaks the game by running in the wrong direction and not activating various triggers that the game needs him to. If he does go in the wrong direction, and he often does, you will have to do the entire level again because the game is now stuck.

That is actually a magical sceptre, you perverts.

So yeah, it's a mess on all levels. The worst thing about all of this is that despite the level design, the inane AI, badly implemented weaponry, insane use of coloured light and utterly baffling sidekick systems, is that somewhere in there, there IS quite a good game. I am really stretching the definition here, but my point remains. Deep inside this broken, irritating, badly designed mess there is a good game waiting to get out, but no amount of modding and fixing will ever do it. I am also quite adamant that this game never be given a sequel, if only because doing this will give the game legitimacy. The fact is that Daikatana must stand on its own as a monolithic testament to ego and excess, and a warning that no videogame company is better than its audience. This has to be said because in an age where Shaq Fu, one of the worst games in history, is getting a sequel because of ironic fans giving it a kickstarter - the danger is that someone may well try and launch a Daikatana sequel. No, leave Daikatana as it is. As a rather sad tombstone to videogame's most excessive golden age.