And maybe this is me being... the opposite of a naysayer? but Daikatana isn't actually that bad. At least, not in 2024.

This is because of a few things:

In the interests of full disclosure, I played through Daikatana on the easiest difficulty, with the sidekicks switched off, and save gems disabled. Once I'd gotten through the very very worst part of the game (episode 1 - absolutely not an exaggeration), the game legitimately got way, way more fun.

What follows is a per-episode breakdown of my experience.

Episode 1: Find The Explodey Bit And Shoot That Until Something Happens

I was skipping all of the cutscenes here, so I have no particular interest in why Hiro Miyamoto winds up in the dankest swamp video gaming has ever known, but if the game has its biggest dip in quality anywhere, it is in Episode 1. Swamps, followed by sewers, followed by neon-colored labs with confusing layouts. I did once attempt to play through this game in co-op, for my youtube channel (this was something like 14 years ago though, so if you go looking for that video, it is not a current representation of me or my current state of life), but gave up on the second to last level of Episode 1 - it's that bad.

The arsenal of this episode immediately gives you a series of weapons for Advanced Users Only. The Ion Blaster is well reputed for being as dangerous to you as it is to the enemy, due to its sometimes unpredictable bouncing pattern as well as it being unable to fire underwater (and zapping you if you ever try). The 1.3 fan patch does let you disable both kinds of self-damage, and defaults the bouncing self-damage off, but I elected to leave the water self-damage on. The result was somewhat more of a workhorse weapon, though I left it behind as soon as I had hands on anything more predictable. The C4 launcher ("Vitzatergo"? I'm not sure what language that is) is at least useful for blowing up robots, and once I figured out how to remote-detonate my shots (instead of having to plink at them with the blaster), it was also nice for opening walls. The Shockwave is ostensibly this game's BFG, but does such a bad job of covering rooms that I can't even abide by using it in a room where I can slam the door on it to avoid flinging myself into the ceiling.

A recurring theme with this game and its episode-specific arsenals, though, is that you always wind up with some way to rocket-jump. See, John Romero's previous expertise in Quake deathmatching inevitably turned him on to the more advanced mobility techniques, and Daikatana is fully compatible with almost every single one of them. Sure, you can just upgrade Hiro's raw stats in Acro and Speed, or you could save those stat points and bunny-hop everywhere instead. There is nothing you cannot reach, doing that or launching yourself into the sky with this game's wide and varied arsenal of dedicated rocket-jumpers. Episode 1 even gives you two of them: the Sidewinder launcher is a more typical rocket launcher that fires a pair of rockets in a corkscrew, with low enough self-damage that you don't have to worry about finding more armor if you screw up the timing, but high enough radius thrust that you're probably not going to need multiple attempts to reach your target.

The one I was not expecting was the Shotcycler, a silly belt-fed super shotgun that immediately, uncontrollably dumps six shots as soon as you pull the trigger. Wildly impractical for actual combat, due to the spread, recoil, and ammo inefficiency, but I would always try to keep my ammo at a healthy level for this thing, because its real strength is in allowing you to hover. The Shotcycler puts out enough raw recoil that a well-timed jump-and-shot can send Hiro roughly three times his normal jump height (granting easy access to at least one secret), or with careful angling of the shots, extend the length of his leaps by several hundred feet. Extremely useful for bypassing annoying jumping puzzles or skipping some of those annoying elevator sequences.

The neon-colored labs quickly gave way to a very Quake 2-esque cyber prison area, wherein I met the game's first sidekick, Superfly Johnson, strapped to an electrical table. Attempting to free him before finding the keycard causes the table to zap him. ...I confess, I did this a few times on purpose. I knew Superfly was going to go away, by nature of the Sidekicks being disabled, so I had to have some of my usual depraved video game fun before stuffing him into Hiro's back pocket.

Except it sure took me a while to find that damn keycard.

