Daikatana (PC) > Reviews (15)

Wow. Here it spins in my CD-ROM drive - Daikatana, a nondescript, orange compact disc, containing years of effort from dozens of designers. After all is said and done, there's a game waiting at the end.

The game kicks off in a futuristic Kyoto, Japan, which has been reduced to a neo-industrial conglomerate ruled under the iron fist of mega-corporation head Osaka Mishima (who, coincidentally enough, looks and speaks just like Lo Pan from John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China). You assume the role of Hiro Miyamoto, a down-on-his-luck Kendo teacher, struggling to make ends meet while maintaining his cool, iron-jawed demeanor.

Late one night, Miyamoto is approached by an elderly gent named Ebihara (who must be voiced by Shadow Warrior's Lo Wang), who informs him that the present day has been twisted and warped by the evil Mishima. Apparently, it's Hiro's destiny to confront Mishima and retrieve the Daikatana - a magical time-hopping sword forged by the Ebiharas thousands of years ago.

At this point, courtesy Ninjas drop from the sky and beat the bejeezus out of Hiro, and drop him into a makeshift graveyard on the outskirts of Mishima's turf. Fortunately, Mishima has been stupid enough to leave a powerful "Ion Ripper" weapon approximately three feet from where you land. If you're reading this magazine, you should have a pretty good idea of what comes next, eh? And that's the nutshell of this "story-driven" FPS.

Getting to the Big Man ain't gonna be easy, though - this evil Mishima chap has some kind of sick fetish with creating robotic animals. He obviously gets a big discount on Evil Cyber-Frogs when he buys them in bulk from the distributor; the first few levels are packed to the brim with the damn things. When you turn a corner, you will find an evil frog. When you open a door, you will find more evil frogs. Blast open a wall, and chances are very good that evil frogs are awaiting your appearance.

After an hour of nuking cyber-Kermits and trudging through what looks like a terrible Quake II user mod, Hiro finally meets up with the man who promises to liberate him from this tedious hole of rehashed gameplay - "Superfly" Johnson (cough, cough). Mr. Johnson is the ex-head of Mishima's security, and has been portrayed with the same racial sensitivity as the characters in the feature film I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. He also serves as the first of the in-game "sidekicks" who stay by your side and fight with you.

After hooking up with Superfly and busting Ebihara's lovely daughter Mikiko out of Mishima's prison, there's some time-traveling to be done. You're dropped back into the days of Ancient Greece. The gameplay continues to be fairly uninteresting here as well - but now you've got a new set of lackluster weapons, and evil skeletons have replaced the robo-frogs. While the levels' blockiness may be realistic for the time-frame of each era, anything that reminds me of the LEGO castles I built as a kid can't be good.

After defeating a dozen levels' worth of skeletons, evil spiders, and English-speaking Grecian guards, it's onwards in time to Dark Ages Europe.

Here, you defeat evil rats, evil bats, and more evil guards. Finally you arrive in futuristic Alcatraz, where you defeat evil crazed prisoners, and then an evil boss. Much like your average drunken Japanese salaryman at a karaoke bar, this game does not know when to stop.

One thing's for sure: there is an huge amount of gaming to be done in Daikatana. Each of the four episodes features its own set of weapons, textures, and monsters, and could be passed off as an average-sized game on its own. On the other hand, while there's a lot of "content" in Daikatana, there's also a lot of "content" in the 48-chapter Sonic the Hedgehog versus Aliens fan-fiction series, so we know that more does not always equal better. Actually, I get the impression that Daikatana's epic feel is more of a result of slow-paced, find-the-lever gameplay, and the sheer amount of time it takes to ensure that your moron sidekicks get from point A to point B without getting their skulls split open.

That's right - neither Superfly nor Mikiko are terribly helpful in your quest. In theory, both characters should follow you around and provide backup during heavy-fire situations. Unfortunately, the Quake II engine was never really built for this type of behavior, and the sidekicks never present themselves as more than slightly retarded AI entities who need to be babysat 24/7. You can give them basic orders via hotkeys; they'll attack, retreat, or pick up certain items if you tell them to, and even climb ladders and crawl through passageways (but they won't jump). Unfortunately, there are no commands for "Don't get crushed by the swinging door' or "Stop humping the corner of the room, dimwit."

Your partners also verbally berate you whenever you bump into them, which seems to happen at a frequency of twenty times per minute. I can only imagine how much sooner this game would have shipped had the sidekicks gotten the axe. Nevertheless, you'd better get used to them - they'll be tagging along, delivering poorly written banter and giving you headaches for around three-quarters of the game. (The only line that solicited a giggle was Superfly's threat of pounding me into "ass dust" if I accidentally shot him again.)

One easily overlooked aspect of Daikatana is the whole RPG aspect - you're actually getting something for mowing down hordes of demon frogs. Experience points are dished out whenever you dispatch an enemy, and you can allocate bonus points to abilities like speed, acrobatics, and power. If you opt to use the Daikatana for combat, the experience points are collected by the sword itself, resulting in one whoop-ass melee weapon at the end of the game.

Aside from pithy RPG elements, Daikatana also adds liberal amounts of frustration for anyone who wants to save their game whenever they want. Taking a page from those nefarious console games, you must pick up red "Save Gems" before you can make a record of your progress. I believe the majority of gamers will find this as appealing as a grapefruit-juice enema, especially when forced to replay hideous sequences over and over again (just wait until you get to the jumping puzzles - shudder).

Similarly snore-inducing is Daikatana's multiplayer deathmatching, which crams those pithy RPG nuggets into a plain-vanilla online beatdown. Yeah, there are some nice features - the maps scale based on the number of players, and "Death Tag" is fun for a few run-throughs, but the levels are pretty weak, and the weapon selection is just as gimpy as the single-player modes.

On the plus side, both you and a buddy can slog through the story in co-op mode - a feature that's been missing from a lot of FPS titles these days.

While the gameplay remains stale through all eight gajillion levels, the in-game visuals make frequent leaps between blah and beautiful. While some stages look like an amateur's first attempt at map- making, others force you to step back and admire the architecture. The Daikatana team managed to modify the Quake II engine to include volumetric fog, light flares, and wonderfully atmospheric rain and snow effects. The character textures are amazingly detailed, thanks in part to the uncredited current id Software texture artist, Kenneth Scott. Similarly top-notch is the soundtrack, a good percentage of which was composed by the also-invisible Will Loconto. I can only wonder how many people really contributed to Daikatana - I have a feeling that the actual staff is a good deal larger than the dozen fresh faces in the credits.

As it stands, the release of Daikatana signals nothing more remarkable than the end of an era in fandom.