YMMV / Daikatana

• Angst? What Angst?: After freeing Mikiko from the cell, Hiro reveals to her that her father is dead. It seems she doesn't care about him except for the quest about finding the sword. Given endgame events, it might simply be foreshadowing. Averted with the GBC version, where she doesn't take it well and has a Heroic BSoD.
• Awesome Music: The game's soundtrack stands in direct opposition to its gameplay.
  • From the N64 version, there's the Fight theme which is a fast-paced track similar to Helmet's Unsung that can be heard every time the trio faces Kage Mishima.
  • Slow Doom from the first act which is a slowed down version of At Doom's Gate.
  • Caution from the fourth act which is a relaxing Downtempo track in contrast with the Hard Rock music of the act in question.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The miniboss fight with Cerberus becomes this in the N64 version. The Acropolis stage ends with a cutscene introducing it, only for the next stage to open with Hiro and Mikiko admiring a statue of Athena with no mention of the hellhound that just got skipped over.
• Bile Fascination: At this point, the game's biggest selling point is based purely in its infamy. Common consensus is that this was the real reason the game was re-released on Steam in 2013.
  Yahtzee Croshaw: I was slightly surprised to find Daikatana available on Steam, but even more so by the feature list. "25 glorious weapons to collect and utilize". "Two highly-trained sidekicks to watch your back". I'd have said it was being sarcastic if I thought publishers had any self-awareness at all. But realistically, everyone knows that its infamous reputation is the only reason this game is on Steam, and the blurb should have read, "Roll up, roll up, everyone come and see the freak."
• Complete Monster: Kage Mishima is the tyrant of a dystopian future. Discovering the Daikatana with his partner and its ability to time travel, Kage killed his partner and traveled back to 2030 AD, where he claimed the cure for a pandemic and sold it at a high price, leaving many people dead, while also making San Francisco a Martial Law town where gangs roamed the streets causing havoc. Becoming the iron-fisted ruler of the world, he forces his guards to go through brutal training, creates burgers out of human flesh, and regularly has his prisoners tortured and beaten to death, and uses his time travel abilities to assassinate members of the Ebihara clan. When Hiro Miyamoto refuses to swear his subservience to him, Kage tries to clash both of their Daikatanas together, knowing full well that doing so will destroy the entire universe.
• Fight Scene Failure: Any time the Daikatana is used in a cutscene, expect it to be this due to the incredibly Limited Animation. A duel between Hiro and Mishima halfway through the game has the two halfheartedly swiping their swords at nothing.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Despite the infamous reputation that Daikatana has as one of the worst FPS games of all time, it is quite beloved in the Philippines, where it used to be one of the most popular games of all time and is still seen as fairly beloved by many Filipino gaming fans.
• Goddamned Bats: Most of the enemies in the first episode are annoying to fight due to being small and moving very fast, which is only made worse by how most of the weapons have a high likelihood of damaging or killing the player.
• Ho Yay: With how ridiculously close Hiro and Superfly seem to be even though they just met ("I can't leave without my buddy Superfly" comes to mind) and how Superfly just straight up bawls his eyes out when Hiro dies. Really just makes you wonder if the two have something going on to explain the unwarranted infatuation the two have for each other.
• Mis-blamed: John Romero was not responsible for the "about to make you his bitch" ad, and even before the backlash was generated by the ad, Romero fired the publicity person responsible for it.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "John Romero is going to make you his bitch.", "I can't X without my buddy Superfly!" and "Thanks John".
  • Dealing with cyber frogs in the first level became one as well.
• Narm:
  • The "ultimate gas hands". Just try to say it out loud and keep a straight face.
  • Hiro puts in an honest performance (though he does sound like he's trying to imitate Solid Snake a bit) but everyone else varies between stereotypical Asian accents and wooden acting. Then Superfly Johnson, whose name already might elicit a few giggles, opens his mouth, and you realize that he's essentially the game's comedic relief. Very few of the scenes he's in stand up against his performance making the game feel like it's Played for Laughs at that point, never mind the wacky banter and one-liners in-game.
  • Thanks to a severe case of Limited Animation, the dramatic "Hiro versus Mishima" Daikatana battles, which get played up as warping reality around them with dramatic flair, look more like swinging at empty air and pretending to dodge or get hurt like it's a turn-based role-playing game. Mishima rambling about Hiro not yet having the skill to use it doesn't help, given it takes until his actual in-game final battle to actually do something besides swing it blindly and warp the cast through time.
  • Someone thought it was a good idea to make maxed out jump and speed stats play sounds for every time you do the respective actions. This results in that cheesy "bionic sound" from things like The Six Million Dollar Man, and obnoxious wooshing sounds, again respectively. If it doesn't make you laugh hysterically, it will drive you insane.
• Never Live It Down:
  • This is one of John Romero's most famous games ever—for all the wrong reasons. PC Gamer took a lot of flak for including Playboy model / Daikatana level designer / John Romero's girlfriend Stevie Case in a cover article about "The Next Game Gods."
  • The game is widely mocked as the "game where most of the enemies are robot frogs and mosquitoes". In truth, only the first couple levels have these enemies. Unfortunately, said levels are also among the most unpleasant parts of the entire game, meaning many players never make it past the first few levels before giving up, likely contributing to this misconception.