Once Superfly was added to my inventory (and eventually also Mikiko, whose dialogue I kept skipping), this episode kept going for another three levels. E1 is not only the least pleasant episode of Daikatana, it is also the longest. It does not help, either, that a lot of these maps loop back on themselves.

You know what the actual legitimate best part of Episode 1 is? The Ultimate Gas Hand. You strap a little chainsaw motor to your already-stupid-powerful fist, to make it even more stupid-powerful. The one drawback is that its "ammo" can never be replenished, and it ticks down just for having the thing equipped. It's a shame I was playing on Easy mode, where the damage output of these weapons never really mattered.

Anyway, after one confusing boss fight against... a room?... I claim The Daikatana, get voiped through a time tunnel, meet one of many John Galt appearances Kage Mishima, get yelled at a bit, and then the Daikatana whooshes me off to...

Episode 2: I've Been To Ancient Greece! I Have Proof! Look At This Grape!

Hiro finds himself ostensibly alone, on Lemnos Isle. I feel like he just forgot which pocket he put his buddy Superfly in.

The ancient and fantastical land of Greece begins by giving me what is probably the game's best and most practical weapon, the Discus of Daedalus, somehow both a formidable projectile weapon capable of felling the mightiest gryphon, and also somehow, a better melee weapon than the Daikatana. It's what we have to work with for roughly an entire level, as getting to Greece proper entails finding bus fare for Charon, the only person Hiro has to talk to for a level and a half (besides himself).

The arsenal in Greece has a couple of misfires, the Venomous being too big of a liability to come to grips with its bizarre arcing shots, the Sunflares being a great "fuck this entire room" weapon, and the Hammer being great for sending stuff flying but not so great for raw damage. The real star of the show is Poseidon's Trident, which acts as a three-barreled rocket launcher that puts out recoil on its own, and is powered by an ammo source identified as "trident tips" but actually comes in the form of entire life-sized statues of Poseidon, that Hiro dutifully absorbs through his face. The timing is very slightly tighter for it, but the sheer impact of firing three water-rockets at the ground, combined with its inherent recoil, enables you to fling yourself all the way into the skybox with ease. I even used the Trident to skip over an annoying switch-hunt in a later level, and multiple times to avoid backtracking. Add to that, the Greece levels are open enough that I really got to practice up my bunny-hopping skills, and there are genuinely some really cool setpiece rooms to be found here, too, like all the giant snake-head doorways in Medusa's lair. (Because of course you have to fight Medusa, she's like, the staple boss of Ancient Greece.)

With Medusa slain, along with the random gaggle of monsters that suddenly ceased being made of stone, the Daikatana is now charged up enough to voip the party off to...

Episode 3: Look, We're Hexen Now!

God, how is it medieval levels are so conducive to FPS action? Something about all the dungeons, and plague-infested villages, and churches, and towers, just lends itself so well to the kind of Quake-like combat this game wants to do.

We find ourselves in Insert Medieval Kingdom Here, I skipped all the cutscenes that would have told me precisely where and when. I didn't care at this point. I had an excuse to bunny-hop through a village and plink at rats and zombies with a crossbow. That's always worth my time, justification or no.

Admittedly this episode was a bit of a misstep, design-wise; Plague Town looks very cool, but your goal in level 1 is locating all three Keystones. Two of these are actually in places where you're likely to explore; one of them is shoved beneath some ice that does not look interactable unless you accidentally plinked it with your crossbow while trying to fight something.

Once I'm past that unfortunate hurdle, the rest of Episode 3 goes fairly well. Eventually I receive the episode's finest weapon, arguably the best weapon in the game: the Ballista. Yes, it's another crossbow, but it's episode 3's rocket-jumping weapon, firing projectiles with mild enough splash damage that it doesn't hurt much, and heavy enough recoil that you can use it to effectively undo a jump if you should misjudge. It also likes to send enemies flying if it doesn't kill them in one shot, which is always fun.

