Daikatana/YMMV


 * Crowning Music of Awesome: The game has quite a good soundtrack.
 * Hype Backlash: John Romero pretty much hyped the game up so much that there was simply no possible way that it could ever live up to the expectations he was setting, even if it didn't turn out to be an Obvious Beta. It didn't help that he never stopped hyping it during the entire two years that it was delayed.
 * On top of that, Half Life came out along the way, succeeding at everything that he claimed Daikatana would do.
 * Goddamn Bats: Half the enemies in the game.
 * It Gets Better Slightly Less Godawful: Episodes two, three, and four aren't wall-to-wall green and not entirely full of Goddamned Bats.
 * During his Let's Play of the game, Proteus4994 admits that the first three levels in ancient Greece, and weapons like the Eye of Zeus and the titular sword are actually pretty fun (or at least well designed).
 * Conveniently, most of the reviews seemed to only talk about episode one - the average-positive reviews of the game spoke about it in depth.
 * Memetic Mutation: "John Romero is going to make you his bitch.", "I can't X without my buddy Superfly!" and "Thanks John"
 * Most Annoying Sound: It's funny the first time Superfly notes that Hiro "just got bitch-slapped into oblivion." The next three-hundred or so times, not so much.
 * Narm: Two Words: Robot frogs.
 * Polished Port: The Game Boy Color tie-in game released by Kemco somehow managed to be better received that 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.
 * Porting Disaster: The Nintendo 64 version had blurry, low-resolution textures, 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.
 * Even the original falls prey to this: Many of the bugs were caused by a shift in engine mid-production.
 * Scapegoat Creator: The team that worked on Daikatana apparently consists of only one person - his name is John Romero. According to most people; he did all of the designs, all of the publishing, all of the marketing, all of the debugging, and likewise did all of the criticism. This is ignoring how many people worked on the game, and how the level designs were actually done by Romero's wife, for example.
 * That actually makes it even more his fault.
 * Never mind that she was a profession level designer and did the same work on well received games like Anachronox nor that she shared the work with Chris Cummings (who also did level designs for American McGee's Alice), Larry Herring (Splinter Cell: Double Agent) and Luke Whiteside (F.E.A.R. 2).
 * Hey. Those who slap their name all over a game and its advertising deserve to be blamed when the game proves to be terrible. Especially so if you are the LEAD on a project and should be CAREFULLY OVERSEEING what those under your lead do, and allowing for as little error as possible.