The Stack

Episode 3 of Daikatana is set in a quasi-medieval-Europe of castles and half-timbered villages. (I see some sources saying it’s Norway, but the only indication of this in the game is snow.) It starts with a “plague village” where the plague is one that turns people into zombies, although this doesn’t faze our heroes at all. Mikiko falls ill early on, and loses consciousness; from that point on, Mr. Johnson carries her, and can’t fight, making you basically go it solo (although you’re still not allowed to leave them behind). I recall that the introductory infodump mentioned a pandemic back in the future, with the Mishimas maintaining their power by controlling access to the cure. I wonder if there’s a connection? If there is, it would at least somewhat justify telling us about the future plague in the first place. (Worldbuilding tip: You don’t actually have to tell us everything. Exposition is just one reason to invent backstory. Just as visual artists sketch out things that will be in darkness or otherwise hidden from view in order to keep things consistent and therefore comprehensible, so too does working out the backstory help keep your narrative believable even if that backstory is never communicated to the audience directly.)

Anyway, just as the ancient Greece of Episode 2 was one of legendary weapons and mythical creatures, so too is the medieval Europe of Episode 3 distinctly D&D-ish. To charge the Daikatana up for another time jump, you have to face dragons, werewolves that can only be killed permanently with a silver melee weapon, and muttering, axe-throwing dwarves. The bosses in this section are three evil sorcerers, encountered one by one, and each sorcerer uses a wand that you scavenge from their corpse and can use as a weapon yourself afterward.

I honestly found the wands less useful than the episode’s mundane weapons, a fast-firing pistol crossbow and a slower, more powerful ballista. ¹“A ballista?” you cry. “But that’s not a handheld weapon!” Neither is a chain gun, but Doom let you run around firing one. Just about the only FPS to ever treat these things realistically was Outlaws (Lucasarts, 1997), in which your authentic 19th-century gatling gun had to be set up on a tripod before you could fire it. Which makes sense — after all, when I fought the sorcerer, he had the wand and I didn’t, and I won! But also, the wands have effects that are powerful but slow, which means they’re not much use against a sudden werewolf ambush. As well, ammo for them is scarce, and they’re prone to backfire. The first wand is essentially a rocket launcher, prone to catching you in its splash if it hits a too-close wall, and the third summons a large beastie that attacks you if it doesn’t see anything else, which is a real possibility, because it takes so long to do the summoning. That last point is one that the game kind of warns you about; Mr. Johnson says that it has an evil feeling and advises you not to use it. I kind of wonder if you could take advantage of it to grind XP, but I didn’t try.

Still, the second wand, which fires slow-moving hovering orbs that emit lightning, was pretty useful against the episode’s final boss (an insane king with absurd muscles), finishing him off practically without effort. Which is pretty unsatisfying, and clearly not the experience that the designers wanted — there’s health pickups across the room, something you’d expect to need in a protracted battle. But even on my losing tries, when I hadn’t found the dominant strategy yet, the fight always ended very quickly. Defeating the king gives you an opportunity to cure him of his madness with a magical “purifier” sword, at which point he instantly becomes your friend and helps you cure Mikiko and recharge the time sword. Contrived as this development is, it strikes me as actually being appropriately contrived; knights going mad and then being suddenly brought back to their senses by magic is something with precedent in chivalric literature.

One last thing of note: In this episode, there’s a substantial luck factor. The guaranteed infinite healing devices of the first two episodes are gone, and in their place we get metal-bound treasure chests with randomized contents. When you open one, maybe it’ll be a powerful healing, maybe it’ll be a random armor item, maybe it’ll just explode. Even when it’s not an explosion, it might or might not be what you need at that moment. I’m dubious whether this mechanic was a good one even in the original version of the game, but it particularly makes no sense when you have unlimited saves and can just roll the dice until you get what you want.