Roughly around this time is when I had accrued enough experience to raise my Attack stat to 4 points out of the maximum 5, which raises the rate of fire of every weapon in the game to almost double. At this point I declared that the Daikatana itself was finally worth using. Kind of. See, the Daikatana only really needed to be one thing: a cool-ass sword. Killing things with the Daikatana produces a sparkly lightning effect, implying that the sword is absorbing enemies into itself.

The problem is that swinging the Daikatana, at base level, is very slow and awkward, with the game randomly picking a swinging animation that seems to come with its own unpredictable hit arc. Swinging the Daikatana throws out hitboxes that go nowhere near the center of the screen, with almost zero feedback as to where or whether it's even hit anything (it makes a "clang" noise even if you don't appear to be in range of anything to hit). It both reaches farther than you'd expect, and not nearly far enough. Hit decals will appear on walls almost completely out of your field of view. Nearly every time you reach a new episode, you are given a melee weapon that is more predictable and arguably stronger than the Daikatana. But sometimes, the Daikatana decides to work.

Employed at proper moments, it can erase an enemy in short order. It even has its own experience level - which unfortunately means, if you want it to be a better weapon, you have to forego earning experience for Hiro. (But the only stats that truly matter in this game, IMO, are Attack and Vitality.) I'm not even sure that leveling up the Daikatana truly makes it a stronger weapon, maybe it's just some weird kind of confirmation bias. All I know is I used it on two episode bosses, one of which I got unlucky and died quickly, tried again, and got lucky and kill him in like 3 swipes. So I don't know.

Episode 3, meanwhile, decides to give me three separate wizard staffs, one of which collects gibs as its ammo source. None of them seem very practical. I main the Ballista through the rest of the ordeal, up until I meet the Mad King and decide to do the cinematic thing and fight him with the Big Sword. He dies in like 4 swings. The cutscene seems to imply he didn't die from it, but I don't stick around to learn why because Mikiko is the one doing the talking and I don't like listening to her. Her voice direction is kind of bad, in a "maybe we didn't know any better at the time but somebody should really have taught us cultural sensitivity" kind of way.

Episode 4: Look, We're Kingpin: Life of Crime Now!

And then the game runs headlong off a cliff.

I mean, OK, I shouldn't be that dire about it, Episode 4 is still better than Episode 1. But please understand, that that's not a high bar to clear.

Kage Mishima yells at us through the Stargate sequence some more, and we land in a jail cell in Alcatraz in 2030 AD. Things have apparently gotten "bad enough", 30 years in the future, that San Francisco decided to start using the place as a prison again, and by that, they actually mean they're dumping all their convicts onto the island and leaving them to fend for themselves. Which means we're spending most of this level fighting giant denim-clad musclemen who throw rocks at us. We also lead off by collecting the most normal weapon in the game: the Glock 2020, an accurate, weak, and kinda slow (if not for my 4 points of Attack) handgun that's been greebled so much that it could be a Quake 3 map.

Alcatraz leads us in a merry circle, with a slightly frustrating water valve puzzle that entails making Hiro swim around for a while. It is at this point that I have a vague recollection of a Nintendo Power magazine - the sum-total of the magazine's coverage of Daikatana for N64 (which is effectively a different game) was a reader calling in to Counselor's Corner and asking if it is possible to drown. "No," replies the Counselor. "Apparently, you have gills." This is not true of the PC version though - Hiro's lung capacity is somewhere between 10 and 15 seconds without an entire Environment Suit. So goofing around with water valves is a bit irritating while listening to him trying to undo a billion years of evolution and trying to regain the aforementioned gills.

