Daikatana is so underrated!

[haruko haruhara]

i'm sorry if this is not allowed to be talked about here but if anyone who likes the game or hates the game all are allowed just don't spam how bad it is we get it already but here is my opinion on the game you must know

 

my opinion about the game is not harsh sure its frustrating but that is what a game is about but most people hate the first level i am going to assume its because the giant bug in the sky that shoots alot of those bugs well i found a way to kill it without doing it in the water to hide for cover its if you hide here but i think everyone knows by now 

https://imgur.com/LJezmjq

 

but it depends when the game wants to make the giant bug or whatever it is stuck so you can kill it but as long as you hide the level is not bad but all tho it was design where you can skip pass everything thats why once i beat the game i wait either 7 months or a year to play it again.

 

i also love the weapons the ion blaster is great i have not read much about the names of the weapons or monsters so any information to new comers to this game will be awesome to know i just play it because its a game not to read unless if there is some important information

 

but the game is awesome the music weapons the monsters to me it has good voice acting even tho they cut parts off which can be a bit odd but i love Hiro Miyamoto's voice its so early 2000s first person shooter voice of a badass i know not everyone will think what i think.

 

but what is your opinion of the game let me know!

 

and i kinda wish there would be custom levels since ion raidiant does exist.

 

Edited January 4, 2022 by haruko haruhara

[Aaron Blain]

I've tried a few times, and I can't figure out what to do after killing the bug, so I die by falling or getting killed by a frog or alligator because my health is low, so then I have to reload at the checkpoint before the boss, re-fight those drones and then try to beat the boss again, which I find difficult and completely frustrating and unfun.

 

I like everything else about the game -- the look, the feel, the theme and the story. I just don't have enough free time to spend whole sessions in frustration hoping for the good parts to come along.

[Astronomical]

I am convinced that (assuming you are playing a patched copy) Daikatana is a game that if someone wants to like it, they will.  If you don't want to like it, you won't however.  The game is so unique that you can almost ignore the issues if you like it.  

[haruko haruhara]

5 minutes ago, Astronomical said:

I am convinced that (assuming you are playing a patched copy) Daikatana is a game that if someone wants to like it, they will.  If you don't want to like it, you won't however.  The game is so unique that you can almost ignore the issues if you like it.  

true i was playing the 1.3 patch which fixes things so i'm sorry if i was not playing the original game the only thing i can not like about it is the sidekick ai's but the whole game is interesting through. 

[Astronomical]

Just now, haruko haruhara said:

true i was playing the 1.3 patch which fixes things so i'm sorry if i was not playing the original game the only thing i can not like about it is the sidekick ai's but the whole game is interesting through. 

I don't have an issue at all with that, I encourage people who want to play it to use community patches because the technical issues that get in the way suck.  

[haruko haruhara]

btw i am curious if someone could make levels for it or make a whole new campaign worth i would do it but the program won't work

 

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=804127931

 

or i must be doing something wrong?

[Rudolph]

I would argue that Daikatana is fairly rated: after all, it was devoted fans who ended up addressing - or at the very least alleviating - its biggest issues long after the game's original release.

[whybmonotacrab]

Yes, if you use the community patch to fix the bazillion bugs and design issues it's pretty good. The second and third episode in particular are really cool, and I like quite a few ideas from the game.

[Rudolph]

What I would love to see is some sort of fan remake/TC for GZDoom that takes what worked from the game and ditches what did not.

 

I was not convinced by Return of the Triad, but I was blown away by the In Pursuit of Greed gameplay mod and Alien Breed 3D TC.

[ReaperAA]

For once, I actually agree with Haruko Haruhara.

[Redneckerz]

3 hours ago, haruko haruhara said:

i'm sorry if this is not allowed to be talked about here but if anyone who likes the game or hates the game all are allowed just don't spam how bad it is we get it already but here is my opinion on the game you must know

I thought you had your own megathread for exactly these kinds of topics.

3 hours ago, haruko haruhara said:

but what is your opinion of the game let me know!

I have the game physically in a deluxe CD cover. The premise is interesting: Have a shooter play out in different time periods. At the time, this was still a novelty.