  • During the advertising for the game, one of the more infamous ads read "John Romero is about to make you his bitch". It's likely he intended the line to sound fairly badass as if implying the game is going to be incredibly fun and/or unbelievably hard, but the response to the ad was much less positive. Furthermore, it's one of the most well-remembered parts of the game's history if only because of how bad of an idea it was. John Romero would admit in this Kotaku article that he didn't mean for it to come across the way it did, and he regrets it.
    John Romero: You know, I never wanted to make you my bitch, not you, not them, not any of the other players and, most importantly, not any of my fans. Up until that ad, I felt I had a great relationship with the gamer and the game development community and that ad changed everything... I regret it and I apologize for it.
• Nightmare Fuel: Some tracks from the third act are geniunely unsettling.
• Obvious Beta:
  • The game is riddled with bugs, especially the co-op mode - early highlights in the Let's Play by Proteus4994 and Suspicious involve their needing to abandon the original plan of playing the game completely unpatched because they would invariably crash at the first map transition in the opening level, and then having to noclip through a door in the second level that was supposed to open in the starting cutscene, but didn't because cutscenes are disabled in co-op. Again, these are the first two levels in the game.
  • The game's official demo was even worse — not least because the installer's self-extractor was broken, requiring you to use WinRAR or a similar program to manually extract the installation files. Moreover, the first level transition quite often caused a bug that would corrupt your save file and prevent the game from starting until you deleted the file.
• Obvious Judas: Mikiko, in her first appearance, straight-up tells Superfly "Don't worry, you'll get what's coming to you." The rest of the game isn't low on similar reminders, both from the character in question and Mishima straight-up telling you not to trust your allies.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The game itself was overshadowed by the infamous ad, and how it was a Troubled Production that couldn't deliver the promised goods.
• Polished Port: The Game Boy Color tie-in game released by Kemco somehow managed to be better received than the PC game it was based on. Sadly, it only came out in Europe and it was completely different in playing style to the original. However, John Romero put a link to the ROM on his site, so, fortunately, there should be nothing illegal about emulating it. The fact that it's not even an FPS with cutting-edge 3D graphics but an 8-bit pixelated Zelda-clone and yet a far more successful game is pure Irony.
• Porting Disaster: The Nintendo 64 version had blurry, low-resolution textures, and lots of fog to hide the shorter draw distance. The titular Daikatana was removed as a usable weapon. Mikiko and Superfly were removed from the gameplay (which actually makes the game more fun, but still) but remained in the cutscenes.
• Protection from Editors: Even at a time when games typically had much smaller development teams with much more creative control, being a great game designer does not automatically make you a good project manager.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The game originally required you to use "save gems" rather than allowing you to save whenever you want as most shooters do. The game also saves at level transitions, and rather annoyingly, they sometimes put save gems right near level transitions, making it likely you will waste the save gem in question.
  • Every part of the game with Superfly and/or Mikiko is an Escort Mission. Unpatched, you have to micromanage their health on top of their weapon supplies, as just about anything can kill them as dead as they can you. Even when patched so they can effectively be invulnerable, they can still block your path constantly and get stuck on level geometry in a game where you can't progress without them, making the pair a massive pain in the ass to deal with. Most players playing the patch would recommend just turning them off altogether to save yourself the hell.
• Scrappy Weapon: So many, the vast majority of them being in the first episode. It's telling that one of the better weapons in the opening is the one that wastes six consecutive shots every time you fire it, simply because it's effectively the only ranged weapon from its time period that can't actively damage you like the blaster with bolts that bounce off a wall and back into you or the explosives that conspire with terrible collision detection to blow up in your face.
  • While they aren't bad to use, for those that like the wacky weaponry, the weapons in the final episode are all far more straight forward, resulting in the combat feeling less unique, the Pistol in the final episode even appears as an NPC-only weapon in the first episode, when swapping out the more "standard" final episode weapons with some of the more "unique" first episode weapons for a healthy balance of both in both episodes would have been a better balance.
• So Bad, It's Good: Oscillates between this trope and being just plain bad. Every aspect of the game is a hilariously incomprehensible, poorly designed mess, with AI that tries to walk up near-90 degree ledges, hilariously broken weapons that can easily kill you, and a bizarre time travel plot that revels in excessive faux-asiatic imagery and racist accents.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Considering that either of them dying is an instant game over in-game, Superfly and Mikiko dying after the battle with Mishima (and even getting to kill Mikiko yourself, after she betrays you by killing Superfly) is a highlight of the game.
• The Un-Twist: Mikiko's betrayal is not only foreshadowed by the individual themselves in their first cutscene, Mishima also spells out that something like it is going to happen. It doesn't take a genius to know to expect it, the only question at that point became when. And somehow, Hiro remains blissfully oblivious to the mere thought and consideration of it, only to genuinely be shocked when it finally happens.
• Vindicated by History: The game used to be one of the biggest failures in gaming history and was seen as a cautionary tale of how uncontrolled hype and a massive ego can ruin a game. After an unofficial 1.3 patch, however, people have come to reevaluate Daikatana as not being as bad as it was made to be back when it came out, and is now So Bad, It's Good at worst, but nowhere near the infamous reputation it used to have. It helps that Romero has long since apologized for the "bitch" ad.

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