Anyway I run through the entire prison 3 or 4 times before I remember that the level's goal was to assemble a bomb (out of a bottle, a lump of coal, and some saltpeter that happen to all be lying around) and then interact with a specific wall in the yard with a crack in it. Then we start fighting non-prisoners - soldiers, guys with jetpacks, women with swords, apparently all employees of the Mishima Corporation. ...This plotline would be way more fun if it was about Tekken's Mishima-zaibatsu, and not John "Lo Wang" Galt wearing shogun armor.

Throughout the next handful of maps - one of which is literally entitled TOWER OF CRIME - I amass the final arsenal and get into some actually reasonably fun gunfights. The Slugger is a shotgun with, honestly, kind of an unsatisfying sound, that has a semi-hidden alternate mode (hit the number key twice) that enables it to launch grenades. The Ripper - what is it about calling automatic weapons Ripper? - is basically the Quake 2 chaingun with less cooldown time, and an ammo supply labeled "Rip-Ups". On slot 5 we have the Novabeam, which probably looks really cool from anything but the first-person perspective, but is basically a burst-firing laser that vaporizes enemies in one or two squirts. The Metamaser sounds awesome, and is on the superweapon slot 6, but it's actually a throwable little robot spider that spins around and shoots laser shockwaves everywhere. It has the same problem Episode 1's Shockwave does, in that it doesn't reliably cover the room, and hurts enough that you really don't want to be in the room with it when it goes off either.

The final rocket-jumper, though, is on slot 3: the Kineticore. It looks a bit like a computer speaker slapped on the end of a Nerf gun, it fires bursts of bouncy projectiles that do damage-over-time (and are arguably more dangerous than E1's blaster was!), but it also comes with Shotcycler-esque recoil, enabling you to perform extra extra long jumps with it. This came in especially handy for me during one of the final level's more frustrating jumping puzzles, combined with my well-practiced bunny hops. It also enabled me to reach the roof of Mishima's hideout - where, unfortunately, I could not sequence-break the game and trigger the exist sequence without being inside the building first. And then I had to listen to Hiro being cold for a while, because ice damage, for some reason.

The final-ish fight ensues. I throw everything I have at Mishima, spamming Metamasers all over the room, trying to plink at him with the Novabeam, utterly failing to fend off his projectile ghosts, and then dying near-instantly because I stood too close to him.

I try it again, this time just using the Daikatana. ...He just dies. I think I got lucky.

Then the real final fight ensues against (Spoilers!!). I shoot them. They just die. I think I got lucky.

In the face of all of that, what are my thoughts?

You know, if they'd cut episode 1 from the game entirely, and not committed to limited saves, Daikatana could have been seen as a flawed gem from day one. Maybe it wouldn't have cost Ion Storm quite as badly as it did. Maybe some years down the line, John Romero could have issued a director's cut of sorts, remade it to finally be the game he'd envisioned back in 1996. I feel like there's something to it. Sure, the voice acting kinda stinks, the plotline verges on the kind of stuff that we thought was cool in the 90s, and maybe a bunch of the weapons needed an extra pass for functionality. But if Romero and his posse were truly good at Anything, it'd be doing neat maps for FPS games, and given the chance, Daikatana could have truly shined there.

It's easy to see the intent behind Daikatana. This was to be the magnum opus of a man who loved tabletop roleplaying, and Chrono Trigger, and samurai, and high fantasy, and guns, and heavy metal, and just sought out to make the ultimate game to combine all of those things into one package that was to be the height of awesomeness.

What truly befell Daikatana was, in my opinion, not so much hubris, as a lack of muse. What Romero and company needed to push Daikatana into actually being the awesome game he had in his head, was not a terminal realist to talk him down off of his more questionable design choices, but someone who was willing to yes-and him into truly elevating his ideas into being as great as they needed to be.

When I look at Daikatana, I don't see disappointment and empty promises. I see a potential yet to be fulfilled. The community efforts to tweak it into being as playable as it is today have definitely helped, but what it could really use? Scrap it all, and start again from the concept. Let the last 24 years of game design inform what it could truly be. What it always aspired to be.

I think it could work.