 

What made the game infamous was not only the delay's but also the whole ordeal with John Romero. Purchasing a huge ass office prior to releasing the game.

 

I like how there is a port to the OpenPandora handheld. And i find it hilarious how bad the N64 version was. Allegedly based off the Quake 64 engine meaning all the Quake 2 based stuff had to be surplanted on a engine a generation prior.

 

Still, for as bad as it is, its interesting that such a current game was ported to N64 in the first place. The N64 was at the end of its lifespan, with the Gamecube slowly coming about. Why Daikatana was not launched in 2001 as a launchtitle for the Gamecube instead of the N64, well...

2 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

For once, I actually agree with Haruko Haruhara.

I liked the effort at paragraphs.

[Rudolph]

14 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

Have a shooter play out in different time periods. At the time, this was still a novelty.

Is that not the premise of Serious Sam as well as two of the Duke Nukem third-person shooters, Time To Kill and Zero Hour?

Edited January 4, 2022 by Rudolph

[Liberation]

I think the main issue with Daikatana, if we discount the dodgy AI and bugs was simply the fact it was released far too late, it belonged in the 90's around 97/98 and anything released after 99 was always going to be over shadowed by Halflife, causing a review bombing of a game that simply wasn't ready for release. 

 

I liked the idea of it, and some of the later episodes do look really cool.

[Liberation]

Just now, Rudolph said:

Is that not the premise of two of the Duke Nukem third-person shooters, Time To Kill and Zero Hour?

 

I don't know about Zero Hour personally, but Time to Kill certainly was set in different time periods, so good point.

[Redneckerz]

2 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Is that not the premise of Serious Sam as well as two of the Duke Nukem third-person shooters, Time To Kill and Zero Hour?

I suppose it is. I was thinking of first person shooters only.

[Rudolph]

4 minutes ago, Liberation said:

I don't know about Zero Hour personally, but Time to Kill certainly was set in different time periods, so good point.

I have not played it either, but I have listened to Zero Hour's music on YouTube and it is pretty good!

 

Unfortunately, it does not appear to have been composed by Lee Jackson. :(

[Yandere_Doomer]

I havent played it but i feel the same way about Perfect Dark. i feel that Goldeneye is inferior to it, yet Goldeneye gets all the praise!

i Plan on playing Daikatana one day (i feel an obligation to at this point) 

[mrthejoshmon]

I have played Daikatana and all I will say is that it is a hard disagree from me.

 

Glad you enjoyed it, I however do not enjoy a single aspect of it (and usually I genuinely enjoy playing absolute trash) and quite simply do not wish to progress any further passed the 17th "Superfly makes love to the map geometry" encounter.

[Captain Keen]

I've tried to like the game multiple times, but have trouble getting into it. There's a lot of interesting ideas, but before the community patches I think it was nearly unplayable, and after the patches it IS very playable but still feels like a prototype for something better down the line. (Which in many ways, I guess it was...)

 

Part of the reason DOOM works so well in my opinion is its simplicity; the day to learn, lifetime to master type of approach to gameplay. Same for QUAKE 1, which I still really like to play as well. The more complicated the gameplay gets, with AI companions and all of that, the more noticeable the limitations of late 90s coding gets.

[kristus]

I have a friend from England that is an avid Daikatana deathmatch player. I haven't tried it in that mode. But I can imagine it being a lot more palatable than the single player campaign.

[kwc]

52 minutes ago, kristus said:

I have a friend from England that is an avid Daikatana deathmatch player. I haven't tried it in that mode. But I can imagine it being a lot more palatable than the single player campaign.

That would make sense considering Romero's history up to that point.
Are you saying there is still an active community of Daikatana players out there? If that's the case I'd like to try a game or two and see what it's like.

[Gregor]

Play Daikatana or John Romero will eat your face!

[kristus]

I don't know how active it is. But yeah there is at least a small community of people still playing Daikatana DM.

[Murdoch]

5 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

The premise is interesting: Have a shooter play out in different time periods.

 

Believe it or not, I actually had an idea for a massive Doom mod based on a similar premise, before I knew about Eternal Doom, and well before Daikatana was a thing. Serves me right for having ideas and not a whiff of actual talent and skill needed to make them happen.

