John Romero's Daikatana

I used to have this game a long time ago, but now I got rid of it. I destroyed it with an axe and burned it.

This game's development has been troubled. John Romero, who is famous for his work at id Software in the development of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, left id Software following the release of Quake due to creative differences with the rest of the team (briefly: he had wanted to make a medieval game, the entire rest of the team wanted to make a sci-fi game, and Quake is the result). Romero intended Daikatana to be his magnum opus, he envisioned the game as an RPG First Person Shooter that would revolutionize the genre again and have massive amounts of content. He also promised the game would be out by late 1997 (probably around the month of November or so).

Romero had worked under the John Carmack at id, and without him proved to be a very poor organizer. Daikatana's original design document described a game with 24 levels, 12 weapons and 64 different types of monsters: Romero scheduled just seven months to complete this work, basing this off the six-month dev time of Quake.

Initially the game was being developed using the id Tech 1 engine, but when Romero saw a prototype of Quake II showing off advances like colored lighting and enemies dodging attacks, he feared that Daikatana would be outdated unless he used the id Tech 2 engine. However, Romero heavily underestimated how much work it would take to move Daikatana from id Tech 1 to id Tech 2: instead of three months as Romero estimated, it took an entire year, which caused major delays and internal conflicts. Many of the departments had no idea what the assets they were making were actually being used for, most famously leading to a gigantic hi-res texture being made for an arrowhead.

The development of the game, as said earlier, was originally set for 7 months; however, the game took 4 years to complete. This led to multiple members of Ion Storm leaving the company, inexperienced people being hired to work on Daikatana, and eventually the publisher Eidos forcing Romero to release the game despite it clearly being unfinished. A sequel was in development by Human Head Studios, and was going to use Epic Games' Unreal Engine 1. Eventually, it was cancelled before any screenshots and trailers were shown and this game we have here is the result.

Very ironically, by the time Daikatana was released 3 years after its initial launch date, it WAS already outdated because of other, newer engines such as id Tech 3, or the Unreal Engine 1. The game was a major factor in the demise of Ion Storm's Dallas studio, which was forced to sell off 51% of its stock to Eidos as part of the deal to release the game: seven months after the game's release and following the failure of another Ion Storm game, Anachronox, Ion Storm Dallas was closed, leaving the studio in Austin that made Deus Ex as Ion Storm's only office.

From very early on in the game's development, Daikatana was advertisted as anything more than a vanity project for John Romero. The game was repeatedly delayed due to Romero's ego making him do bad design choices that caused those delays. Time magazine even gave Romero and Daikatana glowing coverage, saying "Everything that game designer John Romero touches turns to gore and gold."

This game is perhaps most known for its infamous extremely arrogant teaser poster shown here. This early advertisement for Daikatana, created around 1997/8 by marketer Mike Wilson and reluctantly approved by Romero, was a red poster with large black lettering proclaiming "John Romero's about to make you his b****.", a reference to Romero's infamous trash talk during gaming. Nothing else was featured on this poster but a small tag-line, suggestively reading "Suck It Down", an Ion Storm logo and an Eidos logo. Following this ad's appearance in several gaming magazines, highly negative news came out of Ion Storm, fueling distaste for the game whose release was pushed back. This also alienated and angered many gamers, including me especially. The lavish rock star-like treatment given to Romero in his attempt to build a designer-centered game studio, including a multimillion-dollar office on the top floor of a Dallas skyscraper.

John Romero during his rockstar time has been well-publicized for his expensive tastes and hobbies (such as racing Ferraris), the dubious saga of Romero's ex-girlfriend, professional gamer Stevie "Killcreek" Case, being hired on as a level designer, and the game's development (which included most of the original development team quitting en masse to form a competing company called Gathering of Developers), incited criticism from the online gaming fan community.

Years later Romero went on record that while he approved the advertisement with his arrogant tone, he stated that he wasn't the one who wrote the quote, was unaware of it until the ad was published, and he also hated it too. He claims that he never wanted to make anyone his b****. At least we won't have to see that evil promotion again. Seriously, I've seen it in all computing magazines.

As for the game itself, words cannot describe how abysmal it truly is.

The title itself is a mistranslation; the kanji characters used in the game actually read as "daitou" or "daidou" (with rendaku). While one of them might be transliterated as "katana," it does not actually say katana: the literal translation would be "big sword."

The graphics and textures look average and outdated for the 2000s, as the game was delayed many times and was still using the Quake II engine (or id Tech 2). By the time then, more advanced engines such as the Unreal Engine 1 (which was used for Deus Ex, another Ion Storm title released the same year) and id Tech 3 were being used. It also has frequent framerate issues. The N64 version's graphics are even worse than the PC version in that it has arguably the ugliest graphics in a 3D rendered game, with textures so low resolution that you can't even tell what some objects are supposed to be.

The cutscenes are awfully boring and unnecessarily long, with no option to skip them. In fact, the intro alone is about 11 minutes long! The N64 version suffers from an awful framerate that also makes these cutscenes even longer. In addition the PC version has a very annoying loading screen due to the loud ticking sound the loading bar makes when it's filling up.

