Awful game! (Daikatana (PC))

Member Name: raypdaley182

Product:	Daikatana (PC)
Date:	28/08/08 (25 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of interesting ideas

Disadvantages: All very badly executed

If you've read the other reviews of this game you'll already know everybody hates it. A LOT! For a game that was delayed beyond belief for many years, had many members of its design team sacked, had level design allocated to amateurs, had the worst save method known to man and had the worst in game character AI for your supposedly "helpful" sidekicks this game had pretty much EVERYTHING stacked against it.

But did that stop the producers releasing this game? Did it hell!
The game had been started and was well into its creation then production was halted so they could rewrite everything using the then new Quake 2 engine. The game had been hyped, demos looked awful and ran slowly, the AI was difficult for the creators to get right (which they never did), the level designers created levels which were much too big & complex, having the ideas of different weapons & enemies for each time zone slowed production down even more.

You play Hiro who is asked by an old man to find a sword and save his daughter who went missing when she was trying to find that sword. The sword is the Daikatana (I still think it sounds like a Welsh sword!) which the game is named after and you can expect to get 7 shades of shit kicked out of you by everyone and everything you encounter along the way.

You will start out by rescuing Superfly Johnson, a security guard who comes right out of every bad Blacksploitation film you've ever seen or heard of. He might look big and tough but he's a huge coward when it comes to getting him to fight along side you.
You'll get your 1st struggles with the insanely bad sidekick AI routines with him and also come to hate the save method where you can only save when or if you find a save gem. With Superfly you'll fight your way through crematoriums and then eventually find and free Mikkiko Ebihara. Yet another annoying sidekick with equally bad AI routines and really annoying phrases.

That's worth mentioning here so I will. Both the sidekicks speak to you and each other, they also seem to randomly talk to themselves about whatever is on their minds, sometimes its hard to get them to shut up. You'll wish you could kill them yourself but you can't past most level markers without your sidekicks who have a bad habit of getting themselves either stuck or killed.

Mikkiko likes fighting and will run into danger regardless of whether she has a weapon or not & 8 times out of 10 the silly cow winds up getting herself a 1 way ticket to the afterlife unless you dive in and intervene pretty quickly which most of the time will end up getting you killed in her place. And do you ever get any thanks for continually saving her ass? Like hell you do!

You work your way through various countries and timezones, the past, the future and the present. Having to find both the sidekicks each time before you are allowed to leave, Ancient Greece is probably the worst level as you have to find stones to spell the word Aegis to open a gate to the next timezone which are very widely spread over an enormous level. Expect to get lost a LOT there.

You do eventually get back to present day after having been to places like Alcatraz (I still say Half Life 2 stole the idea for Nova Prospekt from there so its not like the game hasn't been completely uninfluencial) and you finally face the big bad evil boss who is called Mishima.

You fight him in a huge rectagular room that contains you, him, a submarine and some catwalks. He's very hard to beat as he wears Samurai type armour and uses the Daikatana, fighting him consists of lots of running away and attacking him from behind which might sound incredibly cowardly but its the only way to kill him. Don't knock it if it works I say!

After despatching Mishima to the hereafter you get to then board the submarine (to either find the Daikatana or destroy the time machine that kept throwing you and your sidekicks all around history). This is where the game & story all get turned on its head, as Mikkiko kills Superfly (after he carried her for a whole level when she got infected by something, the ungrateful cow!) and tries to kill you with the Daikatana. You do have to kill her (which I'll admit after all her annoying phrases & rushing into battles to constantly get me killed was a welcome reward!) but if you suceed you will use the Daikatana to travel back into time a final time to a point before Mikikko or her father had found out about the Daikatana and hide the sword so its evil influence doesn't corrupt anyone.
I got really angry with Mikkiko (she's now eternally known to me as "The Ebihara Bitch") after she killed Superfly and tried to kill me.

The game is too long. The graphics look bad compared to Quake 2. The AI is awful. The save system is awful. The sidekicks are annoying and die too easily. To play the game you will definately have to download a whole load of patches which will eliminate a lot of problems that the people who bought this game when it was new (like me) encountered. If you do decide to use the patches then DO NOT start playing the game before you install them as the save games ARE NOT compatible with the patches and your game will crash, leaving you to restart from scratch.

Summary: Possibly the worst FPS to ever see the light of day