 

As for the topic, no it is not underrated at all. Sorry. It has some really interesting ideas, but the first episode is a noisy pain in the ass, the other episodes are marginally better but it's still a buggy piece of crap with cringeworthy dialogue. If you get some joy from it great. But it is more or less deserving of the reputation it has. The bugs and problems are objectively demonstrable.

 

That said, I really like the basic idea (as I said above, I had one very similar). Honestly, I think a reboot of the game would be a stroke of genius. Give it the resources to get it done right and the sheer "Holy shit lol what a Daikatana remake?!?" factor would be PR gold I think.

Edited January 4, 2022 by Murdoch

[Jello]

It really wasn't. I finally managed to get through it last year with the 1.3 community patch. And I had been trying to get through it from time to time over a decade and a half. In fact, I have an original CD version of it, because I thought "How bad can it be?".

 

The game was so broken that it took diehard fans to fix it to the point that it was playable, and it still wasn't good. Episode 3 was okay. And that's the best recommendation I can give it, was that one of the episodes wasn't mind-numbingly boring. It was a terrible game, from start to finish. It started off in a quagmire, and it never escaped. It was a bad game. The idea was interesting, everything after that was a complete and abject failure. 

[printz]

I only played episode 1 until I got stuck somewhere in the factory, so what I'm going to say is not a review, just my impressions.

 

When I got Daikatana in a game magazine CD years after it got launched, I knew absolutely nothing of the review meltdown. I thought it was the awesome game that Romero had announced (I also knew or cared nothing about his infamous catchphrase, actually it would have just raised the hype for me). So yeah I was under a positive mindset, without any influence that the game may be a let down.

 

On starting the game, I was totally stoked. I really liked the samurai theme, given I was watching Samurai Jack and even attended some obligatory (pointless) karate lessons IRL. I had no issues about using dangerous weapons and the enemies being small and deadly. I appreciated that the venomous frogs were robotic, otherwise it would have been too creepy. I also loved those turret traps because the solution was always something smart.

 

Things started to get weird once entering the installation. Why did those civilians scream so insanely?! And why did the armed guards keep saying "why do we keep getting stuck guarding this secror" (pretty sure I was mishearing)? The mecha robots looked too Quake2-like for my taste. It seems to be the blight of secondary games (Strife, Daikatana) to just push for regular mecha robots as enemies.

 

The game got too difficult once I got my first buddy Superfly. While fairly competent in combat (very quick to trigger) the levels worked too much against us, supplying us with almost no health or ammo. That level with the organ music and Mishima painting was already insanely hard. I think I had to tell Superfly to wait as I was busy sniping potshots at the enemies.

 

All weapons were interesting, none of them was regular or all reliable. I liked that. I loved that vibrating/motorized "berserk" pack, it looked fun to use.

 

Oh, I totally loved the experience system, and the temporary boost powerups. Nowadays we have the new Dooms for this, so it's definitely not a lost art.

 

The game was indeed buggy at points, such as by showing errors. That's a big shame really, it felt unreliable to play. Maybe the stupid dorky Quake 2 engine didn't help either. Buggiest game engine from id, worst victim of its time.

 

I stopped playing when I was somewhere in the factory, presumably needing to go through some venting passages (STOP USING THIS UNREALISTIC TROPE, WRITERS), with almost no health, neither I nor Superfly (who decided unilateraly to stay in the hall). Oh, my fault is that I didn't understand that "Hosportals" are infinite health stations. Nothing in the game hinted I should hold-press them. I just saw the neat effect and I thought they're bonus switches or something.

 

I later watched Let's-play of episode 1 later. The player was clearly influenced by the toxic post-release public bashing of Daikatana, having only complaints about the game (which is totally bandwagon and unfair mentality). What I saw near the episode end was another stupid enemy, typical of secondary games: the typical blob-shaped flying drone.

 

The game would be interesting to explore, but nowadays I would have far less patience with the trial and error gameplay, and the Quake 2 engine would make it crash spectacularily on Windows 10. Stupid.

[PsychEyeball]

12 hours ago, printz said:

I only played episode 1 until I got stuck somewhere in the factory, so what I'm going to say is not a review, just my impressions.

