I first tried "Daikatana" when I was a kid, but as far as I remember, I never made it past the first area. Something about it immediately put me off. Only now, many years later, did I finally decide to come back and play the whole thing.
As it turns out, the biggest challenge is simply surviving the beginning. Now I completely understand why I dropped it back then. The opening area is dark, dirty, and visually dull, with almost nothing interesting to look at. Your enemies include mosquitoes and frogs, robotic ones, sure, but they still make incredibly annoying sounds. This is not the kind of discomfort a good horror game can create on purpose. It is just boring and irritating.
Thankfully, "Daikatana" gets better after that. Once you get past the opening, the game starts picking up momentum and that terrible first impression gradually fades.
At its core, this is a Quake-like shooter with several interesting ideas, but mostly average execution.
There is an actual story built around time travel. Yes, it is poorly developed and often absurd, and I would not call it one of the game's strengths. Still, I have never agreed with John Carmack's famous attitude that story in shooters is basically unnecessary, so I am actually glad "Daikatana" has one at all.
There is even a leveling system. Killing enemies gives the main character experience, which can be spent on stats such as attack power or movement speed. I mostly invested in speed, and that is what I would recommend. Besides making movement faster, it also lets you jump higher and farther, which can help you reach some awkward or otherwise hard-to-access places.
Because of the time-travel premise, the game is divided into four major periods: the distant future, which is the hero's starting point, Ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, and a relatively near future that feels somewhat like the present day, just with more advanced technology such as jetpacks.
And these periods are more than simple reskins. The level design, enemies, and especially the weapon selection change between them. In the future you fight with various blaster-like weapons, in Ancient Greece you get things like throwing discs, and in the Middle Ages you use crossbows and other period-appropriate equipment.
I think this is one of the game's strongest ideas. In a way, "Daikatana" feels like four smaller shooters stitched together into one larger game. Because of that, it manages to change its atmosphere several times and does not stay stuck with the same environments and weapons for too long.
Another unusual feature, and probably a genuinely impressive one for its time, is the companion system. Two characters periodically travel with the protagonist, sometimes individually and sometimes together. This is probably the most controversial part of the entire game.
For such an old game, the companions are surprisingly complex. They can pick up weapons, health and armor, jump, crouch through tight spaces, and follow commands like "follow me", "stay here", or "pick this up". On paper, this sounds great.
In practice, they are incredibly clumsy.
They constantly get stuck somewhere, so you have to push them around yourself or repeatedly switch commands in the hope that they finally understand what you want. They are also remarkably eager to kill themselves whenever the opportunity appears: standing under a descending elevator, falling into lava, or finding some other stupid way to die.
At least they refuse to use weapons with splash damage, such as rocket launchers or Greek fire. Otherwise I am fairly sure they would regularly kill both themselves and the player.
The real problem is that a companion dying means Game Over, so you cannot simply ignore them. Even making them pick up health or armor can become a separate challenge. They often need to literally walk over the item, but their pathfinding tries to keep them away from walls and corners. So if a medkit happens to be lying in an awkward spot, they may simply refuse to reach it.
They can also run out of ammunition, and of course you have to share your own supplies with them. Because of this, it is often easier to tell them to stay in one place while you move ahead alone.
That does not always work either. If an enemy attacks a companion you left behind and they have no ammo, they cannot kill it, but they also will not run away because you told them to stay. At one point I had a companion get killed by a rat while I was busy fighting an armed group of enemies somewhere else.
If a modern game released with companion AI like this, it would be torn apart, and deservedly so. But "Daikatana" is an old game, and I am willing to give it some credit for ambition. At the time, the idea of companions with this many behaviors was probably genuinely impressive.
Today, though, the system mostly feels like an irritating mandatory mechanic that you constantly have to fight against.
I did enjoy the structure of the levels. They encourage exploration not only because of secrets, but simply because you need to figure out where to go next. I like that kind of design, although I can easily understand why other people might find it frustrating.
There are moments when you completely lose track of what the game expects from you, only to discover that you were supposed to notice some tiny button or shoot an easy-to-miss hook somewhere in the environment.
"Daikatana" has plenty of ideas that were ambitious and innovative for its time: traveling through drastically different eras, weapon sets that change with each period, character progression, unusually complex companions, and levels that expect you to explore instead of simply following a corridor.
The problem is that almost every good idea is held back by mediocre or outright irritating execution.
Once you get past the awful opening level, the game becomes noticeably better, and I am glad I finally finished it after all these years. But overall, my opinion did not change that much: "Daikatana" is interesting because of its ideas and what it tried to do, but as an actual shooter, I still consider it fairly average.