The voice acting is incredibly stereotypical and horrendous and the characters are absurdities. It cannot be emphasized enough that the game contains a character called "Superfly Johnson" and this is not treated as any kind of joke. One element that Daikatana stressed was the important role of Hiro Miyamoto's two sidekicks, Mikiko Ebihara and Superfly Johnson. The death of either sidekick resulted in failing the level, and their assistance was required to complete certain puzzles. Also, initial versions of the game required the player to find crystals to save their progress, but a patch later changed that.

As for the story, it's a complete mess. There is also one major inconsistency: Mishima warns Hiro that they cannot duel using Daikatanas, since if these swords will touch each other, the time and the world along with it will be erased from existence; both Hiro and Mishima, though proceed to duel with their Daikatanas on a few occasions anyway.

Daikatana is composed of 24 levels (18 on the Nintendo 64 version) divided into 4 episodes, with a varying number of levels per episode. Each episode represents a different location and time period: 25th century Japan in the year 2455 AD., ancient Greece in the year 1200 BC, the Dark Ages in Norway in the year 560 AD., and near-future San Francisco in the year 2030 AD. The levels are poorly designed, with some really confusing puzzles, and some sections of the game having the level design conflicting with the gameplay and control mechanics. At one point in the game, you must ride a slow elevator. If you use the rocket launcher (which has massive recoil) while riding said elevator, the resulting recoil will make you fall off of the elevator, causing you to take severe damage, if not die outright. Although there is part of the level design that does reflect Romero's skills in the field, but it's not enough. Worse, no checkpoints in any of the levels; if you die you have to start the level all over again, unless you use a quick save, but this has problems too. It uses a terrible method of saving progress in both versions; on the PC you can only save a very limited number of times with gems that you collect (was later patched to include quick-saves) and on the N64 you can only save after completing a level. Also, specifically in the Ancient Greece level, the word "aegis" is shown in lowercase, but at the time, in Greece, there was no lowercase alphabet, which did not exist until the Middle Ages. It also uses the wrong form of one of its letters. Even with the poor visuals, there are lots of variety to the levels, with standouts like the medieval levels.

A few enemies are not only small and hard to shoot at, but can easily bumrush and kill you in a just a few seconds. There are also allies with poor AI, whose death results in an instant game over. Trying to play the game with less than three human players is like herding suicidal cats. The player cannot exit a level if AI teammates are not fairly close by: if they try, Hiro will loudly proclaim that he can't leave without them, forcing the player to go back and figure out what piece of scenery they have managed to get stuck on. There are at least fan-made patches for the PC version which improve the game, making it more playable and improving the AI as well.

The sheer ambition of its design is quite impressive for its time. For instance, each time period has a completely different set of weapons, and some of the weapon designs are creative. Unfortunately, they also often demonstrate what the problem is with creativity that isn't balanced with practicality. What's worse is that almost all of the weapons have some way of dealing damage to you instead of the enemy, including the very first weapon you acquire in the game, due to the fact that their bullets ricochet off of walls. This makes the titular sword the only reliable and the most preferable weapon. Speaking of the PC version itself, it's easy to cheese nearly the whole game with it, since it's already powerful enough and the more it levels up, the more its power increases; not to mention it's also the only weapon that you keep in your inventory for all the game. Not to also mention many weapons are needlessly gimmicky, sometimes ending up so situational that it is hard to think of any time it would be a good idea to use them. In the N64 version, apart from the final boss, you can't use the sword. Also, in this version you only get ammo for weapons found in the current chapter/time zone, which makes every single weapon from the previous chapter/time zone completely useless because you'll never get ammo for them again. These now useless weapons also become an actual hindrance when you have to switch weapons, because they stay in your inventory make it take longer to switch weapons, and the fact that you can't pause the game to switch weapons makes every second you have to take to switch an additional second you're unarmed and unable to defend yourself. Thankfully, in the PC version, weapons that are not in the current chapter are removed from the player's inventory.

There are lots of bugs and glitches, some of them being game-breaking. One of the most infamous bugs, aside from the terrible AI, is the bug that causes the game to crash after beating Medusa, whom you're supposed to beat using only the Eye of Zeus, but developers forgot to make her take damage only from that weapon. The other infamous bug is one of the wizards in the Norway level suddenly turning invincible, or sometimes causing a crash when beaten. The N64 version suffers from stiff controls and slow movement. It also doesn't tell you how to do specific moves in-game. For example pressing R + A to crouch, which could easily have just been mapped to the L button instead since the L button is never used for anything in the game.

The N64 release has a lot of content cuts, thanks to the hardware limitations. There is no voice acting, no AI partners during gameplay (though this one is a blessing in disguise), some of the bosses are missing, despite them still being mentioned (with The Cerberus it's the most absurd case: the game shows it in the cutscene, but then just proceeds to the next level right after), and the levels are significantly shorter. Unintentionally, it also fixes a few problems on the other hand, making levels less tedious, saving you a lot of headache and lost nerves from the AI partners and getting rid of the annoying loading screen. Some of the cutscenes are also executed in a much better way than in the PC version, though they are ruined by the lack of voice acting and the awful looping music.

The game sold poorly, just like Stupid Invaders, only selling 40,351 copies compared to 2.5 millions copies that was required to be profitable, making it one of the hardest flop in the gaming history. The game is also known as one of the major commercial failures of the video game industry.

In other words: "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?" -AVGN