On one hand, Episode 1 is by far the worst part of the game. It genuinely feels like stuff that was done early in the game's development process and never was touched back again. The weapon and sound design for Episode 1 is beyond abysmal, with the jail level being a lesson on how not to do ambient sound design. But then every monster, moreso the robots, have these high pitched whining sounds that very quickly make way for headaches and of course there are robots everywhere. And of course almost every weapon in the arsenal either hurts you or is unwieldly as all hell to use (Shotcycler anyone?).

 

The game do get a little better once you leave Episode 1, but not by enough. Thankfully the environments get more appealing in Episode 2 so the game isn't too bad to actually move around and get things done. But weapons constantly remain a weak point in the game; despite the game having 4 different weapon sets, most of them feel really bad to use in overall. Episode 2 has real clunkers in the arsenal set, such as the snake head that shoots poisonous balls (which poison you), the giant hammer which always hurts you when you use it and the exploding flare grenades which I swear do nothing.

 

Episode 3 probably had my favorite setting in the game with the Norway plague village and it might have the most consistent arsenal of the game (only the ultimate weapon is a letdown, which summons a devil that slowly damages things around and is very inefficient). The AI is of no help to you since Superfly is relegated to carrying your other companion for the whole chapter, but that's okay because the AI is already of no help to you anyway.

 

This is another big problem with the game and even version 1.3 doesn't do enough to alleviate problems (the big fix, beyond being able to disable sidekicks, is to make them immortal). The sidekick AI is baaaaaad. You want them to get ammo for their weapon? They will refuse to do so. They are low on HP and armor and you command them to get said health and armor? They won't do it. They routinely get stuck on ladders and it'll require voodoo magic to pry them away. Sometimes they randomly get lost because the pathfinding bugs out and they'll just get stuck somewhere for no reason. They break the flow of the game so often you'll shudder every time Hiro goes "I can't leave without my buddy Superfly" and wonder what the hell he's currently doing. I played the game with sidekicks and I can't say I recommend that anyone do the same. Turn them off.

 

Episode 4 has the most classic arsenal of the game (a pistol, shotgun, rail gun laser and a minigun rank amongst its best weapons) but it's also let down by how many hitscanners it has, especially compared to Episode 2 or 3. After how exotic the last two settings are, Modern USA is a really boring setting and it's more of a throwback to Episode 1. At the very least, it does feel more competent, even though some levels come with their load of aggrievances. Especially the Mishima Labs. Fuck that level.

 

So in the end, you have an incredibly poor Episode 1 and while the rest of the game is a notable improvement, it never manages to be more than okay. And considering the hype and long development times, being okay is nowhere near enough.

Edited January 5, 2022 by PsychEyeball

[printz]

2 hours ago, PsychEyeball said:

After how exotic the last two settings are, Modern USA is a really boring setting

That idea sounds a lot like DOOM II (return home, but it's hell on Earth).

[DoomGater]

On 1/4/2022 at 10:00 PM, kwc said:

That would make sense considering Romero's history up to that point.
Are you saying there is still an active community of Daikatana players out there? If that's the case I'd like to try a game or two and see what it's like.

 

At http://www.daikatananews.net/files.html  there still is  was the freeloadable DM-Only version.
(Here comes another URL: https://securedl.cdn.chip.de/downloads/4691419/DaikatanaDM_v1.2.1.zip?cid=54429738&platform=chip&1647892086-1647899586-909d50-B-bc3f7b82709cda07de10aedc5abee0f4)

Very impressive and VERY fast.
Try "Gibbler On The Roof". Really an outstanding experience :-).  I guess I'll dust it off right now :-)

Edited March 21, 2022 by DoomGater
LINK IS DEAD

[Dark Pulse]

Bit late to this topic, but fellow Doomworlder and all around studly muffin of meat @Arcturus has been doing a stream of the game every Saturday for the last few weeks. He's currently just gotten to E3, I believe.

 

Feel free to join in and experience the schadenfreude of him trying to figure out what the hell to do, as well as my awful and occasionally crude humor.

Edited March 22, 2022 by Dark Pulse