Daikatana has a strong emphasis on its single player mode, and thus does have an actual decent plot to back it all up. One night while practicing some martial arts, Hiro Miyamoto receives a knock at his door. A homeless man asks for a word with Hiro, and while he is reluctant to go along with at first, Hiro eventually agrees to listen to the man. The man explains that the corporate organization Mishima should not be in the point of power that they are in. The man also talks of the Daikatana, an ancient sword crafted so finely that it has powers that can bend time itself. The sword has no place in the hands of mere mortals, but as of now it’s being used for the sole purpose of pure evil. The Mishima Corporation has used the sword to alter the past to place themselves in their current position of wealth and power. The homeless man pleads with Hiro to embark on an adventure to rescue his daughter Mikiko, as well as place time back onto the correct path.

It isn’t a good sign when you dislike a title right from the first level, but that is what I felt with Daikatana; I entirely disliked Episode 1 as a whole right off the bat. I am not entirely sure who came up with idea of fighting off hopping, green robot frogs, mosquitoes and alligators, but I think whoever did ought to some more creative thinking next time. It was a painful experience to drag through most of the first episode. Once past the marsh and sewer areas it started to pick up, but even then the entire episode seemed like such a bore as a whole. None of the architecture or environments was at all interesting. Some of the enemies were actually extremely cool, but there wasn’t enough to keep interested enough to keep playing. Ultimately, it came down to me dragging through the episode to check out the other ones. While the other three episodes aren’t what I would call super fantastic fun, they’re definitely much better than the first. Having the time-based themes works out rather well, and allows for a nice amount of variation when it comes to gameplay flow.

Besides a simple environmental change, hopping into a new point in time results in a whole new set of monsters to take on, as well as another new set of weapons. The weapons from Episode 1 were rather generic and uninspired (except for one or two), but the other sets are considerably better. The new sets of weapons are always different than their predecessors (except for the fact that the Daikatana is present), and it provides a fresh, new experience. Then again, each new episode also carries the same frustrations that were there since the beginning, but we’ll get into that in a second.

Probably one of the worst disadvantages that stem from Daikatana being pushed back so often and so much is that the technology that it’s based upon has become dated. Daikatana has been built upon the Quake II-engine, while most titles on the horizon are either utilizing the Quake III or Unreal Tournament engines. Ion Storm has, however, performed more than a fair share of tweaks in order to keep the engine looking as up-to-date as possible. The frame rate can be a bit of a problem when there are four or five characters on-screen at once, but otherwise I found that the frame rate held up fairly well, even when I was fighting in some fairly large outdoor areas.

Throughout Daikatana’s development, one of the major points in the title that was always played up to be a revolution in genre was the addition of sidekick characters that would aid during battle. I’m not quite sure where the idea spun out of control, but whoever developed the supposed revolutionary AI for Mikiko and Superfly did anything but. The intelligence level for Mikiko and Superfly is about at the level of a mentally challenged child, and all the sidekicks do is cause absolute frustration during the time that they are around. The first time that they join up, and the few times that they can become useful in battle, the sidekicks seem like a good inclusion. But it is when the sidekicks have to be maneuvered around the game’s environments that their idiotic AI becomes increasingly present. Within an hour of gaining Superfly into my little group, I was pounding the keyboard in frustration. Far too often Superfly would either not respond to the commands that I gave him, or he’d completely ignore them all together. And even worse, I was never able to kill off Superfly during an actual battle, but instead he decides to commit suicide every couple of seconds and get crushed by a mere closing door. And as soon as a sidekick dies, the game is over and a previous save had to be loaded up.

Moving on, we come to the save system, another piece of Daikatana that I’m not sure who had the smart brains to conceive. Instead of giving the player the choice to choose where they want to save, Daikatana forces you to find save crystals that are scattered in the levels. Since most of the crystals are hidden in secret locations, if you want to be able to save at all often, you will have to go scavenging through the level pushing walls and such, in an attempt to find a hidden location. The save crystal idea works for perhaps a console title, but on the PC it is commonplace for a game to at least give the player the option to turn off the save crystals, and allow them to save anyplace at anytime.

Quite a bit of Daikatana’s disappointment is because of the fact that many of the features in the game would have been much more impressive if the game had been released when it was originally intended to - which was more than a year or two ago. Daikatana is a dated title that offers little in the way of features that we haven’t seen in another FPS (other than the sidekicks, but those turned out to be horribly frustrating, so they don’t count for much), and it just simply is not very fun. Even the extremely fast paced multiplayer mode could not do a whole lot to keep my interest sustained. John Romero has some great ideas for the FPS genre, and hopefully his next effort will live up to what he hypes.