Daikatana

I wanted to give it a chance but it really is as bad as people say it is, if not even worse. Even with the unofficial patch that's supposed to make the game 'better" it's difficult to tolerate even the first two levels. The graphics are hideous and dated, even for the year 2000. It's truly one of the ugliest video games of all time. To make matters worse, it has annoying flying enemies and tiny pest enemies and all you are given to defend yourself is a garbage energy pistol with projectiles that bounce back and can hurt you. This game is true suffering. Don't buy this game.

I have a lot of things I would like to say about this game but I’ll try my best to simplify it so I don’t get bored. The Game is far ahead of its time. The Concept, the Game Design, the Storytelling, almost everything in Daikatana would be a reference to the industry if the game had not been so badly received due to the poor AI ​​of the sidekicks. Playing with Patch 1.3, you can either remove sidekicks completely or make them immortal, so you can see that the game is actually quite fun and fluid. Aside from the sidekicks, the only thing I considered bad about this game was the small, irritating enemies with good mobility. Can you imagine a DOOM game full of variants of Lost Souls? Yes, VERY IRRITATING! But apart from these 2 things, the game has very diverse scenarios, weaponry that changes as we go through the episodes, storytelling with cutscenes that was an embryonic thing with regard to FPS at the time. And there is the great point of this game that very few understood. The role of the sidekicks in this game is exactly to delay the player, in the logic of the great heroes, the hero, is always a character sacrificed by his teammates, and the game puts you exactly in that position, I admit that I don't think this is fun but from a conceptual point of view, even today in 2021 this concept is still ahead of time. This is too damn challenging even if you play it on lower dificulties.

Recently, there has been a wave of people arguing that the 1.3 fan patch established Daikatana as an unfairly panned masterpiece in disguise. This couldn't be further from the truth. The patch merely makes the game *playable*, but does nothing to prevent it from still being utter crap. While the patch enables one to play without sidekicks, which is by far the best choice from a gameplay perspective, you'll be scratching your head through the entire game given that it's clearly intended to be played with sidekicks. Unfortunately, doing so is a horrible experience, for three reasons. Call them the triple threat of bad design. (1) The game is full of doors that immediately shut behind you and cannot be opened again. Real fun if your sidekicks are still standing behind it. The only way to handle this is by saving every time you're about to go through a door. Ridiculous. (2) Due to the outdated engine, there are level transitions with loading screens every two minutes. To progress, you're required to have your sidekicks nearby. Have fun scouting the level for several minutes to find your low IQ sidekicks that got stuck somewhere. (3) The sidekicks really love walking into your line of fire, especially when you handle explosives. Awesome design, John. In a way, you get the impression nobody told the level designers during development that there will be sidekicks in the game. The difficulty progression is also all over the place. First episode is the hardest, from there it gets easier and easier. Most of the weapons are useless, you only ever need two or three of them at any point. The only saving graces are the fluid movement (nothing like Q2, thank) and the fact that some of the environments are reminiscent of other, better FPS such as Unreal and Hexen II. I'd suggest playing those instead of this crapfest. Save your time and money.

After I managed to turn on the god mode on the sidekicks (so I can ignore them), the game started to show it's goodness. Apart from some awful levels, the game feels good, and sometimes I can find some folks playing multiplayer. What else I can say? Buy it and try it, but don't expect it to lick your boots (as the most today's games are trying to do).

Everything is wrong: enemies act as if on roller-skates, weapons are weak, AI is bull-like, levels make no sense, script is awful, you spend half the time damaging yourself and, well, robotic frogs. Yet, it is oddly addictive in a naff, B-movie sort of way. In no way lovable but a real curio. You'll want to find out why it is sooooo awful...great ideas smothered by bad ideas or poorly implemented ideas. A fascinating train wreck of a game.